Long experience should have taught both men, however, that, while the world press isn’t much interested in Christian ecumenism, it’s mightily interested in politics, especially the politics of a potential clash of civilizations.

So, whatever Benedict and Bartholomew manage to accomplish ecumenically, the question of the Muslim response to the Pope’s initial visit to an Islamic country is almost certainly going to dominate the coverage.

Since Benedict’s Regensburg lecture will set a large part of the context for coverage of this papal pilgrimage, it would be helpful if all interested parties recognized just what the Pope was proposing in September. He was trying to advance two lines of critique: First, that irrational faith can be a lethal threat to the human future. Second, that a loss of faith in reason can lead to cultural decay, and thus to a different kind of threat to the human future.

The first point addressed what every sane person knows is a grave issue within the complex worlds of Islam. The second point was aimed at Europe, which seems to be dying from spiritual boredom, one facet of which is a disinclination to think that human beings can know anything to be true – not “true for you,” or “true for me,” but “true, period.”

The thoughtful response of 38 Muslim leaders from across the globe, in a woefully-under-reported “Open Letter to Pope Benedict XVI” issued in October, suggests that the Pope’s forthright challenge was in fact a greater prod toward serious dialogue than the various denial games that are often played in the interreligious dialogue business.

The Muslim leaders – who include major figures from across the spectrum of Islamic thought – thanked the Pope for his critique of Western positivism; they agreed that God cannot be said to command the irrational (thus challenging a major plank in the jihadist platform); they condemned violence against innocents in the name of God; and they accepted the Pope’s proposal for a Christian-Muslim dialogue that forthrightly addressed basic theological questions like the nature of God and the ways in which God communicates his will to humanity.

Whether that response – which includes an implicit concession that Islamic extremists are a major problem for the Islamic world – has real effect remains to be seen, for whether the religious, intellectual, and legal authorities who wrote the “Open Letter to Benedict XVI” have any real capacity to discipline their wayward Muslim brethren is an open, and urgent, question.

But that these Islamic leaders responded as thoughtfully and carefully as they did suggests that Benedict XVI, at Regensburg, identified questions that are of concern to the whole world – and thus opened the door to a real dialogue, not an exchange of euphemisms and banalities.

We should hope for the same in Turkey this week.