The world burns because nobody wants to burn for it.
The world is on fire. This you know. But the one thing that could douse the flames is the one thing of which we Catholics are afraid to speak.
Look at particularly the middle east, the Muslim world. That part of the world is on fire. Riots in the streets, civil war, mass murders, Christian pogroms, political unrest, WMDs, and rampant terrorism are all parts of our daily news for at least as long as it takes to turn the channel or close the page.
As Catholics, what are we to do?
Well, if we listen to many Church leaders, we hear that we should seek to understand them better. We should encourage countries to send foreign aid to their corrupt governments in futile attempts to eliminate the unrest. And of course, we should seek to dialogue with them. Dialogue, dialogue solves everything.
Baloney.
Christ did not commission His Church to dialogue with over a billion people whose lives are dictated by a false religion and a false ideology, an ideology that threatens to burn the world. Christ did not ask us to understand them better.
In all the lofty statements of prominent Church leaders on the myriad problems in that part of the world, the one thing you are guaranteed not hear are calls for conversion.
Conversion, that is what the Muslim world needs. Why are we so darn afraid to say it?
Please read the rest at The National Catholic Register.
As always, I appreciate your support over there.
August 27, 2013 at 6:11 pm
Preach it brother!
August 27, 2013 at 6:12 pm
absolutely true. Now will we catholic clergy and laity have the courage to tell the world!
August 27, 2013 at 9:47 pm
What was the theme of WYD 2013….? What was it that Papa Francis reiterated at the closing Mass in Rio?
Oh, yeah. That's right:
Therefore go and make disciples of all nations…
The Faith did not grow in the world because the Apostles, St. Paul, and the missionaries that came after them tried to "understand" and "dialogue" with potential converts!
August 28, 2013 at 5:07 am
Well, understanding and dialogue didn't hurt anything in St Paul's mission…..(Acts 17:16-34) but St Paul and company didn't fail to make the proclamation.
There are many reasons we don't.
A)We don't really know Jesus ourselves.
B)Since Vatican II the idea of the "anonymous Christian" has undermined missionary focus.
C)We aren't really prepared to lay down our lives.
I think my problem is C.
August 28, 2013 at 5:00 pm
"Why are we so darn afraid to say it?"
IMO because it barely registers as an issue with the institutional Church. Bishop Cautious Coward in the Chancery and Father Fluffy Feel-Good in the Parish are stuck in the shallows of institutional maintenance, worried about keeping their schools open. Those are the same schools that produced the barely if at all Catechized Catholics in name only.
August 28, 2013 at 5:10 pm
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August 28, 2013 at 5:12 pm
It seems appropriate to bring an insightful comment from the NCRegister site to this venue:
From Mike,
"We live in the age of the Church Paralytic. Any attempt to bear witness to the truth, either by confronting pro-death politicians within the church (at Communion time if necessary) or by carrying Christ’s message to the world, risks alienating our comfortable, accommodationist selves.
It’s hard for me to deny that then-Cardinal Ratzinger was right when he said in 1969 that “the church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.” Compromise won’t arrest this process.
Faith formation, faithfully delivered (as distinct from the shaky delivery of the past couple of generations), teaches our purpose on earth—to serve God and our neighbor and achieve sanctity and, after death, the Beatific Vision. To hazard our own souls and those of others through appeasement denies that purpose."
The concept of "dialogue" is both misunderstood and overvalued by many if not most of the Episcopacy.
August 30, 2013 at 4:13 am
John B., excellent first comment. Well said, and all too true.
Unfortunately, Pope Francis is not helping matters:
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/The-Vatican-and-Islam-315582
August 30, 2013 at 4:18 am
One thing Catholics can do is reject the nonsense that Catholics and Muslims "worship the same God." They don't. Not even close. In 2006, I wrote a piece for Front Page Magazine entitled, "How Will Rome Face Mecca?" An excerpt:
However, Benedict and his bishops must confront what French historian Alain Besancon called the "indulgent ecumenicism" that dominates the Christian response to Islam, whether through Martino's superficial multiculturalism or through the wistful yearning for traditionalist transcendence that Besancon described in Commentary magazine:
"Contributing to the partiality toward Islam is an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity, and with our liberal, capitalist individualistic arrangements…. Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe, these writers cannot but admire Muslim devoutness…. Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do."
Influencing that attitude was the work of European scholar Louis Massignon, who popularized the ideas of the Koran as a kind of biblical revelation and of Muslims as being among Abraham's spiritual children.
"An entire literature favorable to Islam has grown up in Europe," Besancon wrote, "much of it the work of Catholic priests under the sway of Massignon's ideas."
Europe is not the only place where such indulgent ecumenism holds sway. Cardinal Bernard Law, the disgraced former Archbishop of Boston, created controversy in November 2002 when he bowed toward Mecca and prayed to Allah in a suburban mosque during a Ramadan service. Afterward, he told the congregants:
"I feel very much at home with my fellow fundamentalists here, who are convinced that God must be at the center of our lives (Boston Globe, Nov. 25, 2002)."
Such sentimentality, however, ignores the irreconcilable differences between Christianity, Judaism and Islam that Besancon described in his Commentary article, "What Kind Of Religion is Islam?"
Though all three faiths are monotheistic, Islam rejects the doctrines of atonement and redemption that define Christianity and Judaism. Moreover, no concept of a covenant between God and humanity exists in Islam. Instead, Allah decrees his law "by means of a unilateral pact, in an act of sublime condescension (that) precludes any notion of imitating God as is urged in the Bible," Besancon wrote.
Islam also rejects the Christian doctrines of original sin and the necessity of mediation between God and humanity. In the Koran, Jesus "appears… out of place and out of time, without reference to the landscape of Israel," Besancon wrote.
Most importantly, Judeo-Christian and Muslim concepts of divinity revolve around one irreconcilable difference:
"Although Muslims like to enumerate the 99 names of God, missing from the list, but central to the Jewish and even more so to the Christian conception of God, is 'Father' – i.e., a personal god capable of a reciprocal and loving relation with men," Besancon wrote. "The one God of the Koran, the God Who demands submission is a distant God; to call him 'Father' would be an anthropomorphic sacrilege."
Sentimental ecumenism and John Paul II's geopolitical agenda also prevented the Catholic Church from effectively confronting barbarism in Allah's name….
August 30, 2013 at 9:11 am
You are a remarkably ignorant writer, Amazon Queen.
Muslims worship the Holy One of Israel. The referent of "Allah" when a Muslim says it and when a Maronite Christian says it are the same being. Muslims are no more worshiping a different God from Christians than are Unitarians. Also, Acts 17:16-34.
That is why what Muslims say about God often strikes Christians as blasphemy; if they were just talking about some mere cosmic overlord like the Jade Emperor, it would pose no problem. Muslims believe that to say God is good or that God is rational is to limit his power; they refer to God as "the merciful" essentially to mean "his gracious whim has deigned to spare our lives". Muslims believe that Satan (Iblis, in Islam not an angel but the chief of the djinn) fell by disobeying God…when God ordered him to worship Adam. Refusing to commit idolatry, if that is ordered by God, is the sin of the Devil to Muslim thought.
And while we're on the subject Jews have no conception of redemption or atonement as Christians understand them. Jews deny that they need salvation; God may rescue them, but that refers only to preserving their existence from destruction at the hands of their enemies, a service a Norseman might ask of Thor. The concept of "atonement" or "redemption" in Judaism is merely the restoration of ritual purity—removing pollution so they can worship—it has no broad existential effect.
Remember, the majority school of Jewish theology teaches that God created man's evil nature (yetzer hora) along with the good (yetzer tov), because the majority school of Jewish theology is in the Hermetic Gnostic tradition and thus hypostasizes evil rather than considering it a privation.
There is no such thing as "Judeo-Christian" views vs Islamic ones. There are Christian views, there are Jewish views, and there are Muslim views. Christians and Jews have legitimate, Muslims illegitimate, claims upon the God all three worship, but aside from that Christians and Jews are as different from each other as either is from Muslims.
September 10, 2013 at 12:13 am
Yes, this attitude worked out so well during the Crusades and the Inquisition.