Cardinal Law shares prayers, feast, hope with Muslims

The Boston Globe ^ | 11/25/2002 | Scott S. Greenberger

[narses]

Ping.....

[watchin]

Anyone wonder how long before the imam offers prayers and praise to Jesus Christ, in the name of peace and tolerance?

When hell freezes over. The compromising bishop is a sucker.

[Capt. Tom]

''Yes, there are differences. But the starting point - and the most important point - is that we believe in one God,'' Law told them

What an idiotic statement.
Father, Son, Holy Ghost, or Allah. Which one God does Law and the muslims believe in? - Tom

[narses]

When the bombs start popping over Bagdhad the temperature down there may drop rapidly.

[RLK]

How sweet...

[don-o]

Muslims are theists, true, but Allah is simply incompatible with the God of the Jews and the Christians.

Give that man a ceegar!

All this footsie and kissyface with the Muslims, in the present circumstances, is a scandal. Dubya plays the political game.

Christian leaders need to get a clue that they are not allowed to play games with the Truth.

[wastoute]

Cardinal Law was "comfortable" in the company of pedophiles, apparently.

[montag813]

Why didn they hold the meeting in Bin Laden's brother's apartment? He owns a lot of them in Boston.

[narses]

To be fair, Our Lord went into the company of many sinners. The story doesn't say so, but one can hope that His Emminance spoke about the Good News to the sinners he was breaking bread with. Perhaps he was their to help them convert?

[Saundra Duffy]

No comment.

[Diogenesis]

Also, Law and the Moslems BOTH support Saddam Hussein, murderer of children.

Dead children, previously playing in Halabja [March 1988] murdered by Terrorist SH.

[don-o]

No comment

I have been on FR for a while.
Very first time I have seen that as a reply

[narses]

No reply. But Happy Thanksgiving. :)

[Revolting cat!]

It sounds like His Worship is not immune to the pop culture's disease of kissy-huggie shallowness of television talk shows. It's all showbiz, he's telling us, it's all more or less meaningless!

[ActionNewsBill]

Well, I'm not Catholic, but according to this story, the Bishop would seem to be out of touch with God's Word, specifically the First Commandment.

...the bishop knelt with his forehead just inches from the carpet and offered praise to Allah.

Law, who participated in the Wayland mosque's Ramadan observance as a gesture of good will, said he felt right at home among the Muslim worshipers.

''Yes, there are differences. But the starting point - and the most important point - is that we believe in one God,'' Law told them.

''I feel very much at home with my fellow fundamentalists here, who are convinced that God must be at the center of our lives,'' Law said.

I can't for the life of me see any Christian, even if it's just "going through the motions" making such an obscene mockery of his beliefs.

[narses]

I think you're right. It is a cultural (or should that be acultural?) thing. That also explains the enormous numbers of Catholic divorces, Catholic's who practice birth control, and Catholic's who support abortion promoting politicians. The problem I have with that explanation is that the history of the True Church in Roman times shows that we can and should be willing to die to defend our faith even against the popular culture. Where are the Saints?

[Technogeeb]

Belloc has an essay where he calls Islam the first external heresy of Christianity and he makes a good case

There is a certain validity to this viewpoint, but only within a very limited context of "heresy". Mohammet merely borrowed some names (and a very distorted history) from local Jews and heretical Christians that he encountered. The "source material" for the vast majority of the religion is local, however (for example, using "Allah", a local moon god and minor member of the collection of idols worshipped at the Kaaba before Islam). While there are aspects of Judaism and Christianity that are rendered in the pages of the Quran, they are done so in a manner that is historically laughable (confusing people born centuries apart as if they were the same person, replacing the covenant promises to Isaac with Ishmael, having "Samaritans" suggest making the golden calf during the Exodus, and other silly mistakes that no literate author would make).

Islam venerates Jesus, Mary and Joseph for example.

Not really. It venerates Isa and Miriam. The Isa of Islam is not Jesus, the Son of God, but just a prophet, and Miriam the mother of Isa is not Mary, since she is also the sister of Moses (where Mary the mother of Jesus was born centuries later).

Allah has no Son (but did have three daughters, before some later revision of Islam), and was worshipped as one of a member of a pantheon of deities at the Kaaba long before Mohammet came along and invented Islam (destroying the other 359 idols at the Kaaba so that worship would focus solely upon the "new" monotheistic deity Allah).

[ultima ratio]

The early martyrs who were butchered for refusing to show deference to an imperial statue were pretty foolish. All they had to do was make a few symbolic gestures. Why take the Christian faith so seriously? What they no doubt needed was a real cool pope to provide a more enlightened example. Come to think of it--Our Lord Himself made a mess of it. All he apparently had to do was lighten-up a little and learn to fit in a little better with other points of view, dialogue with the Pharisees a little more and maybe kiss their Talmud, pour out a few libations in the Temple of Jupiter, perhaps...

[narses]

Well, to be fair, Mohamet was illiterate. To expect him to be accurate is perhaps looking for too much.

Seriously though, thanks for your insight.

[The Iguana]

He prayed to Allah by name. In an Islamic House of Worship. In prescribed Islamic manner.

Smells like syncretism - at the very least - to me.

It is possible to be "ecumenical" and collegial while preserving certain important lines.

One doubts, at any rate, that we will see these Muslim clerics in a RC church making the sign of the cross. Current "ecumenism" seems to be a one way street.

As it happens, however, we hardly need this reason to desire Cardinal Law's early retirement.