| Editor : Abbé Georges de Nantes | N° 77 – February 2009 |
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« CAN THE CHURCH LEGITIMATE ISLAM AS A RELIGION AND CONSIDER MOHAMMED AS A PROPHET? »
Appeal to the Holy Father for clarification on the relativist and Islamically correct drift that has led highly placed Catholic prelates to legitimise Islam as a religion and transform churches and parishes into places of assembly for Islamic extremists.
To His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI
(© Alessia Giuliani/cpp)
I address myself directly to You, Vicar of Christ and Head of the Catholic Church, with the deference of a sincere believer in the Faith of Jesus and of an indefatigable protagonist, witness and builder of Christian Civilisation, in order to manifest to You my very great concern about the serious religious and ethical drift that has infiltrated and spread within the heart of the Church. It has reached the point that at the summit of the Church certain high prelates and even your close collaborators openly and publically uphold the legitimacy of Islam as a religion and credit Mohammed with being a prophet. Meanwhile, at the rank and file level of the Church, other clergy and parish priests transform churches and parishes into prayer rooms and places of assembly for integrist and extremist Islamists who pursue, lucidly and untiringly, the strategy of conquering the territory and the minds of a Christian West which, as You Yourself have stated, “detests itself.” This is because it is ideologically ill from nihilism, materialism, consumerism, and relativism, from the complex of the “Islamically correct”, from cowed meekness, secularism, legal subjectivism, masochism, indifferentism, multiculturalism.
It is a question of a war of Islamic conquest that has transformed the Christian West into a fortress of Islamic extremism to the extent of “producing” Islamic suicide terrorists of Western citizenship. In this fortress the most serious threat is not so much those who take up arms and atrociously cut off heads, as it is those who underhandedly cut off tongues, who have set up dissimulation as a precept of the Islamic faith, giving birth to an Islamic state within the legal state, relying on:
– an extensive network of mosques and Qur’anic schools where hatred is taught and where faith in so-called Islamic “martyrdom” is inculcated, where brainwashing is practiced in order to transform people into fighters for the Islamic holy war,
– Islamic charitable and assistance organisations which, along with material assistance, influence by suggestion and subjugate minds,
– Islamic banks that control ever more vast sectors of international finance and of the world economy, thus giving credence to Islamic law,
– real and veritable Islamic courts which, in Great Britain, have already succeeded in imposing the shari ‘a, the Islamic law, on an equal basis with civil law for questions concerning personal and familial status, even if they pronounce sentences that violate the fundamental rights of man, such as the legalisation of polygamy and discrimination against women. These are facts: whether we want it or not, whether we like it or not, these are real, objective facts that cannot be denied.
This Islamic conquest of minds and territory has been made possible by the extreme fragility of the Christian West: this is the other side of the coin. Our West is more and more comparable to an idol of materialism with feet of clay because its soul is beset by a profound crisis of values, and because it betrays its own identity by its unwillingness to recognise the historical and objective truth of the Judeo-Christian roots of its own civilisation. There exists, from both an ideological and concrete point of view, collusion between this West and the vanguard of the conquering Islamic army that aims at recovering the myth and the utopia of “the umma”, the Islamic nation, by invoking the Qur’an, which legitimises hatred, violence and death, and by evoking the thought and actions of Mohammed who gave the example by committing atrocious crimes, as when he was seen personally participating in the massacre and decapitation of more than seven hundred Jews from the tribe of Banu Quraizah in 627 at the gates of Medina.
Well, Your Holiness! How is it that we do not realise that receptiveness towards Islam – or even worse, collusion with Islam as a religion which, despite appearances, jeopardises Christian love towards Muslims as persons – leads to denying faith in God who became man and in Christianity, which is the testimony of Truth, Love, Liberty, and Peace? This is why it is vital for the common good of the Catholic Church, the general interest of Christianity and of Western civilisation itself, that You deliver a clear and obligatory verdict for all the faithful on the fundamental question […]. Is it conceivable that the Church could substantially legitimate Islam as a religion to the point of considering Mohammed as a prophet?
I will limit myself to pointing out to Your Holiness two recent facts that I witnessed. Last Wednesday, 15 October 2008, the Archbishop of Brindisi, Mgr Rocco Talucci, did me the honour first of welcoming me to the diocesan see around 5 p.m. and, half an hour later, of attending the presentation of the autobiographic account of my conversion from Islam to Catholicism entitled “Thank you, Jesus” in the hall of the Chamber of Commerce of Brindisi […].
It immediately appeared to me that the archbishop was a skilled diplomat, always careful to weigh up the pros and the cons of each situation, seeking to content everyone and to irritate no one […]. Nevertheless, my receptiveness to understanding the reasoning of others was somewhat inhibited when Archbishop Talucci, intervening after the presentation I had made of my book, presented Mohammed as “a prophet” and, in substance, legitimated Islam as a religion in as much as it is an “expression of the aspiration of man to rise towards God”.
It is not my intention to implicate Archbishop Talucci personally because he does not constitute an isolated case. If only this were so! It is, alas, a widespread attitude within the Catholic Church today.
The second fact concerns Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, President of the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue. When he spoke during the meeting of Communion and Liberation at Rimini on 15 August 2008, during a press conference that preceded the public meeting entitled “The Conditions for Peace”, he repeated the thesis that he had already upheld in the past, according to which […] religions are intrinsically good, and thus Islam is also. The consequence of it is that if today Islamic extremism and terrorism have become the number one urgency threatening international security and stability, it is only attributable to a minority “of wicked people” who deform “the true Islam in interpreting it”, while the majority of Muslims are “good” in the sense that they respect the fundamental rights and non-negotiable values that are at the root of the common upbringing of man.
The objective reality, I tell you with all sincerity and animated by a constructive intent, is exactly the opposite of what Cardinal Tauran imagines. Islamic extremism and terrorism are the mature fruit of those who – after the defeat of the Arab armies in the war against Israel on 5 June 1967, which marked the twilight of the secular, Socialist and warmongering ideology of Pan-Arabism – raised the standard of Pan-Islamism, and wanted to adhere even more to the precepts of the Qur’an which, in turn, is considered as one with Allah, an uncreated work equal to God, thus corresponding to the thought and action of Mohammed.
Thus at the root of the evil there is not to be found a minority of “wicked” men responsible for the general deterioration, while religions are all equally “good” […]. The truth is that Christianity and Islam are totally different: the God who became man by incarnating Himself in Jesus, who brought life, truth, love and liberty to other men to the point of sacrificing His own life, has nothing in common with Allah who became a text in the pages of the Qur’an, who imposes himself on men in an arbitrary manner, who legitimated an ideology and a practice of violence and death that has been pursued by Mohammed and his successors in order to spread Islam […].
I wonder if the Church realises that by not affirming and by not rising up as a witness to the unicity, to the absolute character, the universality and the eternity of the Truth in Christ, she ends up becoming the accomplice of the building of a world pantheon of religions in which everyone considers that each religion is the depository of a part of the truth, even though each religion claims the monopoly of the truth […].
For me, Christianity is not a “better” religion than Islam, or the “perfected form” of religion with a “fulfilled” message, in comparison with Islam considered as an “incomplete” religion with an “unfulfilled” message. For me, Christianity is the one true religion, because Jesus Himself is the true God made man […]. For me, Islam, which recognises a Jesus who is only human, which thus condemns Christianity as a heresy because it believes in the divinity of Jesus and as idolatrous because it believes in the dogma of the Most Holy Trinity, is a false religion, not inspired by God but by the Devil […].
It is precisely my experience as a “moderate Muslim” pursuing the dream of a “moderate Islam” that made me understand that there can, of course, exist “moderate Muslims” as individuals but that there in no way exists a “moderate Islam”. We must therefore make a distinction between the dimension of the person and that of the religion […]. We must free ourselves from the diffuse error that consists in imagining that in order to love a Muslim we must love Islam, and that in order to have appropriate relations with Muslims, we must have similar consideration for Islam.
Most Holy Father Benedict XVI, the Church, Christianity, and Western civilisation are succumbing today, undermined by the gangrene of the nihilism and relativism of those who have lost their own souls, under the pressure of the war of conquest, aggressive by nature, of Islamic extremism and terrorism. To this is added the drifting of a world that has become globalised by drawing its inspiration from Western modernity but only in its materialist and consumerist dimension, while it has not integrated its spiritual dimension and its values.
In this rather critical situation with no apparent solution, You constitute today a beacon of Truth and Liberty for all Christians and for all persons of good will in the West and in the world. You are a Blessing from Heaven, You who uphold the hope of a moral and civil deliverance of Christianity and the West.
We draw our inspiration from You and ask You for your blessing in order to elevate us to the status of Builders of Christian civilisation capable of promoting a Movement of Ethical Reformation [of Counter-Reformation…] that will bring about an Italy, a West, and a world of Faith and Reason. May God assist You in the mission that He has entrusted to You.