Category Archives: Islam

The Cathedral of Divine Wisdom

26 Wednesday Aug 2020

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Early Church, Faith, Islam

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A little over three years ago Chalcedon described the last day of Constantinople. I have nothing to add to his moving account, which is here.  Some of us of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian stock may remember 29 May 1453 as the day when Emperor Constantine XI dies amongst his household which included the Varangian Guard, his personal guard recruited from Scandinavia since Viking times and joined by Anglo-Saxons after the Conquest of England. Truly was Constantine reputed to have told his nobles and his household both that:

Constantine told his hearers that the great assault was about to begin. To his Greek subjects he said that a man should always be ready to die either for his faith or for his country or for his family or for his sovereign. Now his people must be prepared to die for all four causes.

He spoke of the glories and high traditions of the great Imperial city. He spoke of the perfidy of the infidel Sultan who had provoked the war in order to destroy the True Faith and to put his false prophet in the seat of Christ. He urged them to remember that they were the descendents of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome and to be worthy of their ancestors.

For his part, he said, he was ready to die for his faith, his city and his people

But Constantinople and it’s wondrous cathedral, Hagia Sophia, the Cathedral of Divine Wisdom of the title. had been on the front lines of the jihad for centuries. Indeed Mohammed himself lusted after the city, which capturing would open the road into Europe.

Raymond Ibrahim wrote last week in FrontPage Magazine about one, perhaps the greatest effort to capture the city, and it’s Cathedral.

At the head of 120,000 jihadis, Maslama crossed into Christian territory and, with “both sword and fire, he put an end to Asia Minor,” wrote a near contemporary chronicler.   On August 15, 717, he began bombarding the city, which was defended by Leo III, formerly a general.  Just weeks earlier, and because he was deemed the ablest man, Leo had been consecrated in the Hagia Sophia as new emperor.

Unable to breach the cyclopean walls of Constantinople, Maslama waited for 1,800 vessels containing an additional 80,000 fighting men to approach through the Bosporus and completely blockade—and thus starve—the city.

Suddenly Leo ordered the ponderous chain that normally guarded the harbor cast aside. Then, “while they [Muslim fleets] hesitated whether they should seize the opportunity . . . the ministers of destruction were at hand.” Leo sent forth the “fire-bearing ships” against the Islamic fleet, which was quickly set “on fire,” writes Theophanes the chronicler: “some of them were cast up burning by the sea walls, others sank to the bottom with their crews, and others were swept down flaming.”

Matters worsened when Maslama received word that the caliph, his brother Suleiman, had died of “indigestion” (by reportedly devouring two baskets of eggs and figs, followed by marrow and sugar for dessert). The new caliph, Omar II, was initially inattentive to the Muslim army’s needs. Maslama stayed and wintered in.

Unfortunately for him, “one of the cruelest winters that anyone could remember” arrived, and, “for one hundred days, snow covered the earth.” All Maslama could do was assure his emaciated, half-frozen men that “soon! Soon supplies will be here!” But they did not come; worse, warlike nomadic tribesmen known as Bulgars—whence the nation of Bulgaria—accustomed to the terrain and climate began to harry any Muslim detachment that left the starving camp in search of food.

By spring, Muslim reinforcements and provisions finally arrived by land and sea. But the damage was done; frost and famine had taken their toll on the Muslims encamped outside the walls of Constantinople. “Since the Arabs were extremely hungry,” writes Theophanes, “they ate all their dead animals: horses, asses, and camels. Some even say they put dead men and their own dung in pans, kneaded this, and ate it. A plague-like disease descended on them, and destroyed a countless throng.”

I’ve little to add to his account, it’s well out of my field, but he wrote a fascinating article on it that I urge you to read.

But I can read a map, and Constantinople blocked the easiest route into Europe, thus blocking the easy early conquest. Not long after this Charles Martel, at the Battle of Tours blocked the western path up through what is now Spain. Thus in the eighth century was Europe saved for all we know to develop.

In the sixteenth century, the twin battles of the Siege of Warsaw, featuring King John Sobieski and his cavalry, and the naval battle of Lepanto, again checked aggressive Islamic moves on Europe.

This allowed the modern world we know to develop, with all the advances we have made.

Malcolm wrote about his visit to Hagia Sophia here.

I wrote about the amazing acoustics designed into the cathedral here.

The Cathedral of Divine Wisdom indeed.

Secularism and Religion

16 Friday Mar 2018

Posted by in Abortion, Church/State, Consequences, Education, Faith, Islam, Politics

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Many here are aware that the basis of western civilization is in our Judeo-Christian heritage. Often we merely assert this, since we have known it all our lives, but it can be examined fruitfully.

I admire Melanie Phillips greatly because not only is she a very good writer and speaker, she is fully capable of thinking through things. And she does so here. Yes, this is a long read, but I think you’ll find it valuable to read the whole thing.

It has become the orthodoxy in the West that freedom, human rights and reason all derive from secularism and that the greatest threat to all these good things is religion.

I want to suggest that the opposite is true. In the service of this orthodoxy, the West is undermining and destroying the very values which it holds most dear as the defining characteristics of a civilised society.

In truth, in the United States, we don’t hear it explicitly very often, but in Britain, it is quite common in my experience. Not to mention very strident, not only from the secularists, but from Randians, and other assorted libertine groups.

Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.

“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.

[…] Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.

Far from utopia, however, this thinking resulted in something more akin to hell on earth. For the worship of man through reason led straight to totalitarianism. It was reason that would redeem religious superstition and bring about the kingdom of Man on earth. And just like medieval apocalyptic Christian belief, this secular doctrine would also be unchallengeable and heretics would be punished. This kind of fanaticism infused the three great tyrannical movements that were spun out of Enlightenment thinking: the French Revolution, Communism and Fascism. […]

In the Sixties, the baby-boomer generation bought heavily into the idea propounded by Herbert Marcuse and other Marxist radicals that the way to transform the West lay not through the seizure of political or economic control but through the transformation of the culture. This has been achieved over the past half century through what has been called a “long march through the institutions”, the infiltration into all the institutions of the culture — the universities, media, professions, politics, civil service, churches — of ideas that would then become the orthodoxy.

From multiculturalism to environmentalism, from post-nationalism to “human rights” doctrine, Western progressives have fixated upon universalising ideas which reject values anchored in the particulars of religion or culture. All that matters is a theoretical future in which war, want and prejudice will be abolished: the return of fallen humanity to a lost Eden. And like all utopian projects, which are by definition impossible and unattainable, these dogmas are enforced through coercion: bullying, intimidation, character assassination, professional and social exclusion.

The core doctrine is equality. Not the Biblical doctrine that every human being is owed equal respect because they are formed in the image of God: equality has been redefined as identicality, the insistence that there can be no hierarchy of values of lifestyles or cultures. There can no longer be different outcomes depending on different circumstances or how people behave. To differentiate at all is to be bigoted and on a fast track back to fascism and war.

So the married family was kicked off its perch. Sexual restraint was abolished. The formerly transgressive became normative. Education could no longer transmit a culture down through the generations but had to teach that the Western nation was innately racist and exploitative.

Subjective trumped objective. There was no longer any absolute truth. Everyone could arbitrate their own truth. That way bigotry and prejudice would be excised from the human heart, the oppressed of the developing world would be freed from their Western oppressors and instead of the Western nation there would be the brotherhood of man.

All this was done in name of freedom, reason and enlightenment and in opposition to religion, the supposed source of oppression, irrationality and obscurantism.

At the heart of it was an onslaught against the moral codes of Christianity. Those moral codes are actually the Mosaic laws of the Hebrew Bible.

[…] What they [Western “progressives” and the Islamists] also have in common is hostility to Judaism, Israel or the Jewish people. The genocidal hatred of Israel and the Jews that drives the Islamic jihad against the West is not acknowledged or countered by the West because its most high-minded citizens share at least some of that prejudice. Both Western liberals and Islamists believe in utopias to which the Jews are an obstacle. The State of Israel is an obstacle to both the rule of Islam over the earth and a world where there are no divisions based on religion or creed. The Jews are an obstacle to the unconstrained individualism of Western libertines and to the onslaught against individual human dignity and freedom by the Islamists. Both the liberal utopias of a world without prejudice, divisions or war and the Islamist utopia of a world without unbelievers are universalist ideologies. The people who are always in the way of universalising utopias are the Jews.

Do read it all, and there is a deal more than I have given you. The full title is: Secularism and religion: the onslaught against the West’s moral codes. It is simply a superb examination of where our basic morality came from, and how it has allowed us to exceed former civilizations by orders of magnitude, and how it has come to be endangered.

A decadent civilization?

26 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by in Abortion, Church/State, Faith, Islam, Politics

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Yesterday something remarkable happened. Bosco, our resident evangelical anti-Catholic stopped repeating his script and wrote:

No problem. I believe you. The world is like it is, no matter what we call it. We can jabber about it, but we cant do much to change it. Now, Europe has a immigrant problem. This is a game changer. The Europe of the 40s and 50s and even 60s is gone. Now its a shooting gallery, a killing field.Instead of being grateful, these muslims are running down the very people who let them in. Europe is in chaos. Trump is trying to keep them out of here, and that means the good ones with the bad ones. the good ones have to suffer because of the bad ones. Could this be the beginnings of Jacobs troubles? The muslims are raging all around Israel, but are largely leaving Israel alone. That is going to change.This is when Gods fury comes up in his face. I want out of here.

The old, shall we say, random spelling, and the same old script were both gone, and suddenly we saw something of the man behind the persona. There was enough of the old apocalyptic Bosco to stop me asking “who are you, and what have you done with Bosco?” – but the tone and content was serious. As well it might have been.

The Roman Empire into which Christianity was born was a civilization of license for the elite, and it has much in common with our own, except that here that license is for the many and not the few. We fail to reproduce at anything like the level needed to replace ourselves, and whilst the NHS spends millions on abortions, it also spends millions on IVF treatment, often for older women who have reached the age when their fertility was not what it was twenty years before. We do not join this up and suggest that ‘unwanted’ babies should be born and then matched to families who would want them; instead we kill them in the name of a ‘woman’s right to choose’, and in Europe at least, apart from some Christians, no one bats an eye-lid. For all the talk about ‘British values’, it seems that our school inspectors insist that gender ideology is taught in schools – or else. even Catholic schools adopt ‘gender neutral’ uniforms, despite the Pope himself, on this issue, speaking against the liberal tide. Dissent will, it seems, not be allowed.

Within this decadence, there are immigrant communities, some now in the third generation, who do have families, and who do have firm values based on their religion. When Bosco says that Muslims are ‘running down’ our society, I would qualify that by saying that what they are criticising is our decadence; many Christians would agree with the moderate Muslim critique that we have become a decadent society. A society which has no confidence in its own future, so does not reproduce, and which seeks it own pleasure first, and so aborts when convenient. That’s not to deny the hard cases, but it is to say they are very far from being the majority.

One of my youthful heroes was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received great acclaim in the West during the late Cold War period because of his status as a dissident against the Soviet system. He fell out of  favour in the late 1970s when, in 1978, he delivered a stinging cruitique of Western decadence in an address at Harvard:

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

A prophetic set of comments indeed. As an Orthodox Christian, Solzhenitsyn did not need to wonder what ‘values’ he supported, they were those formed by Christianity.

Many years before, in his The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), as well as other works, T.S. Eliot argued that the humanist attempt to form a non-Christian, “rational” civilization was doomed. “The experiment will fail,” he wrote, “but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide.” He did not want society to be ruled by the church, only by Christian principles, with Christians being “the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.” We are now well into that experiment, and it has failed. Only Christianity can redeem the times.

 

 

The Papal claims: an historical perspective

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Early Church, Faith, Islam, Pope

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One of the many tragedies of Christian history is that the Papacy, which ought to be a source of unity, has so often been a point of division; indeed, what often began as internal quarrels have, too often, turned into a source of schism.

I was asked recently why, if he was such an important figure, St Peter failed to inform us of his unique position? Good question, to which the answer is clear – it was all there in Matthew’s Gospel. In his own letters, Peter is content to appeal to Apostolic authority and eye-witness testimony. But it is important to understand that just like the doctrines and dogma we have been examining lately, the position of the Pope developed.  We have been examining how the early Christians developed their understanding of the nature of Christ, and of the Trinity, so it should come as no surprise that the same was true when it came to the office of the Pope.

So, just as with the Trinity, the natures of Christ, and the Theotokos, so too with the purpose of the promise given to Peter; these things the Church worked out as it came to have need of them. We cannot know why Jesus did not just write everything down in a book, but he did not; he founded a Church. Justr as it was left to that Church to tell us what the Canon of Scripture was, so it was left to it to work out the implications of the Petrine promise in Matthew’s Gospel.

It has been, then, only as problems arose in certain areas that the Church has come to need to define things. That is as true of the Papacy as anything else. A ‘primacy of honour’ was always acknowledged, but working out what it meant in practice was not easy, as successive posts here tried to show.

It is clear that of the five ancient Patriarchal Sees, the three most important were Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople. It is interesting that the two cities where we know from Scripture that Peter lived, Jerusalem and Antioch, never mounted the sort of claims made by Rome, where tradition has it that Peter was martyred, and where his tomb can be seen. Alexandria, as befitted the See of St Mark (the interpreter of Peter) never questioned Rome’s primacy; that was reserved for Constantinople, whose claims were to be second to Rome, and were based entirely on its position as the imperial capital.

We have seen that Leo was basing his claims for the powers of his office on Peter’s position as the leader of the Apostles, and that that had nothing to do with Rome being an imperial city; the oft-touted notion that Roman Catholicism was ‘Roman State run religion’ (to quote Bosco) could not be wider of the mark; it had nothing to do with the Roman empire, and everything to do with trying to establish a position for the Church which made it as independent of State control as possible. For 1000 years after the death of St Leo the Great, Popes struggled to assert their independence from State control.

The greatest boost to the understanding of the development of the position of the Papacy came with the expansion of Islam: with Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria all under Muslim control by the end of the sixth century, only Rome and Constantinople were left; after 1453 there was only Rome. The need for some central authority to pronounce with authority on vexing matters of doctrine and dogma did not end with the fall of the other Patriarchal Sees, and Rome found itself in a situation where it was the last one standing. The question of whether Rome has always used its position wisely is an open one, and it would be hard to say the answer was yes. But that is quite separate from the developing understanding of the office, which held that in matters of faith and doctrine the Pope was protected from error.

A Case in Point

09 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Islam

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Fitness trainer Tam Khan instagram image

Fitness trainer Tam Khan instagram image

In my post last week, I quoted Cranmer saying this:

All Muslims are exhorted to the greater jihad, to strive against the flesh and persevere in the purposes of Allah, but not all jihad is holy war. All Muslims are not Islamists, but Muslims are becoming terrorists. It is futile, patronising and dangerous to deny it. Islamists are extremists who kill the innocent; Muslims who are moderate and enlightened seek to worship in peace. Islam is not all about oppressing, torturing, murdering and slaughtering. It just seems like it.

The point that he, Chalcedon, and I are trying to make is simply that Moslems amongst us are, like we are, all different.

This morning I came across a Facebook post by Amir Khan, one of the top welterweight fighters in the world, and British by the way. His post exemplifies my point.

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NINTCHDBPICT000257685118

From the source link:

“Mr. Khan’s post was wildly popular; it got 148,000 likes and 126,000 shares. Wow, Facebook must love that sort of action!

Not exactly: Facebook responded by deleting Khan’s account. But it was restored after Facebook said the deletion was a “mistake.” “

Well, you can draw your own conclusions about that, I’ve certainly drawn mine.

But a whole lot of that often elusive thing, common sense, from a young British Moslem.

via Common Sense From a British Muslim

Persecution

05 Friday Aug 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Islam, Persecution, Politics

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yazidi-women

Lord Alton has written a powerful (and moving) piece about the persecution of Christians across the world. He offers statistics and evidence to back up what those of us who take any interest in these things at all know – which is that across the glob, including in China, Christians are being persecuted, and that whatever academic arguments you want to have about ISIS, it is systematically trying to exterminate not only Christian and Yazidi communities, but to eradicate all traces of their past. This is ethnic cleansing and genocide on a grant scale. Yet where, Alton asks, is the UN taking action, where are the protests, where are the demonstrations? Despite Governments condemning what is happened and has happened, none of them is calling it genocide, and despite the rhetoric of ‘never again’, it is happening again.

In 1948,with the holocaust in mind, the United Nations promulgated the 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR), Article 18 of which insists that:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

We failed to enforce this at Srebrenica, as we have so often failed to to before and since, and we are failing yet again, And yet this declaration, this Article especially, is a fundamental value of our society. We are not saying we are perfect, but we are saying that we have learnt lessons from our own past. We don’t believe that treating women as second-class citizens is right, we don’t think it is right to throw gay people off buildings or stone them, and we don’t think that people should be killed because they do not conform to our way of thinking about God. We used to do some of these things, but we have learned better, and yes, we mean that word ‘better’. If that means asserting that these values are superior to those values which say otherwise, then we need to stop the cultural appeasement, we need to quit the relativising cringe that pretends that it is just a matter of ‘culture’. If your culture says that it is right to oppress others for their beliefs, we do indeed dare to talk the language of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. By all means, if in some strange way as a secular liberal, you find it useful to say that Christians have done these things in the past, say so, but ask yourself what signal you are sending to those who do them now? What matters most, your need to be critical of religion, or your need to protect the rights of those who are being persecuted because of their religion?

Lord Alton askes:

“Where are letters by their thousands to the Prime Minister, MPs, political leaders – urging them to do more? Where are the spontaneous grassroots campaigns that helped end apartheid and any number of injustices?

Here’s a challenge.

In November, ACN is arranging for Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abbey to be floodlit in red to commemorate the persecuted.
If every parish in the country did the same it might at last wake up our political classes to the scale of the suffering.”

It may only be a gesture, but it is better than the gesture of not seeming to care. We seem to lack the sense of outrage we should feel, which is an age when social justice warriors can summon up its language for things which seem less important to many of us, is a shame and a surprise.

Cultural superiority?

04 Thursday Aug 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Islam, Persecution

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In ruling in favour of a young woman with joint Saudi-British nationality who is being held in a cage in Saudi Arabia because her father is worried that she is acting strangely (that is thinking for herself), the presiding judge warned against asserting our own cultural superiority. When it comes to keeping women in cages, I am all in favour of asserting whatever it is which says that is a thoroughly bad thing to do; I take a similar view on female genital mutilation, forced marriages and, if it comes to that, burning widows on their husband’s funeral pyre. Whatever is wrong with our culture, it knows that doing such things is wrong. If that is asserting our cultural superiority, I am not altogether sure why a judge should have felt in necessary to imply this could be a bad thing. I take a similar view when it comes to child labour, slavery and treatment of homosexuals – cultures which ban the first two and not the third, have every right to be considered superior. The teaching of the Church on the care of homosexuals is clear – whilst their sexual activity is sinful (as is all heterosexual activity outside of marriage) they are children of God and to be treated with the same respect as everyone else; those who wish to throw them off high buildings are actuated by evil.

The reactions of the Judge perhaps reflect the instinct to appease which is productive of so much resentment from most ordinary people. You don’t need a legal qualification to know that a culture which does not put women in cages is superior to ones which do that. Perhaps it also reflects a hesitation about standards in general, which stems from the relativistic mores of our society. It may not always have lived up to its own standards, but Christianity is the basis of those by which our society has been formed and lived. It may have tolerated slavery for many centuries, whilst disapproving of it, but it was from Christianity that the only impetus that has ever existed to abolish slavery came. It is from the same base that our modern conception of human rights has come. It is from there, too, that the only sustained opposition to the modern ‘culture of death’ comes. Our faith teaches that we are all equal in as far as we are children of God. We are so used to this we are in danger of forgetting what a truly revolutionary teaching this is; no one else in the ancient world believed that. If many of the first Christians we slaves and women, it is no wonder, no other teaching valued them for who they were, no other religion said they we of equal value to the rich and powerful. There were times when the rich and the powerful may have forgotten that (as the history of trans-Atlantic slavery showed), but there was never a moment the poor forgot it (as the history of the spread of Christianity among the African slaves showed).

To say that a culture built on Christian values is superior to ones built on other values, or none at all (like our modern relativistic society) is now a contentious statement – but only because we have forgotten that ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ have a meaning; or perhaps it is because they receive that meaning in a Christian ethos with which some feel uncomfortable? I can only assure such people that they will feel a great deal more uncomfortable with the values of a culture which sees nothing wrong in putting women in cages.

The Table of the Lord

03 Wednesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Church/State, Faith, Islam

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People attend a Mass in tribute to priest Jacques Hamel in the Rouen Cathedral on July 31, 2016. Muslims across France were invited to participate in Catholic ceremonies today to mourn a priest whose murder by jihadist teenagers sparked fears of religious tension. Masses will be celebrated across the country in honour of octogenarian Father Jacques Hamel, whose throat was cut in his church on July 26, 2016 in the latest jihadist attack on France. / AFP / CHARLY TRIBALLEAU (Photo credit should read CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images)

People attend a Mass in tribute to priest Jacques Hamel in the Rouen Cathedral on July 31, 2016.
Muslims across France were invited to participate in Catholic ceremonies today to mourn a priest whose murder by jihadist teenagers sparked fears of religious tension. Masses will be celebrated across the country in honour of octogenarian Father Jacques Hamel, whose throat was cut in his church on July 26, 2016, in the latest jihadist attack on France. / AFP / CHARLY TRIBALLEAU (Photo credit: CHARLY TRIBALLEAU/AFP/Getty Images)

This is an extrapolation on Chalcedon’s post from Monday, ‘Islamic violence’? Shortly after reading his post, I came across this from Archbishop Cranmer on much the same subject, and it moved me, and I see much connection between the two.

Praying before a blasphemous icon of another Jesus, standing in the shadow of a sacrificial cross which they deny, beneath the dome of a cathedral church steeped in idolatry, myths and deception, Muslims throughout France and Italy attended Mass yesterday. From Rouen, Nice and Paris to Milan, Naples and Rome, hundreds flocked to express solidarity and compassion with Europe’s Roman Catholics, many still reeling, weeping and mourning the loss of a much-loved elderly priest, Abbé Jacques Hamel, whose throat was slit by Islamists as he celebrated Mass last week.

All Muslims are exhorted to the greater jihad, to strive against the flesh and persevere in the purposes of Allah, but not all jihad is holy war. All Muslims are not Islamists, but Muslims are becoming terrorists. It is futile, patronising and dangerous to deny it. Islamists are extremists who kill the innocent; Muslims who are moderate and enlightened seek to worship in peace. Islam is not all about oppressing, torturing, murdering and slaughtering. It just seems like it. […]

Behold! The disciples said: O Jesus, son of Mary, can your Lord send down to us a table from heaven? Jesus said: Fear Allah, if you are believers. They said: We only wish to eat of it and satisfy our hearts, and to know that you have indeed told us the truth and that we ourselves may be witnesses of it. Jesus, the son of Mary, said: O Allah our Lord! Send down to us a table from heaven, that there may be for us – the first and the last of us – a festival and a sign from you; and provide for our sustenance, for you are the best sustainer. Allah said: I will send it down to you; but if any of you after that resists faith I will punish him with a penalty such as I have not inflicted on anyone among all the peoples (Surah Al-Maida 5:112-115).

What is this table from heaven? What is this meal which satisfies hearts and witnesses to the truth? What is this festival and sign which provides spiritual sustenance? What peace and reconciliation does it bring to the hearts of those who share it? ‘This is my body...’ […]

There were tears during the sign of the peace. ‘God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself‘ (2Cor 5:19). In their shared humanity, Muslims and Christians bore witness to the humanity of Jesus, his sacrifice and death, his reconciling love, his resurrection and glorification. ‘For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them‘ (Mt 18:20). The Living God is present in the world, if not in bread and wine. We can meet Him, pray to Him and listen to Him. That is our privilege through Christ. And in that communion we stand with all believers in the world and throughout all history. And we stand with all participant peace-loving Muslims, too. ‘This is my blood…‘

via Archbishop Cranmer

And that is the thing, isn’t it? As always, we have to distinguish between enemies of our faith and our countries, and yes, our way of life, and those that have come to us for relief. And those seeking relief are multitudes, while those who seek to destroy are not.

This, of course, is something that our political class has trouble in understanding, most Moslems desire peace, but not all, most Christians also desire peace, but not all. Chalcedon said on Monday:

If we insist on mining the past so that we can use it to portray a religion as it is now, then we fall into the trap of those Muslims who pretend that the modern West is made up of ‘crusaders’ determined to reverse the defeats of the Middle Ages; the method is the same – they did it then, so they will do it now, they have not changed. The need to scapegoat and stigmatise the outside is a common enough one, found in all cultures. But the Pope, in his comments, refuses to go with it.

He and the Pope are correct. When we seek to stigmatize other groups of people, as enemies, as the other, we dishonor ourselves. Sometimes in order to defend ourselves, we will, however much we seek to avoid it, injure or kill the innocent. But we have the guide of Just War Doctrine to inform us, and our leaders, of how we should defend ourselves, and our countries, and yes, our co-religionists, or even other innocent bystanders. What have we heard lately of the Yazidi? Last I heard, the Kurds are doing a credible job, within their abilities to defend them, but we no longer hear much, do we?

So we should be not afraid to defend our faith, and our civilization, which has done much for the world, and has still more to offer. But we must remember the strictures that define us, and not target the innocent to do so.

Relations with Islam

02 Tuesday Aug 2016

Posted by in Faith, Islam, Pope

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popefrancis pray for the hungry

Some of the comments on social media yesterday seemed to imagine that in saying what I did about the Pope’s comments on Islam and violence, I was in some way accepting some degree of parity between Christianity and Islam, or, to be more precise, that the Pope ought to have been telling us all that Islam would not lead anyone to salvation. I must confess to not knowing any Catholic who imagines anything other than that; indeed, I cannot quite imagine why any Catholic would think such a thing. It is, however, a fact of life that there are a great many Muslims living in the West, as it is that the vast majority of them are no more inclined to violence than the rest of the communities in which they live. In the aftermath of the murder of Fr Hamel, it is not the time for the Pope to make disparaging comments about Islam – many will do that – it is, however, the time to say something serious to make it clear to our Muslim neighbours that the Church is not tarring them with the same brush as the murderers. To have done that would have been to have served the purpose of the killers, who would, like ISIS itself, have liked nothing better than to appear on the public scene as representative examples of Islam.

It is unclear to me what the critics of the Pope actually want? Unless they take the view that most Muslims are at war with us, it is hard to see what good could come from the Holy Father making disparaging comments about Islam at a moment like this? Perhaps, to adapt a phrase, it is ‘political incorrectness gone mad’; are they so desperate to upset the PC brigade that they are willing to risk inflaming relations with the Muslim communities in our midst? That, after all, would surely have been the consequence of the Pope taking their advice. Even if the cinema is on fire, shouting ‘fire’ is seldom a good idea; doing so when it isn’t is a very bad one.

I can understand those who wish that we could just go back to the days when the Catholic Church regarded itself in a state of siege, and Protestants, Jews, Muslims and others could be regarded as, literally, outside the walls. But the Church decided back in the 1950s that this was not the position it wished to continue, which required it to work out ways of maintaining its eternal position – namely that it is the Church Christ founded, and that only in it can the fulness of the faith be found – alongside a more ecumenical attitude. The results have not satisfied everyone, and in this fallen world it is unlikely they could. It is easy enough (which is why it is done so often) to contrast Mass attendance then with Mass attendance now, as though in some way the Catholic Church could have been cut off from the changes in the wider society of which it is part, but it is a temptation to be resisted. Every Christian Church in the West has been hit by what has happened to our society since the early 1960s, and we should beware of correlating Mass attendance with the spiritual health of the Church; when it is expected that you go to Mass, people go to Mass.

The Church remains the one major institution in our society which takes the sanctity of human life really seriously, and which speaks out against the evils of abortion; that the Media do not emphasise Pope Francis’ words on this tells us everything we already know about it, and nothing about the Pope. It remains the last, best hope of our civilization. Not even the Gates of Hell can prevail against it – we have Christ’s word on that, as we have about the trials and tribulations of it and of the faithful. The Pope witnesses to the hope that we have, he does not need to engage in polemic about other religions. Islam exists, Muslims are in our midst living, for the most part, peacefully; it we wish to witness to the Faith, we don’t do it by engaging in polemic, but by our lived faith. That is what the Pope does; do we?

 

‘Islamic violence’?

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Faith, Islam, Politics, Pope

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The moment Pope Francis boards a plane in the presence of journalists, many of us wait with baited breath to see what controversy will follow. He did not disappoint yesterday when he said:

“I do not like to speak of Islamic violence because everyday when I look through the papers, I see violence here in Italy,” the Pope told reporters.

“And they are baptised Catholics. There are violent Catholics. If I speak of Islamic violence, I also have to speak of Catholic violence,”

As might be expected, this has caused some controversy, with some objecting to his mentioning Catholic violence in the same terms as Islamic violence, and others calling him delusional for not stressing that violence is in the nature of Islam – citing its history as proof of this. This is to miss his point entirely, and I am beginning to wonder whether there is not an odd symbiosis between the Pope’s press conferences and his critics, with the latter finding in his words, whatever they are, a reason to criticise him?

The Pope is not denying that there is violence carried out in the name of Islam, but he is reminding us of something many atheists will point out on such occasions – that is that our own Christian history is not wanting in expressions of violence carried our in the name of Christ. It is easier for the knee to jerk than it is to face the discomfort this fact creates in us. It has been, unfortunately, a common enough feature of religions that their leaders have used, or encouraged others to use force on their behalf, to enforce control over their followers. Our fallen nature leads us all too easily to talk more about God’s anger than his love, and it is unfortunate that the reaction to that has, as reactions will, gone too far in the other direction; but some corrective was necessary. Christians no longer fall under Byron’s scornful words of having ‘burnt each other quite persuaded / that all the Apostles would have done as they did.’ But the Pope knows we did, and he disarms the atheist charge up front by saying so. A religion founded on the need for repentance, should not find it so difficult to admit guilt and to repent.

Pope Francis is saying much the same thing about Islam. It, too, has a violent past. Christians have tended to feel that violence as directed at them, as it has been, and still is in many places, but it has equally been directed at other Muslims and non-believers of all types. There is a common enough trope which has it that Muslims who live in the West are just waiting until they are in a majority before insisting on Sharia Law. It is easy enough to see where this came from – after all the whole of what we now call the Middle East was, at one time, Christian. But before it was that, it was not Christian, and right as we are to refer to the sufferings and persecution of the Copts in Egypt at the hands of Islam, it might do us good to recall that before that, they were persecuted by the Imperial forces for their rejection of Chalcedon in 451; others might point out that the Egyptian Christians persecuted non-Christians when they had the upper hand. St John was, as ever, quite right – in such discussion we are, none of us, without sin. The Pope acknowledges the beam in our own eye – he does not say there is no mote in the eye of others.

If we insist on mining the past so that we can use it to portray a religion as it is now, then we fall into the trap of those Muslims who pretend that the modern West is made up of ‘crusaders’ determined to reverse the defeats of the Middle Ages; the method is the same – they did it then, so they will do it now, they have not changed. The need to scapegoat and stigmatise the outside is a common enough one, found in all cultures. But the Pope, in his comments, refuses to go with it. He recognises what many others recognise, which is that violence is not the preserve of any one religion; indeed, pace some atheist opinion, it is not even the preserve of the religious. To adapt a phrase, man is born to violence as the spark flies upwards.

The overwhelming majority of Muslims are not advocates of violence. Do some extremists mine their own history to insist on a version of their faith truer, as they see it, to its founding values? Yes they do. But that is no reason to believe them, or to give them credence. It is a reason to oppose them, but we do that, as the Pope recognises, more effectively, if we isolate them from the mainstream of the Islamic world. I am not, as it happens, persuaded of the Holy Father’s materialist explanation of the war in which we find ourselves, as I think there is a religious element in it, but in as far as he is drawing our attention to the fact that, whatever the extremists want, it is not a Holy War, he is doing us a service. As he says:

“I think that in nearly all religions there is a always a small fundamentalist group,” he said, adding “We have them”

He is also doing us a service when he points out the devotion shown in our society to the ‘god’, money. Too often we resemble the man in yesterday’s Gospel who stored up his great wealth without regard to the needs of others.

The moving finger writes and moves on, and I see now that some of his obscurer remarks about ‘another Peter’ going to the next World Youth Day in 2019, have set another set of hares running. It is probably a good job he is not always on a plane going somewhere.