Magdi Allam’s open letter to Pope Francis

After having announced “urbi et orbi” his decision to leave the Catholic Church after five years as a convert from Islam to Catholicism, prominent Italian journalist Magdi Allam elaborated on the issue in an open letter to His Holiness Pope Francis, which appeared in the Italian daily Il Giornale March 31.

“Shortly after your debut as Pope, I was puzzled by your central message [of promoting] a poor Church close to the poor,” Allam writes. This celebration of poverty, he goes on, “is likely to be misunderstood when in Italy, in Europe, and elsewhere affluent populations are reduced to poverty by a financial dictatorship promoted by globalized speculation, by the overwhelming power of the banks, and a Eurocracy sentencing businesses to death, multiplying the unemployed, causing families to suffer and robbing the youth of their hope.”

Allam then outlines six main motivations for his decision, which more specifically relate to what he calls the “discrepancy between the dimension of the faith and the behavior of the Church.”

His first reason is based on the “dictatorship of relativism” as masterfully decried by Benedict XVI, the first and foremost consequence of which is, according to Allam, “religious relativism, and specifically [equating] Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, conceived as the ‘the three great monotheistic, revealed, Abrahamic religions of the book,’ resulting in the legitimization of Islam and consequently the de-legitimization of Christianity.”

The second reason is what Allam calls “the ideology of globalism which results in promoting a substantially centralized and authoritarian new world order, which overpowers up to the point of erasing national identities and autonomous communities.”

The third is the “ideology of ‘do-goodism’ that compels us to give priority to the claims of others rather than the legitimate protection of one’s own good, resulting, in particular, in immigrationism, which forces us to welcome immigrants regardless of the consequences in our lives.”

The fourth is a “moralism that ignores and suppresses the natural function and the positive value of sex as an integral part of our humanity, culminating in the collapse of vocations to the priesthood and the pedophilia deviation in the Church, in the decline of both religious and civil marriages and the economic, social, and human cost caused by annulment or divorce and, therefore, the decline of the institution of the family as a pillar of society and the collapse in the birth rate in European countries with a Catholic majority.”

The fifth is “the prevalence of the raison d'État that governs the Vatican, rather than the universal Magisterium of the Church, with what involves the conditioning of the financial and political powers.”

The sixth is “the political option to side with those in power, as has recently happened with the public and direct support for the Monti-led government, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the Church's social doctrine.” For having manifested these considerations, Allam concludes, “I found myself violently attacked by those who consider themselves as staunchest followers of the Church and the Pope, reduced to an object of media lynching comparable to a virtual version of the tribunals of the Inquisition, irrevocably condemned as Satan, Judas, apostate, traitor, possessed, perfidious, fake-Catholic after being a fake-Muslim.”

Excellent commentary by a poster to CWR

Maybe Mr. Allam should do something to help solve these issues and not chicken-out by just abandoning the Church and the faith. Others are knowingly enduring these same evils and trying to fight them. They are trying to persevere. Couldn't he, as a journalist do more good by exposing particular instances of these evils rather than giving up?
There are always other issues that play into decisions like this. His open letter makes some seriously noteworthy points, many of which are the result of even worse problems but are they the only reason he has left the Church?
A last remark: the test of a religion first comes from the soundness of its doctrine and only afterward from the practice of its members. If I could address him myself I would say, "Don't be so rash to abandon the Church. There have always been those who want to change it, and our day and age simply confirms this by the very real relativism you decry. If the intention of your conversion of five years ago was pure, you would now be doing research and trying help the Church to again achieve the simplicity and purity of its doctrine and worship. Instead, you're abandoning it to those errors, from which you rationalize and justify your open and public defection. Think this over ... and if you say 'it's too late to change', well, you know of one or two who said the same thing in Scripture."

Catholic ping!

His first reason is based on the “dictatorship of relativism” as masterfully decried by Benedict XVI, the first and foremost consequence of which is, according to Allam, “religious relativism, and specifically [equating] Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, conceived as the ‘the three great monotheistic, revealed, Abrahamic religions of the book,’ resulting in the legitimization of Islam and consequently the de-legitimization of Christianity.”

"Allah" is NOT the god of Abraham. To allow "Allah" to be placed next to the Lord God is to violate the first commandment.

Actually, the word Allah was first used by christians. It is the Arabic form of the Aramaic word for God Aloho. That said, since the Muslims adopted this word, it has become associated with their understanding of God. Throughout the Middle East, in ALL Catholic Churches where the Gospel is proclaimed, the word Allah is still used to signify "God". This has apparently angered the muslims who, in certain countries, are now mandating that the word be reserved for use strictly by Islam.

With the exception of the final 'reason', nothing is different from when he joined the Church five years ago. And much of what he says bothers him is created, and pushed by people in the Church, NOT official teachings or doctrine of the Church itself, with the exception of favoring the poor, which the Church has done for years. But even Pope Francis has stated that the poverty he most wants to deal with is the 'poverty of spirit' from which many Christians, not just Catholics, suffer.

I hope he finds his way back.

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