Magister tries to sort out conflicting reports:

Joseph Ratzinger has written little on the topic of Islam over the years. But it is a topic very much on his mind, and all the more so since he became pope. Last September, in Castelgandolfo (see photo), Benedict XVI dedicated two days of study to Islam, behind closed doors, together with two experts in Islamic studies and a group of his former theology students.

The news of the meeting leaked out, but until last January 5 nothing was known about what was said there.

But on January 5, one of Ratzinger’s former students who participated in the meeting, American Jesuit Joseph Fessio, provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, and founder of the publishing house Ignatius Press, gave an ample account of the meeting during one of the most popular radio talk shows in the United States: the Hugh Hewitt Show.

During the interview, Fr. Fessio also reported the thoughts expressed by the pope in the course of the discussion. In Fessio’s view, Benedict XVI holds that Islam and democracy cannot be reconciled.

But one of the other participants at the meeting, Samir Khalil Samir, an Egyptian Jesuit and professor of Islamic studies at the Université Saint-Joseph in Beirut and at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome, when consulted by www.chiesa, gave a different interpretation of the pope’s thought. In Fr. Samir’s view, Benedict XVI holds that it is very difficult, but not impossible, to reconcile Islam and democracy.

In his contribution to the discussion, the pope supposedly wanted to explain precisely the reasons for this difficulty.