Pope Leo must stand up to Muslim immigrants – Latest News
As Muslim migration roils Europe, some Catholic bishops are beginning to discover.
“For decades, the Islamization of Europe has been progressing through mass immigration,” Polish Bishop Antoni Długosz mentioned July 13, including that unlawful immigrants “create serious problems in the countries they arrive in.”
Bishop Athanasius Schneider of Kazakhstan spoke more bluntly in March: “We’re witnessing an invasion. They are not refugees. This is an invasion, a mass Islamization of Europe.”
Yet Pope Leo XIV lives in a completely different dimension.
“In a world darkened by war and injustice . . . migrants and refugees stand as messengers of hope,” Leo mentioned July 25. “Their courage and tenacity bear heroic testimony to a faith that sees beyond what our eyes can see and gives them the strength to defy death on the various contemporary migration routes.”
Leo’s feedback categorical more than blissful sentimentality. They reveal the Vatican’s position in encouraging open borders and exempting migrants from accountability.
In Europe’s case, that entails deliberate blindness to the violent, totalitarian nature of Islam and plenty of of its followers.
This Catholic method towards Islam displays the concepts of Louis Massignon, a French scholar from the early twentieth century. Massignon described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” and asserted that Muslims “have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham.”
French Catholic scholar Alain Besançon described the outcomes.
“An entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe, much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon’s ideas,” he wrote.
Asylum seekers from Afghanistan set up tents inside of the Church of Saint John the Baptist on the Beguinage in Brussels on Jan. 7, 2014. REUTERS/Francois Lenoir
Besançon attributed that posture to “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” a dissatisfaction that the Vatican embodies.
“Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe,” Massignon’s advocates “cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besançon wrote.
“Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than to believe in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”
The Catholic Church formally embraced Massignon’s concepts on the Second Vatican Council in two paperwork. One, Nostra Aetate, targeted on the church’s relationship with Judaism however moreover addressed Islam:
“The Church regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God . . . they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”
The different, Lumen Gentium, declared that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these there are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God.”
That passage made the Catholic catechism.
But what Besançon known as “indulgent ecumenicism” towards Islam goes past phrases. During John Paul II’s papacy, the church embraced outright appeasement.
Catholic bishops offered underutilized church buildings and colleges to Muslim teams; many of the church buildings grew to become mosques.
In October 2006, the Capuchin Franciscan friars agreed to help the Union of Islamic Communities and Organizations in Italy (UCOII) construct a mosque in Genoa subsequent to a monastery. The friars even helped construct the mosque’s basis.
But the UCOII — affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood — advocates “an extremist version of the Quran, where Christians, Jews and Westerners are criminalized, as well as women and other Muslims who don’t submit to their rule,” Magdi Allam, a convert to Catholicism from Islam, reported for Milan’s Corriere della Sera.
In 2006, the group additionally demanded Islamic colleges, banks and clerical review of textbooks. Its president, Mohamed Nour Dachan, refused to signal a doc pledging Muslims to settle for Italy’s structure, denounce terrorism and acknowledge Israel’s proper to exist.
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Seven months earlier, a Vatican cardinal even advised that Muslim college students obtain Islamic spiritual instruction within the hour reserved for Catholic instruction in Italian colleges.
“If there are 100 Muslim children in a school, I don’t see why they shouldn’t be taught their religion,” mentioned the late Cardinal Renato Martino, then the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. “If we said ‘no’ until we saw equivalent treatment for the Christian minorities in Muslim countries, I would say that we were placing ourselves on their level.”
In 2008, the Catholic bishops of England and Wales requested Catholic colleges to reserve prayer rooms for Muslim college students and to adapt rest room services for ritual cleaning earlier than prayer. But the worst instance of appeasement befell in Belgium.
As half of a marketing campaign to drive the federal government to grant amnesty, Belgium’s Catholic bishops turned their church buildings into houses for Muslim migrants, making them squatters.
An Afghan refugee seen on the altar of the Church of Saint John the Baptist on the Beguinage on Jan. 30, 2014. REUTERS
In May 2006, more than 30 Belgian church buildings served such a function. About 300 Africans occupied Antwerp’s Magdalena Chapel. Other church buildings held as many as 700 squatters.
At Our Lady of Succor Church in Brussels, squatters lived in small tents donated by Catholic reduction businesses, carried out Muslim providers, erected pc tables close to the pulpit and even set fires on the ground.
Friar Herwig Arts described a scene at Antwerp’s Jesuit chapel: migrants “removed the tabernacle [and] installed a television set and radios, depriving us of the opportunity to pray in our own chapel and say Mass.”
He went on, “For me, the place has been desecrated. I feel I cannot enter it anymore.”
Belgium’s bishops weren’t amused. Arts was chided by Belgium’s main clergy. “Solidarity cannot be limited to one’s own nation, said the late Cardinal Godfried Danneels, then the country’s leading prelate. Monsingor Luc van Looy, then the bishop of Ghent, even said “illegal fugitives” have been “entitled to a good place in our society. Arts has been silent on the subject ever since.
But twenty years later, Kazakhstan’s Bishop Schneider refuses to keep silent: “This is a global political agenda by the powerful of the world to destroy Europe.”
Leo thus faces an existential problem, one which blissful sentimentality can not reply: Will he permit a church that performed a pivotal position in creating European civilization to carry out a more decisive half in destroying it?
This article first ran in The Spectator’s US version.
