The Vatican Confronts Islam
July 5, 2006, 12:14 pm |
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by Daniel Pipes
Jerusalem Post*
July 5, 2006
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/3729
* Cross-posted with permission
“Enough now with this turning the other cheek! It’s our duty to protect ourselves.” Thus spoke Monsignor Velasio De Paolis, secretary of the Vatican’s supreme court, referring to Muslims. Explaining his apparent rejection of Jesus’ admonition to his followers to “turn the other cheek,” De Paolis noted that “The West has had relations with the Arab countries for half a century … and has not been able to get the slightest concession on human rights.”
De Paolis is hardly alone in his thinking; indeed, the Catholic Church is undergoing a dramatic shift from a decades-old policy to protect Catholics living under Muslim rule. The old methods of quiet diplomacy and muted appeasement have clearly failed. The estimated 40 million Christians in Dar al-Islam, notes the Barnabas Fund’s Patrick Sookhdeo, increasingly find themselves an embattled minority facing economic decline, dwindling rights, and physical jeopardy. Most of them, he goes on, are despised and distrusted second-class citizens, facing discrimination in education, jobs, and the courts.
These harsh circumstances are causing Christians to flee their ancestral lands for the West’s more hospitable environment. Consequently, Christian populations of the Muslim world are in a free-fall. Two small but evocative instances of this pattern: for the first time in nearly two millennia, Nazareth and Bethlehem no longer have Christian majorities.
This reality of oppression and decline stands in dramatic contrast to the surging Muslim minority of the West. Although numbering fewer than 20 million and made up mostly of immigrants and their offspring, it is an increasingly established and vocal minority, granted extensive rights and protections even as it wins new legal, cultural, and political prerogatives.
This widening disparity has caught the attention of the Church, which for the first time is pointing to radical Islam, rather than the actions of Israel, as the central problem facing Christians living with Muslims.
Rumblings of this could be heard already in John Paul II’s time. For example, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister, noted in late 2003 that “There are too many majority Muslim countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens.” Tauran pushed for reciprocity: “Just as Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well.”
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Catholic demands for reciprocity have grown, especially since the accession of Pope Benedict XVI in April 2005, for whom Islam is a central concern. In February, the pope emphasized the need to respect “the convictions and religious practices of others so that, in a reciprocal manner, the exercise of freely-chosen religion is truly assured to all.” In May, he again stressed the need for reciprocity: Christians must love immigrants and Muslims must treat well the Christians among them.
Lower-ranking clerics, as usual, are more outspoken. “Islam’s radicalization is the principal cause of the Christian exodus,” asserts Monsignor Philippe Brizard, director general of Oeuvre d’Orient, a French organization focused on Middle Eastern Christians. Bishop Rino Fisichella, rector of the Lateran University in Rome, advises the Church to drop its “diplomatic silence” and instead “put pressure on international organizations to make the societies and states in majority Muslim countries face up to their responsibilities.”
The Danish cartoons crisis offered a typical example of Catholic disillusionment. Church leaders initially criticized the publication of the Muhammad cartoons. But when Muslims responded by murdering Catholic priests in Turkey and Nigeria, not to speak of scores of Christians killed during five days of riots in Nigeria, the Church responded with warnings to Muslims. “If we tell our people they have no right to offend, we have to tell the others they have no right to destroy us, ” said Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican’s Secretary of State. “We must always stress our demand for reciprocity in political contacts with authorities in Islamic countries and, even more, in cultural contacts,” added Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, its foreign minister.
Obtaining the same rights for Christians in Islamdom that Muslims enjoy in Christendom has become the key to the Vatican’s diplomacy toward Muslims. This balanced, serious approach marks a profound improvement in understanding that could have implications well beyond the Church, given how many lay politicians heed its leadership in inter-faith matters. Should Western states also promote the principle of reciprocity, the results should indeed be interesting.
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Related: Christianity, Islam, War Against Islamo-fascism
July 5th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
The Catholic Church is finally coming out of its state of denial as regards Muslims and Muslim nations treating Christians only as second class citizens if they are lucky, or worse, also denying them rights to build churches or practice their religion as in Saudi Arabia or worse still, denying Christians the right to life by brutally murdering them as in Nigeria.
The demand the Church makes upon Muslim nations to extend reciprocity by ensuring tolerance of Christians and allowing them their freedom of religion as Western nations give to MUslims, is a good first step to clearly set out the Church’s position and what it expects of Muslim nations.
The next step is to determine just how the Church is going to gain the co-operation of Muslim leaders to change the mores, laws and customs within their nations to not only allow by law or royal decree such tolerance and freedom, but get the Muslim citizens of the country to go along with such policy that runs so counter to Muslim traditions and perceptions of non-Muslims in Muslim lands.
That is a very tall order and frankly, it is highly doubtful that any Muslim nation is going to positively respond to the entreaties of the Catholic church.
The Muslim nations must recognize that while the Church may hold moral sway over the majority of Westerners, it holds no legal sway.
In Western Democratic nations it is the laws of the land, various democratic and Judeo-Christian values and a multi-cultural ideology that is imprinted in just about every aspect of most Western societies, be it in the laws, insitutions, and societal norms and conventions.
It is the Western Democratic nations that by their laws, values and ways that have extended freedom of religion to all within its borders regardless of whether a nation of a particular religion does not reciprocate.
The Catholic Church does not have the power or authority to put teeth into its request of Muslim nations that they reciprocate Western tolerance and Western freedom of religion by providing equivocal tolerances and freedoms in Muslim lands.
Muslim nations are not about to change their ways out of the goodness of their hearts and out of respect and regard for the feelings and concerns of the Catholic church and of course other churches and similar wishes and concerns that would be expressed by other non-Muslim religious communities in the West or by those communities in other non-Muslim nations.
So what can be done?
First the Catholic and other Churches and other non-Muslim religious communities in the West must reconcile themselves to the reality that simply asking Muslim nations to change and accomodate their needs and wishes for tolerance, equality and freedom of religion is just not going to be a request that will be granted by these Muslim nations.
Accepting that, the Church will have to consider how far it will go in its sudden realization that it cannot turn the other cheek and will actually have to slap back if Muslim nations can be induced to accede to the Churches requests that must then be posed as insistent stern demands.
Again, the Chuch will have to realize that even a sternly phrased demand is not enough, unless there is a plausible or else attached to the demand that will give Muslim nation leaders cause for concern.
For that to happen, Western nations will have to become involved for it is only they that can tack on the or else to the demand that Muslim nations turn from intolerance of non-Muslims to tolerance and from no freedom of religion for non-Muslims to absolute freedoms as the West provides to Muslims living in the West.
For Western democracies to say to Muslim nations that either they suddenly extend tolerance, equality and freedom of religion to all non-Muslims living within their borders as the Church has demanded or else Western nations will pass laws to absolutely ban the practice of Islam in any respect within Western lands and mosques would henceforth be closed to Muslims, would be no less than revolutionary and would fundamentally change the nature of Western democracies, even if such laws were enacted as temporary measures.
The Catholic and other churches if they are going to take their request of Muslim nations to the next level, being a demand for reciprocity, they will have to gain the co-operation of Western democratic leaders to help find an acceptable ” or else” hammer that they can and will use if their demands are not met.
Such a step will be fraught with many and great difficulties, including the difficulty of the Churches wrestling with their consciences for what they really would be seeking in leaders of Western democracies, is not not only an ally, but an chapion with the power to force Muslim nation leaders to accede to the demands of the Churches.
What would also be needed is for Western nations to come together to join in this effort.
It sounds like the shades of a modern day religious Crusade to dominate Islam and force it to submit to the Christian will.
Just about any Westerner can understand and sympathize with the Churches for their concerns about their fellow Christians in Muslim lands and the equal concerns of other non-Muslms of other religions in Muslim lands who are treated as second class citizens, who lack any freedom to practice their religion, and who further suffer all kinds of indignities as a result of Muslim intolerance in those lands.
It is exceedingly hard however to see how such concern will ever translate into meaningful action by an alliance of sorts between the Western governments and the Curches.
Similarly it is difficult to envision that the churches and non-Muslim religious leaders will ever be able to find and attach a menacingly meaningful “or else” clause to their request upon Mulsim nations to extend tolerance, equality and religious freedoms to their non-Muslim religious followers.
It is nonetheless a good thing that the Catholic Church is coming out of its trance of denial regarding this most serious problem. With that there is at least hope and some chance that answers can be found, whereas no chance or possiblility previously existed.
July 6th, 2006 at 2:32 am
On the day that some Western country begins shifting its Moslem population back to a Moslem country, the Muslims will decide that discretion is the better part of valor. Many such governments view those co-religionists who have lived in Western countries as tainted and a source of future trouble and diluted loyalty.
July 6th, 2006 at 6:35 am
If memory serves me correctly al Qaeda had planned an attack on the Vatican to utterly destroy it. Radical Islam sees the Vatican as the symbol and center of Christiandom just as the saw the Twin Towers in NYC as a symbol of American wealth and power.
If the Vatican is going to engage Islam regarless of the method they must realize that any success also will bring the ire of the militants.
This could just as easily create more strife and more persecution of the church in Muslim lands as anything else.
I do believe you must confront evil but when you do, don’t make the mistake of forgeting that it is evil.
If they are going to pursue engagement with Islam they should prepare for a backlash, especially if they start finding any degree of success.
July 6th, 2006 at 6:40 am
Jerry: You said, “On the day that some Western country begins shifting its Moslem population back to a Moslem country, the Muslims will decide that discretion is the better part of valor.”
I believe that has started: Lawrence Solomon of Canada’s Financial Post predicts, “Muslim immigrants will be expelled from Europe unless they reverse the growing perception of them as a social threat,” in a must-read article.
July 7th, 2006 at 9:30 am
Vatican, No Taliban
“Adesso basta con il porgere l’altra guancia! E’ nostro dovere proteggere noi stessi”. Così parlò monsignor Velasio De Paolis, segretario della ‘corte suprema’ vaticana, riferendosi ai musulmani (…) “L’Occidente ha avuto relazioni diplomati…
July 8th, 2006 at 11:35 am
Only a small fragment of practicing Christians in the West realize that persecution of our people is at an alltime peak at this moment. Most of that persecution is at the hands of Islamicists in many nations of the world, and it will be the same in Eurabia if trends persist. Aggravating the situation is that the Christian denominations of the world do not have a fixed position or doctrine concerning “militancy”. There is a good New Testament case for “non-resistance” but it is not obvious, and has never been considered a principle doctrine within commonly-accepted orthodoxy. There is a more scant New Testament case for the judicious use of force in very limited circumstances. What is NOT debatable is that Chrsitians are commanded, in the strongest possible terms, to “care for one another”, and the “one another” means the those in the family of faith first and foremost. To not reach out a hand of refuge and protection to our persecuted brethren worldwide is a despicable sin of monstrous proportions, for which the entire church, whatever its stripes, must repent.
Islamicism will not be hindered by dialogue. It will take every concession, every gift, every olive branch and use it all in a relentless effort to destroy christendom and Judaism, and the western culture that, in its view, was spawned by the Church.
July 8th, 2006 at 12:33 pm
In fact, many Christian denominations are actively enabling the Islamo-fascists (like the Presbyterians).
May 28th, 2008 at 8:07 am
Robert wrote related post
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