Whitewashing the Darkness of Islam – A critique of Pope Francis’ stance on Islam

Over the past few days, I have been rereading the second edition of Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods Jr’s., The Great Façade [LINK]. It has been almost a decade since my first reading. Some significant events have transpired within the Catholic paradigm since that first reading; as such, this reading has been proceeding at a much slower rate due to my delving into a substantial number of the references provided in the copious footnotes.

For reasons I do not fully understand, I felt compelled to share the following extract from the book that I had read earlier this morning.

Whitewashing the Darkness of Islam

Respecting Islam, EG had nothing but the usual post-Vatican II praise, which Francis managed to bring to a new level. EG presents Mohammed’s invention as pleasing to God and a suitable vehicle for the salvation of Muslims (along with pagan religions and their Holy Ghost–inspired rituals).[36] For starters, citing only the patently false factual contention of Nostra Aetate, EG declares that Muslims “profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God....” Going further than Vatican II, however, EG also refers to “[t]he sacred writings of Islam,” which “have retained some Christian teachings....” And what of the plenitude of Mohammed’s errors, beginning with his denial of Christ’s very divinity? According to EG, “interreligious dialogue” with Muslims requires “suitable training . . . for all involved, not only so that they can be solidly and joyfully grounded in their own identity, but so that they can also acknowledge the values of others, appreciate the concerns underlying their demands and shed light on shared beliefs.” EG thus represents a definitive abandonment of the traditional teaching of the Church as reflected in the traditional Good Friday intercessions for the salvation of non-Christians and the prayer composed by Leo XIII which Pius XI, a mere 37 years before Vatican II, instructed the entire Church to pray on the Feast of Christ the King: “Be Thou King of all those who are still involved in the darkness of idolatry or of Islamism, and refuse not to draw them into the light and kingdom of God.”[37]

Worse, if that were possible, was Francis’s assumption of the role of Koranic exegete in order to exculpate Mohammed’s cult from its historic connection to the conquest and brutal persecution of Christians: “Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalisations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”[38] Disconcerting episodes? The bloody persecution of Christians by various Islamic entities was endemic in the Middle East and was posing an ever-greater threat to the heart of Europe itself. This development, predicted nearly eighty years ago by Hilaire Belloc,[39] was a bit more than “disconcerting.”

Moreover, Francis did not seem to notice that it was not a few “fundamentalists” who were not “true followers of Islam” but rather the government of Pakistan that had sentenced Asia Bibi to death for “insulting the Prophet.” (Francis has to date done nothing to save her, although Benedict publicly called for her pardon by the President of Pakistan[40] as part of an international movement to stop her execution.) Nor was it a few fundamentalists but rather the government of Sudan that had sentenced Meriam Ibrahim to death for converting to Christianity and jailed her to await her execution, to take place after she gave birth to her unborn child in prison. She was freed only after a storm of international protest to which Francis contributed nothing (although he did pose with her for photos in the Vatican after her release). It is Saudi Arabia, not a few fundamentalists, that routinely beheads people for “blasphemy” and “apostasy” from Islam.[41] And what of Kuwait, where “blasphemy” against the Sunni version of Islam is also punishable by death?[42] What, for that matter, of the Islamic world in general, in which flogging, imprisonment and death are commonly imposed for offenses ranging from insulting the Islamic religion or “the Prophet” to adultery. As for adultery, in Islamic nations no one heeds Our Lord’s counsel that he who is without sin should cast the first stone; rather, the legal barbarism that preceded the Gospel, including that which Our Lord condemned among the Pharisees, persists to this day in Islamic legal systems.

Was Francis prepared to tell the rulers of Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and elsewhere that they are not “true followers of Islam” and that their reading of the Koran is not “authentic”? Perhaps the Muslims who control these governments and their Muslim clerics know better than Francis what “authentic” Islam is. Perhaps they have demonstrated what authentic Islam is by the laws and institutions they have erected to enforce the dictates of that man-made religion. That “authentic Islam” is not, and never has been, a “religion of peace” but rather quite the opposite is why Our Lady appeared at Fatima, named after a Muslim princess who became a Catholic following the reconquest of the Muslim-dominated regions of Portugal by Christian forces in the 12th century. In fact, Princess Fatima married the very knight who had captured her, taking the Christian name Oreana, for which the nearby Portuguese town of Ourém is named.

Francis’s willful blindness to the nature of Islam would account for his consistent refusal to issue anything beyond a few generic protests against terrorist violence as Christians are being butchered or driven from their homes throughout the Middle East and Africa by The Islamic State (ISIS), Boko Haram and Al-Shabaab. Instead, he would pray in the Blue Mosque of Istanbul with an Imam and stage a Prayer for Peace event in the Vatican gardens at which an Imam sang: “grant us victory over the heathen/disbelieving/infidel” (reading from Sura 2: 286) to the embarrassment of those who understood Arabic and of Vatican Radio, which censored those words from the broadcast.43 The planting of an olive tree by Francis, Israeli President Shimon Peres and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on that occasion was so ludicrous it was parodied by a popular non-traditionalist Catholic website: “Peace Breaks Out In Israel Moments After Magic Olive Tree Planted.” In fact, only days after the event the worst violence in decades erupted in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and elsewhere in the Middle East, prompting this parodic report: “But less than one day after receiving news that every single Middle East conflict had been resolved, the magic Olive Tree that Francis, Peres, and Abbas had shoddily planted into the ground toppled over with a gust of wind, instantaneously causing a chain reaction of violent outbreaks all across the Middle East.”[44]

In stark contrast to Francis’s absurd whitewash of Islam was Benedict’s realistic assessment in the famous Regensburg address, which had resulted in a storm of denunciations in the media and even fears for his life: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”[45] But then Benedict was not much concerned with his standing before world opinion, which had held him in contempt throughout his short reign. (Christopher A. Ferrara and Thomas E. Woods Jr., The Great Façade - The Regime of Novelty in the Catholic Church from Vatican II to the Francis Revolution, Second Edition 2015, pp. 389-391.)

Footnotes:

36. EG, nn. 252, 253. [EG = Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium; link to Vatican’s official English translation HERE]

37. From Leo XIII’s Act of Consecration of the World to the Sacred Heart, promulgated along with the encyclical Annum Sacrum (1899); cf. Chapter 13.

38. EG, n. 253.a

39. Cf. Hilaire Belloc, The Great Heresies (1938), Chapter 4: “The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed.”

40. “APPEAL OF THE HOLY FATHER: In these days the international community is following with deep concern the difficult situation of Christians in Pakistan who are often victims of violence or discrimination. Today I express my spiritual closeness to Ms Asia Bibi and her relatives

in particular, while I ask that full freedom be restored to her as soon as possible. I also pray for all those in similar situations, so that their human dignity and fundamental rights may be fully respected.” General Audience, November 17, 2010, @ w2.vatican.va (with video).

41. See, e.g., “Saudi court gives death penalty to man who renounced his Muslim faith,” Reuters, February 24, 2015, @ reuters.com.

42. See, e.g., “Kuwait: New Death Penalty for Blasphemy,” Gatestone Institute Report, June 14, 2012, @ gatestoneinstitute.org.

43. Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, “What Did the Imam Really Say?”, July 20, 2014, @ wdtprs.com.

44. June 9, 2014, @ eyeofthetiber.org.

45. Address at University of Regensburg, September 12, 2006 @ w2.vatican.va (quoting the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus in his dialogue with a Persian follower of Mohammed).

An interesting time we are living in...

 

Grace and peace,

David