[Want even more content from FPM? Sign up for FPM+ to unlock exclusive series, virtual town-halls with our authors, and more—now for just $3.99/month. Click here to sign up.]
One of the United States’ most influential Catholic archbishops embarrassed himself recently by equating two similar yet distinct religious observances: Lent and Ramadan, both of which involve dedicated prayer and fasting.
New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, on his Sirius XM radio show Feb. 28, mentioned that Ramadan began the next day and used both observance’s convergence this year to “shame” Catholics into imitating “our Islamic brothers and sisters,” he said.
“Do they take it seriously,” Dolan exclaimed, lamenting the assumed lack of concomitant dedication among Catholics before telling a story to reinforce his point. Early in his tenure in New York, Dolan said, he rode in a taxi on a very hot day, drank some water he had with him and asked the driver if he would like some.
“He said, ‘You bet I’d like some water. I am very thirsty. But it’s Ramadan and I cannot take water until the sun sets.’ ” Dolan said. “That’s how seriously they take their fasting and prayer.
“Now, I tell you that to shame you because Ash Wednesday is coming up. Ash Wednesday is this coming Wednesday (March 5) and that’s kind of our Catholic Ramadan. So let’s unite with our Islamic brothers and sisters in prayer and fasting.”
The fact that Dolan failed to encourage Catholics to imitate Jesus Christ — whose fast in the desert for 40 days in Luke’s Gospel forms the basis for Lent — is beyond telling. So is this response on X.com from Wxman1986, a self-described “devout conservative Catholic”:
“Maybe he should spend more time talking about the Christians who are being beheaded and the Christian churches that are being burned to the ground in Eastern Europe and throughout the Middle East!”
The contrast between Dolan’s and Wxman1986’s remarks illustrates a frightening development: Catholic prelates, including popes, have adopted an indulgent attitude toward Islam that destroys their moral credibility.
Pope Francis embodies that indulgent posture as part of his goal to forge human unity and international peace. Since 2014, the second year of his pontificate, Francis has travelled to 13 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia where Islam predominates.
In 2019, Francis and Imam Ahmed el-Tayeb – the head of Al-Azhar, the most prestigious university in the Sunni Muslim world — signed the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together. That document, built with secular Western boilerplate, ostensibly provides a framework for Catholicism and Islam to work toward common goals that build peace, freedom, justice and prosperity while maintaining interreligious dialogue.
But FrontPage’s Robert Spencer eviscerated the document, which disguises and contradicts the religious and political imperialism inherent in Islam.
Last year in Singapore, Francis ventured into syncretism by claiming that all religions offer equally valid avenues to God.
“All religions are paths to God,” he told an audience of Catholic college students. “I will use an analogy; they are like different languages that express the divine. But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children. ‘But my God is more important than yours!’ Is this true? There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God. Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.”
Yet in the midst of all the flowery platitudes, Francis has failed to confront Islam directly about its violent persecution of Christians or to support its victims, as FrontPage Magazine’s Daniel Greenfield reported recently. In 2017, more than 5,800 Catholic converts from Islam and their friends signed a letter expressing their frustration and fear concerning Francis’ attitude.
“If Islam is a good religion in itself, as you seem to teach, why did we become Catholic?” the signees asked. “Do not your words question the soundness of the choice we made at the risk of our lives? Islam prescribes death for apostates (Quran 4.89, 8.7-11), do you know? In accordance with (Jesus’) teaching (Lk 14:26), we preferred Him, the Christ, to our own life. Are we not in a good position to talk to you about Islam?
The signees indict Francis for his indifference in the letter’s first paragraph:
“Many of us have tried to contact you, on many occasions and for several years, and we have never received the slightest acknowledgement of our letters or requests for meetings.” (emphasis added)
For most of its history, the Catholic Church fought Muslim attempts to expand into Europe. The church’s current appeasement dates from the Second Vatican Council and the influence of Louis Massignon, a French scholar from the early 20th century who believed that the God of Abraham was the God of Muhammad. Massignon also described Islam as “the faith of Abraham revived with Muhammad,” he wrote, and the Qur’an as reflecting a level of divine inspiration.
Because Muslims are Abraham’s descendants, Massignon concluded, “they have the right to equality among the monotheisms descended from Abraham,” he wrote.
Massiognon’s ideas found expression in Nostra Aetate, which the council produced to repudiate Catholicism’s centuries-old embrace of anti-Semitism. Though the document emphasized the church’s relationship to the Jews, it also addressed Islam:
“The Church also regards with esteem the Muslims. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet.”
Another document from the council, Lumen Gentium, stated that “the plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place among these are the Muslims, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind.”
That passage made its way into the Catholic catechism.
The pace of appeasement accelerated under Pope John Paul II, who preceded Francis in pursuing dialogue at all costs. Though traditionalist Catholics criticized him for kissing a Qur’an, John Paul’s approach ranged beyond diplomatic gestures.
“For Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II’s given name), religious dialogue is necessary in order to foster the common good of humanity,” Professor Renzo Guolo, an expert in Islam at the University of Turin, wrote in 2003. “This dialogue is sustained by the awareness that there are common values across cultures, because these values are rooted in human nature. These include the defense of the family, opposition to abortion, and peace.”
The late pope also wanted to forge a political alliance with Islam to fill the vacuum European Communism’s collapse caused.
“The Church is aware that it can offer a sort of new civil religion to the United States of Europe,” wrote Enzo Pace, sociology professor at the University of Padua. “The search for moral unity … represents for the Church a reconfirmation of its central role in history and, at the same time, the opening of a dialogue with other religious cultures of the Old World.
“Islam thus becomes the most important moral interlocutor because the Church sees it as a well-structured religion which is on the increase in contemporary Europe. To ensure this integration, the Catholic Church believes it is necessary to accept the idea of recognizing Islam as a universal religion, while, at the same time, inviting Islam to accept at least the basic moral and juridical principles of European Christian culture.”
Also motivating John Paul and Catholic leaders was “an underlying dissatisfaction with modernity and with our liberal, capitalist, individualistic arrangements,” wrote the late Alain Besancon, a French-Catholic historian.
“Alarmed by the ebbing of religious faith in the Christian West, and particularly in Europe, these writers (influenced by Massignon) cannot but admire Muslim devoutness,” Besancon wrote. “Surely, they reason, it is better to believe in something than to believe in nothing, and since these Muslims believe in something, they must believe in the same thing we do.”
As a result, John Paul and his bishops routinely referred to the embrace of abortion, contraception and euthanasia as a “culture of death,” but never used that term to describe the Muslim embrace of murder for the Greater Glory of Allah. Catholic bishops in Europe also encouraged Muslims to build mosques and even ceded Catholic worship space to Muslims.
As Francis would do decades later, John Paul ignored the plight of Christians in Muslim lands. Bishops remembered how the late pope, “who ordinarily speaks about all topics,” Guozo wrote, “had spread a veil of silence over the persecution of Chgristians in Muslim countries.”
In 2002, an Arab convert named Nura told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera: “We feel abandoned. After our conversion, we have no one to support us. We ask the Church and Italy: Protect us, defend us.”
Appeasing Islam has become so ingrained in Catholicism that the Vatican’s Dicastery for Interreligious Dialogue published a document filled with sentimental blather masquerading as ecumenical repect.
“More than simply a month of fasting, Ramadan appears to us Catholics as a school of inner transformation,” wrote Cardinal George Jacob Koovakad, the dicastery’s prefect “By abstaining from food and drink, Muslims learn to control their desires and turn to what is essential. This time of spiritual discipline is an invitation to cultivate piety, the virtue that brings one closer to God and opens the heart to others.”
By refusing to call Islam account for advocating violence, the document mocks the legitimate anxieties of Christians living in Muslim countries, let alone the Muslim murder of innocent Christians.
Appeasing Islam has become so ingrained in Catholicism that when Pope Benedict XVI forthrightly challenged Islam’s theology of conversion through force in 2006, the archbishop of Buenos Aires publicly distanced himself from Benedict’s remarks.
Benedict’s comments “don’t reflect my own opinions,” he said, adding that “these statements will serve to destroy in 20 seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last 20 years.”
That archbishop was Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis.
Appeasing Islam has become so ingrained in Catholicism that even an atheist noticed. The late Oriana Fallaci, an Italian journalist, blamed that appeasement for Europe’s disintegration in her 2004 book, The Force of Reason:
“This Catholic Church…gets on so well with Islam because not few of its priests and prelates are the first collaborators of Islam. The first traitors. This Catholic Church without which the Islamization of Europe, the degeneration of Europe … could never have developed. This Catholic Church…remains silent even when the crucifix gets insulted, derided, expelled from the hospitals. This Catholic Church…never roars against (Muslims’) polygamy and wife-repudiation and slavery….”
Since Fallaci wrote those words, the impact of Muslim immigration into Europe has become more chaotic and violent. Despite that chaos and violence, however, Francis has never retracted his support for massive Muslim immigration.
Appeasing Islam has become so ingrained in Catholicism that it even cost a convert from Islam his faith. Magdi Allam — a prominent journalist who not only became a Catholic in 2008 but was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI — left the faith five years later and two weeks after Francis’ election “because this church is too weak with Islam,” he wrote for the Milan daily Il Giornale.
Allam, who was born in Egypt to a Muslim family and moved to Italy as a college student, became so enthusiastic about his new faith that he adopted the middle name “Cristiano.” Though he would remain a Christian, Allam wrote, “I no longer believe in the (Catholic) Church.”
“What has distanced me more than any other factor from the Church is religious relativism and in particular the legitimization of Islam as the true religion, of Allah as the true God, of Muhammad as the true prophet, of the Koran as a sacred text, of mosques as a place of worship,” wrote Allam. “I am convinced that … Islam is an intrinsically violent ideology just as it has historically been conflictual within and belligerent outside.”
Islam will enslave Europe, Allam wrote, if Europe “does not have the lucidity and courage to denounce the incompatibility of Islam with our civilization and the fundamental rights of the person, if it does not ban the Koran as an apology for hatred, violence and death against non-Muslims, if it does not condemn Sharia as a crime against humanity … and finally if it does not block the spread of mosques.”
Europe includes the Vatican.
When an atheist and a former Muslim recognize what seems opaque to popes, let alone to an American cardinal, pathetic irony reaches stratospheric heights.