Posted on 03/25/2013 11:52:45 AM PDT by NYer
A prominent anti-Islam advocate’s hatred of Islam has now led him to abandon his Catholic faith:
Magdi Cristiano Allam, an Egyptian-born Muslim whom Pope Benedict publicly baptised at Easter five years ago in St Peter’s Basilica has announced that he is leaving the Church because it has taken too soft a stand against Islam.
“My conversion to Catholicism, which came at the hands of Benedict XVI during the Easter Vigil on 22 March 2008, I now consider finished in combination with the end of his pontificate,” Mr Allam wrote on Monday in the right-wing Milan daily, Il Giornale. . . .
“The thing that drove me away from the Church more than any other factor was religious relativism, in particular the legitimisation of Islam as a true religion,” he said. Mr Allam said Islam was “an intrinsically violent ideology” that had to be courageously opposed as “incompatible with our civilisation and fundamental human rights.”
The secular mind has been complacent, even blithe, in the face of Christianity’s decline in Europe and the simultaneous rise of an assertive Islam. Elites hesitate to acknowledge the ethical debt liberalism owes to Christianity, ropelining any attempt to mention God in the European Constitution and denying the Marian inspiration for the circle of stars in the European flag. The reason for this comical dissembling is that liberalism understands itself as an ideal without a genealogy, a species nowhere native and nowhere exotic. Such historical blindness has led to the increasingly unsupportable belief that integrating Turkish Muslims into the European project is no more fraught or difficult than integrating Dutch Protestants.
Yet critics like Allam who view Islam as a mere “ideology” centered on violence fall into their own, no less grievous, error. Like liberalism, Islam owes no small debt to Christianity. Slander of one can verge into slander of the other. As Robert Louis Wilken warned in Christianity Face to Face with Islam, “Given the experience of centuries, it is tempting for Christians to see Islam as the enemy. Often it has been the enemy. But if that remains our dominant paradigm for looking at the religion, we deny something of ourselves.”
In retrospect, Allam’s disappointment seems inevitable. If we mistake Islam for a mere ideology of violence, we risk mistaking Christianity as merely an ideology that allows us to oppose that violence. Yet Christ did not come to this earth or found his church to oppose Islam but to propose the gospel. Not to eclipse the moon, but to reveal the Son.
Benedict’s pontificate has come to an end; in time Islam will, too. Neither event should affect whether or not one affirms Christian truth or chooses to be in communion with the bishop of Rome. That Allam so grievously fails to understand this aspect of Christian truth ought to warn us against the judgment of Islam he shares with many other anti-Islam advocates.
As we embark on our journey into the holiest week of the christian year, please remember Magdi in your prayers.
Tha sentence doesn't make any sense.
And why would it be a mistake to think Islam is an ideology of violence based on hundreds of years of examples of violence, and by reading the Koran and Hadiths.
Plenty of non-Christians have concluded Islam is not a religion of peace, but a religion spread by bullying and violence to non Muslims, Christians or otherwise. - tom
However, during this Holy Week especially, all Christians should try to remember and obey one of the toughest commands Jesus ever spoke, which is a lot easier for most of us to say than to do:
"You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your brethren, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect." Matthew 5:43-48
Now, imagine the above sentence with 'abortion' as the 'enemy.
If we mistake abortion for a mere ideology of violence, we risk mistaking Christianity as merely an ideology that allows us to oppose that violence.
Would the author be OK with that?
Thank you so much for that post!
...and Heart-Rest misunderstands God’s Word, rightly divided. Unless Heart-Rest desires to be under the Law. Which, in this dispensation of grace, means justification will never be achieved. To put yourself under the Law for God’s approval now is to condemn yourself to being judged by the Law. The Gospel of the Grace of God is for this present time. You will find it in the books of Romans through Philemon. And you will be free from the law of sin and death.
However that religious "glue" is exceedingly important: it postively attracts people in religious wastelands like secular post-Christian Europe because people long to bow before their Maker --- this is an innate, God-given drive --- and this is how they think they can do it.
Right now, Islam is just surging into a vacuum.
Islam will also be the scourge on our backs, just as Assyria was the scourage on the backs of apostate Israelites. We abort 1/3 of our future generation, letting the Dragon sweep a third of the stars from the sky. We gender-homogenize and homosexualize our vulnerable children. We reject our own future even more comprehensively with contraception-sterilization-porn addiction-fruitless fornication; we reject the True God...
And we get what? Not godlessness. We get the False God.
Do not ignore the sheer attraction of even a false god in a would-be child-rejecting, purity-hating, abysmally vulgar, godless culture.
This author Matthew Schmitzis correct. It's not enough to want to eclipse the moon. We have to reveal the Son.
To me, this commandment to "Love your enemy" proves the Deity of Christ. To do this is beyond our unaided human power. Even to want to do it surpasses our unaided human power.
Mind you, this must be freed from every molecule of sentimentality and correctly understood as a call to the Cross: but to love one's enemy with a fidelity that comes from Christ alone is as great a miracle as to rise from the dead.
Yes, the author would be okay with that sentence: “If we mistake abortion for a mere ideology of violence, we risk mistaking Christianity as merely an ideology that allows us to oppose that violence.”
The author is right. I am Catholic because Catholicism is true. I am not a Catholic because of my opposition to Islam. Islam will one day disappear, or be destroyed, but the truth of the Catholic faith will remain and will still be true.
I have known people who became interested in the Catholic faith because of its pro-life stand, or Theology of the Body, or its history, or its art work, or because of a wonderful priest they have known, or because their spouse was Catholic. There’s nothing wrong with that. But there is only ONE REASON to become Catholic - because it is true. This guy apparently was not intellectually honest when he became Catholic - and I say that with a heavy heart because I heartily cheered him on when he converted.
Paul says all Scripture is God-breathed and useful for training in righteousness, not just Romans through Philemon. 2 Timothy 4:1 says that Jesus “will judge the living and the dead” upon his return. “The living and the dead” includes everyone, not some people, not only unbelievers, but everyone. I would not care to place myself in the position of having to explain to my Judge that I called myself a Christian (”follower of Christ”) yet exempted myself from his teaching.
Oh, and also: Re: judgement: ""In the day when God shall JUDGE the secrets of men BY JESUS CHRIST ACCORDING TO MY GOSPEL". Rom. 2:16. Perhaps it would be very vital to know what THAT GOSPEL Paul referred to is. Because you will be judged by IT. God's word, not mine.
Might we conclude that you have now complied with Jesus’ teaching and are now perfect?
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