Dear Reader,
This blog has been inactive for almost a month. I have some excuse, as I was in Europe for two weeks of that. I have no good excuse for not posting in the last two weeks, though, and that is a situation I intend to rectify, starting today and continuing, I think, with a later post comparing Islam and Protestantism.
Today, however, I’d like to talk about Pope Francis. After his Angelus yesterday, the Holy Father had this to say:
Vorrei rivolgere un saluto ai musulmani del mondo intero, nostri fratelli, che da poco hanno celebrato la conclusione del mese di Ramadan, dedicato in modo particolare al digiuno, alla preghiera e all’elemosina. Come ho scritto nel mio Messaggio per questa circostanza, auguro che cristiani e musulmani si impegnino per promuovere il reciproco rispetto, specialmente attraverso l’educazione delle nuove generazioni.
Interestingly, I was not able to find this document in English, so I have taken the liberty of translating the text myself. Hopefully my Italian is up to snuff, as I am reasonably confident that it is.
I would like to send a greeting to the Muslims of the whole world, our brothers, who recently celebrated the conclusion of the month of Ramadan, dedicated particularly to fasting, prayer, and almsgiving. As I wrote in my Message for the Present Circumstance, I hope that Christians and Muslims commit to promoting mutual respect, especially through the education of new generations. (Emphasis mine)
This is a deeply disturbing statement, but sadly unsurprising coming from Pope Francis. This is the same Pope who said that ‘because of our common roots’ ‘a true Christian cannot be anti-Semitic’.
There is simply no excuse for the head of the world’s largest Christian Church to be addressing followers of any religion that denies the Triune God and Our Lord Jesus Christ as ‘brothers’, but to do it to followers of the religion currently leading the pack as the foremost persecutors of Christians should be unimaginable.
If I receive the Holy Eucharist from a bishop who is out of communion with my own, I place myself in communion with him and break communion with my bishop. It seems to me obvious that likewise, if Pope Francis wishes to be the ‘brother’ of the world’s Moslems he must surrender any claim to the brotherhood of the world’s Christians.
The Ummah is the premier existential enemy of Christendom, at least if we exclude those domains that claim to be non-religious. All over the Arab world, we have seen in recent years a resurgence of Islam as a political ideology, even more than before, and the result has been the death of countless Christians.
The Pope of Alexandria may have to appease Moslems to keep his flock from being burned alive; the Pope of Rome has no such excuse.
If the Mahometans are Pope Francis’s brothers, then with respect, he is not mine.
