Catholic, Muslim leaders celebrate US interfaith dialogue
CWN – October 11, 2012
The leaders of the three regional official Catholic-Muslim dialogues in the United States gathered in Chicago from October 3-5 to celebrate past accomplishments and looked forward to future discussions.
In a keynote address, Father Tom Michel, SJ, said that dialogue is enhanced when participants are faithful to their own traditions. “Muslims must glory in the prophethood of Muhammad and the Qur’anic message that he brought, just as Christians must glory in the cross of Jesus Christ and our faith in what God has accomplished in him for all humankind,” he said.
Additional sources for this story: Catholic, Muslim Leaders Celebrate Past Accomplishments, Pledge Continued Support in Public Square at National Gathering (USCCB) www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-162.cfm
Upon whom will the mullahs pronounce a fatwah death-sentence: The infidel Catholics who did not embrace the true faith and its Prophet Muhammad, or the apostate Muslims who dared to attend such blasphemous gatherings?
“… celebrate past accomplishments …”
I wonder what positive things they’ve accomplished.
I find it difficult to find anything specific from the generalities in the USCCB report about the meetings (Catholic, Muslim Leaders Celebrate Past Accomplishments, Pledge Continued Support in Public Square at National Gathering (USCCB) www.usccb.org/news/2012/12-162.cfm) except a statement about the plenary address by Jesuit Father Tom Michel:
Yep, the ambiguities of V2 just keep in giving …
I try to follow this topic and find it impossible to get specifics, also. The middle eastern synod held in October 2010 had many interesting discussions, from the little one could get, but they were summarized into generalities and the actual minutes could not be found. But on the side of islam, they seemed to keep pushing the Church to resume Her real identity, to stand up, to quit taking all the abuse from our own culture. In this quote, Father Michel violates the principal and once again attempts to dissolve our identity by repeating Benedict’s sycretist assertion that we worship the ‘same God’ which theologically we do not. What do you think would happen in muslim-Catholic relations if the Church abandoned the position of religious liberty, and called instead for Catholics to support a Catholic religious state where they are in the majority (the teaching of Pius XI, altho I let the link go) or to step up evangelization and conversion where they are not in the majority with the goal of becoming the majority? If the Church stopped dissolving our message into the sea of ‘churches’ and instead began to asseert our identity in terms of economics, legislation regarding the family, the manufacture and promotion of birth control, homosexual issues, abortion, and so forth? If Father Michel’s original assertion has merit, that we owe faithfulness to our own traditions and that it would enhance ‘dialogue’ and diminish the enmnity (expressed in violence toward Christians, at present) rather than worsen it, do you think islam would resent this move? Wouldn’t they see our call for our own religious state (which is our tradition) as an unstated support of their right to their own religious state, which the otherwise *liberal* factions in islam in the new uprisings support and is the reason for our country attacking them or failing to support them in their struggle against their secular dictators (because those leaders are muslim the way Biden is Catholic)? Would they not see it, even though we would never say it to a heretical group, as a kind of endorsement for what they wish so passionately (the same way we ought to wish so passionately for Christ to be restored as King in our societies as well as in our hearts–the social reign of Christ to be restored, and thereby peace).
I think Father Michel is right–but he is not doing it, instead he is following the lead of the Church at large, touting the party line, the Vatican II line. To restore Catholicism is to reject secularism. That’s what the ‘fundamentalists’ in islam are rejecting, and it just seems to me it would take us out of the line of fire in their struggle. Presently we’re like the shock troops in the middle east for a cause that is fighting us to the death on the homefront. Benedict may call it bad secularism and good secularism–he does in every middle eastern speech–but it’s all just secularism in one or another stage of development.
Our doctrinal support of the social reign of Christ our King has political implications. We have not even begun to sort them out, and one SSPX spokesperson was clear to say that our position on this question in dispute with Rome is not political, but doctrinal. But that’s impossible. Religion and politics are the same thing by other names and in different spheres. +Lefebvre said, when they changed the doctrine at the Council (reported in They Have Uncrowned Him), that it would cause untold social suffering and chaos, just as it has. He didn’t say spiritual chaos, he said political chaos. I think it’s the paradox at the root of the new antagonism against Christianity in the Middle East, the upset in a tolerance that previously existed there. It’s contradictory, or paradoxical, that in doctrinally rejecting the idea that we can share religions and powers with Islam, we free them to assert their identity in those lands. Will we fight them for trying, and push secularism down their throats, as we are now, or will we shut up about them–because we can’t say they have a right to their religious states just as we do, because they are heretical; but we could shut up and stop calling them radicals and fundamentalists for wanting it, as we do now– and begin the struggle to assert our OWN right to our OWN religious states around the world, right here, right now? Which would they hate more? There’s one muslim barroness that is calling for exactly that in Europe, and she sends her daughter to Catholic school, too. I have the piece on my blog. And we could live peacefully in an islamic state, too, perhaps more peacefully than in our secular ones. There’s one called Kelantan in Malaysia where a number of Catholic parishes, and buddhist and others, too, exist peacefully and have four days during the year called open house where they may prozeletize as much as they like, and the rest of the time, Kelantan stops to pray eight times a day, only muslims, others simply wait the few minutes, and women have to dress modestly, and liquor is available only to non-muslims in the hotels and restaurants, typically. It’s only one place in the whole world as far as I know, but it’s interesting to consider. Google it. You can google the parishes. You’ll find the same announcements and activities that you find here, bake sales and study groups.
I surely have rambled, sorry, too early.
By the way–if you hate distributism, as some of us rightly do, can you see it would be a whole different thing if distributist economic projects were paired with the call for a Catholic religious state? Those projects exist, see some examples in the parenthesis after this sentence, presently trying to ‘run’ in our secular world without naming Christ, without calling for the Restoration of all things in Christ, all things, the commandments in our social world, in our courtrooms and schools, the respect for Sundays, the respect for private property and yet the constant concern for the poor. Etc. (e.g. there was one project in East St. Louis one or two decades back; there’s a generations-long taxation scheme that would make it more profitable to stay small and local; there’s a cooperative ownership proposal of some new streams of oil revenue in the undeveloped fields that would help our economy in a thousand ways, alternatively to developing those fields and letting Standard Oil and Shell have all the profits and we get nothing but jobs, income, no ownership), There are, I’m trying to say, some totally creative distributist economic practices that would bring down the too-big-to-fails without class warfare, but we can’t presently use them because without Christ they’re simply band-aid socialist or at times fascist, depending on the funding source and the recipients, and that’s why we’ve hated and rejected them in the past. Catholics can’t be tea party either. We must have an independent political identity in addition to our doctrinal identity, and both must be restored! My thought is it would turn islam’s guns away from us and toward secularism rather than make it worse. We, us and islam, don’t have mutual gods but we do have a mutual enemy and maybe recognizing that would help the situation. Presently we represent the gay marriage movement to them. Why not? We support the political structure called secularism that makes it possible. Benedict just keeps on shoving it in their faces, in every speech.
I am sorry to have tried to cover so much, so badly, and perhaps so wrongly, and how do I know, we hardly ever talk about this but we sure live in a world suffering from secularism. Tom, feel free to ditch this comment.
This is insane: Putting on the same level with God the devil moon goddess allah.
Muslims worship the devil moon-goddess allah.