03.31.08

The Annunciation

Posted in Marian Devotion at 7:15 am by Brian Schuettler

The church of Milan, up to our times, assigns the office of this feast to the last Sunday in Advent. On the 25th of March a Mass is sung in honour of the Annunciation. (Ordo Ambrosianus, 1906; Magistretti, Beroldus, 136.) The schismatic Armenians now celebrate this feast on the 7th of April. Since Epiphany for them is the feast of the birth of Christ, the Armenian Church formerly assigned the Annunciation to 5 January, the vigil of Epiphany. This feast was always a holy day of obligation in the Universal Church. As such it was abrogated first for France and the French dependencies, 9 April, 1802; and for the United States, by the Third Council of Baltimore, in 1884. By a decree of the S.R.C., 23 April, 1895, the rank of the feast was raised from a double of the second class to a double of the first class. If this feast falls within Holy Week or Easter Week, its office is transferred to the Monday after the octave of Easter. In some German churches it was the custom to keep its office the Saturday before Palm Sunday if the 25th of March fell in Holy Week. The Greek Church, when the 25th of March occurs on one of the three last days in Holy Week, transfers the Annunciation to Easter Monday; on all other days, even on Easter Sunday, its office is kept together with the office of the day. Although no octaves are permitted in Lent, the Dioceses of Loreto and of the Province of Venice, the Carmelites, Dominicans, Servites, and Redemptorists, celebrate this feast with an octave.

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The Annunciation of the Lord (Solemnity, moved from March 26th)

Posted in Daily Mass Readings at 7:07 am by Brian Schuettler

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03.30.08

Homily for the second Sunday of Easter

Posted in Daily Mass Readings at 9:29 am by Brian Schuettler

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Homélie pour le deuxième Dimanche de Pâques

Posted in Daily Mass Readings at 9:27 am by Brian Schuettler

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03.29.08

Papa Benedict’s Easter Vigil Homily

Posted in One Truth at 9:23 am by Brian Schuettler

Dear brothers and sisters,

In his farewell discourse, Jesus announced his imminent death and resurrection to his disciples with these mysterious words: “I go away, and I will come to you”, he said (Jn 14:28). Dying is a “going away”. Even if the body of the deceased remains behind, he himself has gone away into the unknown, and we cannot follow him (cf. Jn 13:36). Yet in Jesus’s case, there is something utterly new, which changes the world. In the case of our own death, the “going away” is definitive, there is no return. Jesus, on the other hand, says of his death: “I go away, and I will come to you.” It is by going away that he comes. His going ushers in a completely new and greater way of being present. By dying he enters into the love of the Father. His dying is an act of love. Love, however, is immortal. Therefore, his going away is transformed into a new coming, into a form of presence which reaches deeper and does not come to an end. During his earthly life, Jesus, like all of us, was tied to the external conditions of bodily existence: to a determined place and a determined time. Bodiliness places limits on our existence. We cannot be simultaneously in two different places. Our time is destined to come to an end. And between the “I” and the “you” there is a wall of otherness. To be sure, through love we can somehow enter the other’s existence. Nevertheless, the insurmountable barrier of being different remains in place. Yet Jesus, who is now totally transformed through the act of love, is free from such barriers and limits. He is able not only to pass through closed doors in the outside world, as the Gospels recount (cf. Jn 20:19). He can pass through the interior door separating the “I” from the “you”, the closed door between yesterday and today, between the past and the future. On the day of his solemn entry into Jerusalem, when some Greeks asked to see him, Jesus replied with the parable of the grain of wheat which has to pass through death in order to bear much fruit. In this way he foretold his own destiny: these words were not addressed simply to one or two Greeks in the space of a few minutes. Through his Cross, through his going away, through his dying like the grain of wheat, he would truly arrive among the Greeks, in such a way that they could see him and touch him through faith. His going away is transformed into a coming, in the Risen Lord’s universal manner of presence, in which he is there yesterday, today and for ever, in which he embraces all times and all places. Now he can even surmount the wall of otherness that separates the “I” from the “you”. This happened with Paul, who describes the process of his conversion and his Baptism in these words: “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20). Through the coming of the Risen One, Paul obtained a new identity. His closed “I” was opened. Now he lives in communion with Jesus Christ, in the great “I” of believers who have become – as he puts it – “one in Christ” (Gal 3:28).

So, dear friends, it is clear that, through Baptism, the mysterious words spoken by Jesus at the Last Supper become present for you once more. In Baptism, the Lord enters your life through the door of your heart. We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another. He passes through all these doors. This is the reality of Baptism: he, the Risen One, comes; he comes to you and joins his life with yours, drawing you into the open fire of his love. You become one, one with him, and thus one among yourselves. At first this can sound rather abstract and unrealistic. But the more you live the life of the baptized, the more you can experience the truth of these words. Believers – the baptized – are never truly cut off from one another. Continents, cultures, social structures or even historical distances may separate us. But when we meet, we know one another on the basis of the same Lord, the same faith, the same hope, the same love, which form us. Then we experience that the foundation of our lives is the same. We experience that in our inmost depths we are anchored in the same identity, on the basis of which all our outward differences, however great they may be, become secondary. Believers are never totally cut off from one another. We are in communion because of our deepest identity: Christ within us. Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close (cf. Eph 2:13).

The Church expresses the inner reality of Baptism as the gift of a new identity through the tangible elements used in the administration of the sacrament. The fundamental element in Baptism is water; next, in second place, is light, which is used to great effect in the Liturgy of the Easter Vigil. Let us take a brief look at these two elements. In the final chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews, there is a statement about Christ which does not speak directly of water, but the Old Testament allusions nevertheless point clearly to the mystery of water and its symbolic meaning. Here we read: “The God of peace brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant” (13:20). In this sentence, there is an echo of the prophecy of Isaiah, in which Moses is described as the shepherd whom the Lord brought up from the water, from the sea (cf. 63:11). Jesus appears as the new, definitive Shepherd who brings to fulfilment what Moses had done: he leads us out of the deadly waters of the sea, out of the waters of death. In this context we may recall that Moses’ mother placed him in a basket in the Nile. Then, through God’s providence, he was taken out of the water, carried from death to life, and thus – having himself been saved from the waters of death – he was able to lead others through the sea of death. Jesus descended for us into the dark waters of death. But through his blood, so the Letter to the Hebrews tells us, he was brought back from death: his love united itself to the Father’s love, and thus from the abyss of death he was able to rise to life. Now he raises us from death to true life. This is exactly what happens in Baptism: he draws us towards himself, he draws us into true life. He leads us through the often murky sea of history, where we are frequently in danger of sinking amid all the confusion and perils. In Baptism he takes us, as it were, by the hand, he leads us along the path that passes through the Red Sea of this life and introduces us to everlasting life, the true and upright life. Let us grasp his hand firmly! Whatever may happen, whatever may befall us, let us not lose hold of his hand! Let us walk along the path that leads to life.

In the second place, there is the symbol of light and fire. Gregory of Tours recounts a practice that in some places was preserved for a long time, of lighting the new fire for the celebration of the Easter Vigil directly from the sun, using a crystal. Light and fire, so to speak, were received anew from heaven, so that all the lights and fires of the year could be kindled from them. This is a symbol of what we are celebrating in the Easter Vigil. Through his radical love for us, in which the heart of God and the heart of man touched, Jesus Christ truly took light from heaven and brought it to the earth – the light of truth and the fire of love that transform man’s being. He brought the light, and now we know who God is and what God is like. Thus we also know what our own situation is: what we are, and for what purpose we exist. When we are baptized, the fire of this light is brought down deep within ourselves. Thus, in the early Church, Baptism was also called the Sacrament of Illumination: God’s light enters into us; thus we ourselves become children of light. We must not allow this light of truth, that shows us the path, to be extinguished. We must protect it from all the forces that seek to eliminate it so as to cast us back into darkness regarding God and ourselves. Darkness, at times, can seem comfortable. I can hide, and spend my life asleep. Yet we are not called to darkness, but to light. In our baptismal promises, we rekindle this light, so to speak, year by year. Yes, I believe that the world and my life are not the product of chance, but of eternal Reason and eternal Love, they are created by Almighty God. Yes, I believe that in Jesus Christ, in his incarnation, in his Cross and resurrection, the face of God has been revealed; that in him, God is present in our midst, he unites us and leads us towards our goal, towards eternal Love. Yes, I believe that the Holy Spirit gives us the word of truth and enlightens our hearts; I believe that in the communion of the Church we all become one Body with the Lord, and thus we encounter his resurrection and eternal life. The Lord has granted us the light of truth. This light is also fire, a powerful force coming from God, a force that does not destroy, but seeks to transform our hearts, so that we truly become men of God, and so that his peace can become active in this world.

In the early Church there was a custom whereby the Bishop or the priest, after the homily, would cry out to the faithful: “Conversi ad Dominum” – turn now towards the Lord. This meant in the first place that they would turn towards the East, towards the rising sun, the sign of Christ returning, whom we go to meet when we celebrate the Eucharist. Where this was not possible, for some reason, they would at least turn towards the image of Christ in the apse, or towards the Cross, so as to orient themselves inwardly towards the Lord. Fundamentally, this involved an interior event; conversion, the turning of our soul towards Jesus Christ and thus towards the living God, towards the true light. Linked with this, then, was the other exclamation that still today, before the Eucharistic Prayer, is addressed to the community of the faithful: “Sursum corda” – lift up your hearts, high above the tangled web of our concerns, desires, anxieties and thoughtlessness – “Lift up your hearts, your inner selves!” In both exclamations we are summoned, as it were, to a renewal of our Baptism: “Conversi ad Dominum” – we must distance ourselves ever anew from taking false paths, onto which we stray so often in our thoughts and actions. We must turn ever anew towards him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life. We must be converted ever anew, turning with our whole life towards the Lord. And ever anew we must allow our hearts to be withdrawn from the force of gravity, which pulls them down, and inwardly we must raise them high: in truth and love. At this hour, let us thank the Lord, because through the power of his word and of the holy Sacraments, he points us in the right direction and draws our heart upwards. Let us pray to him in these words: Yes, Lord, make us Easter people, men and women of light, filled with the fire of your love. Amen.

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Understanding Proselytism

Posted in Catholic Leadership at 9:18 am by Brian Schuettler

That is the title of Dr. Jeff Mirus’ latest Blog post at Catholic Culture. Read and learn:
http://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/articles.cfm?id=240

If you look up the verb “proselytism” in most dictionaries, you’ll find it defined as any effort to persuade a person to give up one point of view in favor of another. The word is sometimes used in a political sense, but most often it is used religiously. The most common synonym for “proselytize” is “convert”. This will come as a surprise to Catholics, and it requires clarification.

For Catholics, who have a highly developed spiritual vocabulary, the standard definition is not adequate. In the Church’s lexicon, proselytism typically refers to conversion efforts that fail to respect the prospective convert’s freedom and dignity. High pressure tactics; telling lies about the other person’s current religion; comparing the weaknesses of another’s religious community with only the strengths of one’s own; attempting to convert children in opposition to their parents; offering worldly inducements to change one’s religious allegiance—these are what Catholics would call proselytism. In contrast, a sincere effort to share one’s faith so that others might freely choose to embrace it is considered a virtue. Terms with positive connotations are used to describe such generosity: evangelization, apologetics, catechesis, personal witness, or even simply “winning converts”.

Sources of Confusion

But not every religious community uses the term “proselytism” in the same way. For example, the Russian Orthodox Church regards all efforts by Catholics to win converts in Russia as proselytism, and complains of it frequently to the Vatican. The Russian Orthodox have a strong sense of their own “canonical territory”, within which the Russian Orthodox Church is supposed to have a privileged status. This concept is fueled partly by patriarchal tradition, in which each patriarch is considered the highest source of Christian authority in his own region. It is also fueled partly by Russian insularity. Anything other than Russian Orthodoxy is considered an unRussian novelty. But this attitude is fueled by human nature as well. Isn’t it obvious, after all, that your efforts to convert someone from my faith look suspiciously like proselytism, whereas my own efforts to convert your coreligionists are always marked by charity and respect?

Sensitivity to the negative side of proselytism also derives from ecumenism. Conflict among divergent Christian groups is a great scandal. The Protestant Revolt and all its subsequent controversies have probably contributed more to the rise of relativism and secularism than any other single factor. Collectively, the West largely concluded in the 17th and 18th centuries that if even Christians cannot agree on revealed truth, then it is probably best to admit such truth is unknowable and move on. By the twentieth century, it became obvious to Christians that the rising tide of unbelief was a far greater threat than sectarian differences. Since then many shepherds have been reluctant to be involved in what they have come to consider “sheep stealing”. The process of converting one’s fellow-Christians has, in this context, come to require a very light touch indeed.

All of this is understandable, but it may also represent something of a failure of nerve. The Islamic world feels no such need to tread lightly. There the full force of punitive law and the allure of material and political blandishments are routinely used both to prevent the conversion of Muslims to Christianity and to convert Christians to Islam. Serving a voluntarist God, Islam has left notably undeveloped any notion of human dignity based on God’s image and likeness. Christianity finds God’s own nature reflected in His creation in ways that are accessible to human reason. This perception of the Logos at work in all things forms the basis for both human dignity and natural law. In Islam, the emphasis on God’s will alone is so strong as to be scarcely linked to the nature of being. For this reason, an understanding of the deep freedom required for true religious assent has gone largely undeveloped in Islam.

Sensitivity and Paralysis

Christians are right to be sensitive about proselytism, but they are foolish to become paralyzed by it. I’ve written elsewhere that it is the nature of true conviction to seek converts. The person who is convinced of something necessarily believes he has recognized a helpful truth. He must be either a fool or a knave to withhold it from others. The result is a great cacaphony if ideas, discussions and arguments, not only concerning religion but concerning just about everything. Those who assert that such arguments are detrimental to the human race are correct only insofar as it would be better if all had long since come voluntarily to the whole truth. The only other alternative to incessant debate is for all to come involuntarily to a lie. That’s why the Catholic usage of the term “proselytism” is so valuable. It recognizes that human dignity demands discussion and choice. It holds, therefore, that there are right and wrong ways to engage in the discussion.

Still, the distinctions are not always easy. It may be wrong to run a soup kitchen at which only those willing to listen to a Christian homily will be served. But is it wrong to host regular evenings of prayer and preaching at which all who attend may avail themselves of a free meal? It may be wrong to refuse material aid to someone because he is not a believer, but is it wrong to expend one’s charitable energies first in one’s own religious community? It may be wrong to require parents to enroll their children in Christian schools, but is it wrong to encourage them to do so by offering strong financial aid? It may be wrong to restrict public office to Catholics, but is it wrong to restrict public office to those who recognize the natural law?

The answer to all of these questions depends primarily on the intention, which will also determine the manner in which various goods are presented. If I am offering support, aid, education, political advancement or any other non-religious benefit to certain persons so that they will adopt my religion, then I am proselytizing. If I am sharing an enthusiam for my religion with them in the hope that they might convert to it, I am not proselytizing. And if I am offering benefits for other legitimate reasons, I am not proselytizing either, even if these benefits can in some cases create a cultural preference for my faith, should that faith happen to be dominant in some way. For example, I may wish to deny public office to those who do not recognize a higher and more rational law than that of the state, and so I might support an oath of office which includes these elements, but my motive would be to ensure good government, not to win converts. Or I may establish an orphanage to care for needy children and, in the process, give them everything I can, including Christian instruction, but my goal would be primarily to serve the needy, not to win converts.

Love and Hate

I say “primarily” because, in fact, I will very probably have multiple motives for nearly everything I do. Indeed, to have only one motive is at some times unhealthy and at most times impossible. Therefore, I will neither hide my light under a bushel nor risk obscuring it through selfish motives or unfair tactics. If I cannot respect the other’s freedom and dignity, if every gift I offer comes with spiritual strings, then the God I claim to serve will appear distorted—He who lets the sun and the rain fall on the good and the bad alike. The value of “my” conversions will be dubious indeed.

So Catholicism has it right again. It is always abhorrent to use conversion tactics which do not respect the freedom and dignity of the potential convert. It is equally abhorrent to have so little regard for others that we refuse to share our faith, which we hold more precious than any gift save life itself. The word we use to describe the former is proselytism. Catholics are not to engage in it. Nobody should. But the latter is simple lack of charity, a privation of love, that is, hatred. Catholics are not to engage in that either. And neither should anyone else.

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A Convert From Islam States His Case

Posted in General at 9:14 am by Brian Schuettler

Dear Friends,

I am particularly happy to share with you my immense joy for this Easter of Resurrection that has brought me the gift of the Christian faith. I gladly propose the letter that I sent to the director of the Corriere della Sera, Paolo Mieli, in which I tell the story of the interior journey that brought me to the choice of conversion to Catholicism. This is the complete version of the letter, which was published by the Corriere della Sera only in part.

* * *

Dear Director,

That which I am about to relate to you concerns my choice of religious faith and personal life in which I do not wish to involve in any way the Corriere della Sera, which it has been an honor to be a part of as deputy director “ad personam” since 2003. I write you thus as protagonist of the event, as private citizen.

Yesterday evening I converted to the Christian Catholic religion, renouncing my previous Islamic faith. Thus, I finally saw the light, by divine grace — the healthy fruit of a long, matured gestation, lived in suffering and joy, together with intimate reflection and conscious and manifest expression. I am especially grateful to his holiness Pope Benedict XVI, who imparted the sacraments of Christian initiation to me, baptism, confirmation and Eucharist, in the Basilica of St. Peter’s during the course of the solemn celebration of the Easter Vigil. And I took the simplest and most explicit Christian name: “Cristiano.” Since yesterday evening therefore my name is Magdi Crisitano Allam.

For me it is the most beautiful day of [my] life. To acquire the gift of the Christian faith during the commemoration of Christ’s resurrection by the hand of the Holy Father is, for a believer, an incomparable and inestimable privilege. At almost 56 […], it is a historical, exceptional and unforgettable event, which marks a radical and definitive turn with respect to the past. The miracle of Christ’s resurrection reverberated through my soul, liberating it from the darkness in which the preaching of hatred and intolerance in the face of the “different,” uncritically condemned as “enemy,” were privileged over love and respect of “neighbor,” who is always, an in every case, “person”; thus, as my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny, I was able to adhere to the authentic religion of truth, of life and of freedom.

On my first Easter as a Christian I not only discovered Jesus, I discovered for the first time the face of the true and only God, who is the God of faith and reason. My conversion to Catholicism is the touching down of a gradual and profound interior meditation from which I could not pull myself away, given that for five years I have been confined to a life under guard, with permanent surveillance at home and a police escort for my every movement, because of death threats and death sentences from Islamic extremists and terrorists, both those in and outside of Italy.

I had to ask myself about the attitude of those who publicly declared fatwas, Islamic juridical verdicts, against me — I who was a Muslim — as an “enemy of Islam,” “hypocrite because he is a Coptic Christian who pretends to be a Muslim to do damage to Islam,” “liar and vilifier of Islam,” legitimating my death sentence in this way. I asked myself how it was possible that those who, like me, sincerely and boldly called for a “moderate Islam,” assuming the responsibility of exposing themselves in the first person in denouncing Islamic extremism and terrorism, ended up being sentenced to death in the name of Islam on the basis of the Quran. I was forced to see that, beyond the contingency of the phenomenon of Islamic extremism and terrorism that has appeared on a global level, the root of evil is inherent in an Islam that is physiologically violent and historically conflictive.

At the same time providence brought me to meet practicing Catholics of good will who, in virtue of their witness and friendship, gradually became a point of reference in regard to the certainty of truth and the solidity of values. To begin with, among so many friends from Communion and Liberation, I will mention Father Juliàn Carròn; and then there were simple religious such as Father Gabriele Mangiarotti, Sister Maria Gloria Riva, Father Carlo Maurizi and Father Yohannis Lahzi Gaid; there was rediscovery of the Salesians thanks to Father Angelo Tengattini and Father Maurizio Verlezza, which culminated in a renewed friendship with major rector Father Pascual Chavez Villanueva; there was the embrace of top prelates of great humanity like Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Monsignor Luigi Negri, Giancarlo Vecerrica, Gino Romanazzi and, above all, Monsignor Rino Fisichella, who personally accompanied me in the journey of spiritual acceptance of the Christian faith.

But undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert was that with Pope Benedict XVI, whom I admired and defended as a Muslim for his mastery in setting down the indissoluble link between faith and reason as a basis for authentic religion and human civilization, and to whom I fully adhere as a Christian to inspire me with new light in the fulfillment of the mission God has reserved for me.

Mine was a journey that began when at four years old, my mother Safeya — a believing and practicing Muslim — in the first in the series of “fortuitous events” that would prove to be not at all the product of chance but rather an integral part of a divine destiny to which all of us have been assigned — entrusted me to the loving care of Sister Lavinia of the Comboni Missionary Sisters, convinced of the goodness of the education that would be imparted by the Catholic and Italian religious, who had come to Cairo, the city of my birth, to witness to their Christian faith through a work aimed at the common good. I thus began an experience of life in boarding school, followed by the Salesians of the Institute of Don Bosco in junior high and high school, which transmitted to me not only the science of knowledge but above all the awareness of values.

It is thanks to members of Catholic religious orders that I acquired a profoundly and essentially an ethical conception of life, in which the person created in the image and likeness of God is called to undertake a mission that inserts itself in the framework of a universal and eternal design directed toward the interior resurrection of individuals on this earth and the whole of humanity on the day of judgment, which is founded on faith in God and the primacy of values, which is based on the sense of individual responsibility and on the sense of duty toward the collective. It is in virtue of a Christian education and of the sharing of the experience of life with Catholic religious that I cultivated a profound faith in the transcendent dimension and also sought the certainty of truth in absolute and universal values.

There was a time when my mother’s loving presence and religious zeal brought me closer to Islam, which I occasionally practiced at a cultural level and in which I believed at a spiritual level according to an interpretation that at the time — it was the 1970s — summarily corresponded to a faith respectful of persons and tolerant toward the neighbor, in a context — that of the Nasser regime — in which the secular principle of the separation of the religious sphere and the secular sphere prevailed.

My father Muhammad was completely secular and agreed with the opinion of the majority of Egyptians who took the West as a model in regard to individual freedom, social customs and cultural and artistic fashions, even if the political totalitarianism of Nasser and the bellicose ideology of Pan-Arabism that aimed at the physical elimination of Israel unfortunately led to disaster for Egypt and opened the way to the resumption of Pan-Islamism, to the ascent of Islamic extremists to power and the explosion of globalized Islamic terrorism.

The long years at school allowed me to know Catholicism well and up close and the women and men who dedicated their life to serve God in the womb of the Church. Already then I read the Bible and the Gospels and I was especially fascinated by the human and divine figure of Jesus. I had a way to attend Holy Mass and it also happened, only once, that I went to the altar to receive communion. It was a gesture that evidently signaled my attraction to Christianity and my desire to feel a part of the Catholic religious community.

Then, on my arrival in Italy at the beginning of the 1970s between the rivers of student revolts and the difficulties of integration, I went through a period of atheism understood as a faith, which nevertheless was also founded on absolute and universal values. I was never indifferent to the presence of God even if only now I feel that the God of love, of faith and reason reconciles himself completely with the patrimony of values that are rooted in me.

Dear Director, you asked me whether I fear for my life, in the awareness that conversion to Christianity will certainly procure for me yet another, and much more grave, death sentence for apostasy. You are perfectly right. I know what I am headed for but I face my destiny with my head held high, standing upright and with the interior solidity of one who has the certainty of his faith. And I will be more so after the courageous and historical gesture of the Pope, who, as soon has he knew of my desire, immediately agreed to personally impart the Christian sacraments of initiation to me. His Holiness has sent an explicit and revolutionary message to a Church that until now has been too prudent in the conversion of Muslims, abstaining from proselytizing in majority Muslim countries and keeping quiet about the reality of converts in Christian countries. Out of fear. The fear of not being able to protect converts in the face of their being condemned to death for apostasy and fear of reprisals against Christians living in Islamic countries. Well, today Benedict XVI, with his witness, tells us that we must overcome fear and not be afraid to affirm the truth of Jesus even with Muslims.

For my part, I say that it is time to put an end to the abuse and the violence of Muslims who do not respect the freedom of religious choice. In Italy there are thousands of converts to Islam who live their new faith in peace. But there are also thousands of Muslim converts to Christianity who are forced to hide their faith out of fear of being assassinated by Islamic extremists who lurk among us. By one of those “fortuitous events” that evoke the discreet hand of the Lord, the first article that I wrote for the Corriere on Sept. 3, 2003 was entitled “The new Catacombs of Islamic Converts.” It was an investigation of recent Muslim converts to Christianity in Italy who decry their profound spiritual and human solitude in the face of absconding state institutions that do not protect them and the silence of the Church itself. Well, I hope that the Pope’s historical gesture and my testimony will lead to the conviction that the moment has come to leave the darkness of the catacombs and to publicly declare their desire to be fully themselves. If in Italy, in our home, the cradle of Catholicism, we are not prepared to guarantee complete religious freedom to everyone, how can we ever be credible when we denounce the violation of this freedom elsewhere in the world? I pray to God that on this special Easter he give the gift of the resurrection of the spirit to all the faithful in Christ who have until now been subjugated by fear. Happy Easter to everyone.

Dear friends, let us go forward on the way of truth, of life and of freedom with my best wishes for every success and good thing.

Magdi Allam

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Are secularism and Islam cousins?

Posted in General, Dogmatic Socialism at 7:14 am by Brian Schuettler

That is thr title of an article at Mercatornet.com >>>>> http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/are_secularism_and_islam_cousins/

Recent events suggest that Muslim theologians may appeal more strongly to European university students than do their Christian counterparts. While Pope Benedict XVI had to cancel a lecture he had been invited to give in January at La Sapienza, in Rome, because of protests from students and faculty, Tariq Ramandan, a well-known Swiss Muslim academic and theologian, grandson of Hassan al Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and currently on a Visiting Fellowship at Oxford University, is constantly giving lectures in various European institutions. In January, he was even invited to speak at Université libre de Bruxelles (”Free University of Brussels”), generally considered an intellectual fortress of Freemasonry, where he was given a warm reception. According to media reports, even the Cercle du libre examen (”Circle of free thought”) appeared prominently on the list of organizations sponsoring his lecture.

This raises the question of what might cause institutions generally known for their strict secularism to show such sympathy for someone who has become an icon of Islam.

We usually view Islam and secularism as two antagonistic systems of beliefs, one based on an alleged Revelation, the other on the refusal to admit of any such Revelation, one claiming total submission to God’s will, the other to reason’s dictates. Yet, what these two systems have in common is perhaps much more important that what separates them. They are in effect profoundly united in their common denial of any link between faith and reason. That is also what distinguishes them from Catholicism, which has always thought that reason is enlightened by faith, and vice-versa.

Secularism claims that religion is a strictly private affair and that God has no place in public life. This claim is based on the premise that there is no true knowledge other than scientific. Any statement not lending itself to the scientific method is deemed subjective, ie, mere opinion. Thus, it is assumed, there is no moral law whose truthfulness is guaranteed by reason. In short, faith and morality lie outside the realm of reason.

There is an important body of evidence showing that Islam also believes in a total divorce between faith and reason. For example, according to French Islamist R. Arnaldez, whom Pope Benedict XVI referred to in his Regensburg speech of September 2006, the 11th century Muslim philosopher Ibn Hazn thought “that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us”.

Islam’s move away from rationality was pushed further in the 11th century when Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, considered by some as the most important Muslim authority after Mohammed, lamented the influence of Greek philosophers. In a book entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he argued that God is not bound by reason, that “natural” links between causes and effects are illusory and that there is no rationality in the universe, thus denying the very possibility of scientific investigation. Al-Ghazali also thought that reason was darkened by passions and, hence, could not be trusted. Thus morality could be known solely through Revelation. “No obligations flow from reason but from the Shariah (the divinely ordained path)”.

The upshot of it all is that both secularism and Islam deny any possible link between religion and reason, but for different reasons : the former because it denies reason’s capacity to know anything other than what is captured by our senses, the second because it denies that God is constrained by reason.

This common denominator helps to understand many other similarities between secularism and Islam. For example, both systems are incapable of admitting of a harmonious coordinated relationship between Church and State based on a distinction between their respective roles. What secularism calls separation of Church and State is, in effect, subordination of the former to the latter. The Church is only one other interest group amongst many others. In the case of Islam, the State’s role is to enforce the divine law, ie, the Shariah, as interpreted by the mullahs. Thus, in both systems, there is subordination rather than coordination between State and religious authorities. In secularism, religious authorities are subordinated to State authorities. In Islam, it is the other way around.

Another similarity is that both systems are deterministic, ie, they deny human capacity to make free choices. Because it admits of no true knowledge other than empirical, secularism assumes that human conduct can be explained solely by observable causes and ignores any other possible cause. Thus, any human action based on disinterestedness is associated with irrational or pathological behavior. That is tantamount to denying free will and explains the emphasis of secularism on social controls rather than character formation. As for Islam, by asserting that what God wants is what he decides and that what he decides is what happens, it leaves no room for human choice either. Both systems thus deny free will, albeit for different reasons.

It is also clear that both systems are prone to legitimize the use of violence to enforce beliefs. In the case of Islam, a quick look at the Mediterranean world during the 1000 years that followed its birth in the 7th century shows that it was largely spread through the power of the sword. Muslim armies conquered all of what is now the Middle-East and North Africa, wiping out all traces of Christianity, and then moved on into the Iberian peninsula and, later, the Balkans. As for secularism, it has always been violent in all its forms, whether Marxist, Nazi, Maoist or even “Liberal” — the latter admitting of the killing of unborn babies and of assisted suicide.

Secularism and Islam also share a common intolerance towards those who do not adhere to their respective beliefs. In Islam, this translates into dhimmitude, ie, the imposition of an inferior social and legal status for non-Muslims. In secularism, it translates into various forms of discrimination against all who refuse to exclude God from public life and can take extreme forms, such as “labor camps” such as the Gulag described by Alexander Solzhenitxyn.

Thus, from the point of view of reason, Islam and secularism have important similarities: both admit of its use only in the pursuit of utilitarian purposes and reject it in the pursuit of philosophical or theological knowledge. Consequently, neither can explain rationally why open dialogue is preferable to violence in the search for such knowledge.

In a book entitled Unholy Alliance, David Horowitz, a former radical socialist, argues that the American Left, which is the political expression of secularism in the United States, and radical Islam, both seek to destroy the great “evil” of our day, American capitalism, although for entirely different reasons. The American Left wants to emancipate the oppressed by abolishing inequality, poverty and war by ushering in a utopian communism, from which God would be officially banished. Radical Islam wants to destroy American influence and conquer the world for God alone by enforcing Sharia law worldwide. Islamic fundamentalism, notes Horowitz, was first hostile to Communism but its leaders soon discovered that there were genuine benefits in sharing the same totalitarian political structures and spreading the revolution.

Horowitz assumes that radical Islam and the American Left (ie, the most important segment of American secularism) agree on who the enemy is but diverge on why it must be fought and what should replace it. However, in light of the intellectual kinship between Islam and secularism described above, it might well be that these disagreements are not so important after all. Radical Islam and the leftist segment of American secularism use different terminologies that perhaps serve to hide a deeper philosophical unity. More specifically, while secularism likes to picture itself as radically a-religious or anti-religious, it may be useful to think of it in terms of a religious system with its own set of dogmas.

Richard Bastien is an Ottawa-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Égards, a French-language quarterly journal.

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Saturday in the Octave of Easter

Posted in Daily Mass Readings at 6:35 am by Brian Schuettler

Here is one of the best means to acquire humility; fix well in mind this maxim: One is as much as he is in the sight of God, and no more.

– St. Francis of Assisi

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