Pope Francis and Islam: Deception or Illusion?
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2021 issue of Courrier de Rome.
At the initiative of Cardinal Bea, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue was created during the second-to-last session of Vatican Council II, in 1964. This was anything but an isolated event; in fact, it was one of a whole array of creations, all of which held the promise of a bright future. The Protestant World Council of Churches created an Office for Interreligious Relations. The World Conference of Religions for Peace (WCRP) was born of a UN initiative and held its first sessions in 1970 in Kyoto, in 1974 in Louvain, and in 1979 in New York. In this same context, specifically Muslim-Christian relations were honored by the organization of regular public symposiums beginning in the 1970’s: in Cordoba in 1974, in Tunis in 1974, in Tripoli in 1976, in Cordoba again in 1977, in Al-Azhar in 1978. To make the organization of these symposiums even more official, the French Episcopal Conference created in 1973 a Secretariat for Encounters with Muslims, which later became the Muslim Relations Service (SRI) and would remain at the cutting edge of conciliar Modernism. The magazine Islamochristiana, published yearly from 1975 on by the Pontifical Institute for Arabic and Islamic Studies (PISAI), has served since as a basis for studies.
This first impetus in the 1970’s would lead to an unending proliferation in our days of groups and associations of every sort, whose common denominator remains the same as ever: the search by Catholics for an idyllic Muslim-Christian friendship. Hence the birth of the Islamo-Christian Research Group (GRIC) in 1977, the foundation in 1989 of the Association for Muslim-Christian Dialogue (ADIC) that would later become the Association for International Muslim-Christian Dialogue and Interreligious Encounters in 1995, and the creation of the Group for Islamic-Christian Friendship in 1995; not to mention the countless local groups that most often include only a few notably progressivist Catholics and a few Muslims doing their best to keep up a dialogue. In the past few years, the number of Muslim-Christian dialogue forums online has exploded. This apparent multiplicity really comes down to two types of contributions. The first category is made of up websites run by Muslims who use them as instruments of propaganda and so-called “apologetics” in favor of Islam for Europeans1; their primary goal is to reassure Europeans and kindle an attraction for Islam (a “call to Islam”) in a manner “adapted to the Western mentality”. The second category consists of websites run by Catholics or Protestants whose goal is most often to present each religion in a positive light and encourage reflecting upon the answers that all religions could offer together. These websites are designed by people of the Western world for people of the Western world (be they Muslim or Christian) and present Islam in an honorable light, suggesting that it can and should have a place in the Western world. The result is clearly expressed in this naïve reaction published in La Croix on January 29, 2021, “Out of ignorance, I had a negative view of Islam.”
The author of these lines participated in several of these online forums and a number of these Muslim-Christian encounters. The only observable and observed result is that Christians have become involved in Islamization, in welcoming Muslim immigrants, in distributing books and videos praising Islam. Truly constructive discussions do not occur in these structures. At best, “Once diversity has been accepted as a positive factor, it is necessary to ensure that people not only accept the existence of other cultures but also desire to be enriched by them. In a discourse to Catholics, my Predecessor, the Servant of God Paul VI, spelled out his deep conviction in these words: ‘The Church must enter into dialogue with the world in which she lives. She has something to say, a message to give, a communication to make.’[…] May believers always be ready to promote initiatives of intercultural and interreligious dialogue, in order to encourage collaboration (cf. Nostra Aetate) on themes of mutual interest, such as the dignity of the human person, the search for the common good, the building of peace.2 […] If it is to be authentic, such a dialogue must avoid sinking into relativism and syncretism and must be inspired by sincere respect for others and by a generous spirit of reconciliation and fraternity. I encourage all who are dedicated to building a Europe that is welcoming, supportive.”3
These remarks by the immediate predecessor of Pope Francis reveal great naivety and an equally great illusion regarding the way the major Islamic institutions consider the overall objective of this dialogue. But there is more: the illusion here leads to an actual self-censorship (which should be unacceptable) of the Church’s Mission to evangelize. How this illusion and self-censorship have continued and worsened under Benedict XVI’s successor is what we shall now proceed to consider.
A First Attempt at a Fraternity of Believers
In 1978, Fr. Anawati, OP, as member of the Vatican delegation to Al-Azhar for the symposium on interreligious dialogue, gave a conference4 in which he tried to reconcile the two religions, Catholicism and Islam, in a consensual vision. The purpose of this vision was to build a “humanism founded on God or a theocentric humanism,” a “consequence of faith in God.” To this end, the good friar found no better approach than to relativize the differences in faith between Islam and Catholicism, by means of two complementary tactics.
The first is based on the contents of the Faith. It consists in listing the truths of faith apparently shared by Catholics and Muslims, but without giving their precise contents, thus making things ambiguous, as for example having faith in one God. For he does not add that, in Christian Revelation, it is essential and not secondary to affirm that this one God is – in the essence of His transcendent and therefore mysterious Being – three persons, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Nor does he mention that in the Quran it is essential and not optional to deny that God is Trinity. Fr. Anawati was very careful not to say that Catholics and Muslims believe in the same realities, but he also did not mention that Muslims do not have faith in the sense the Catholic Church gives this word. He also failed to mention the absolutely fundamental distinction between:
This tactic contents itself with saying that in the Quran, Revelation is found in a reduced condition or a merely imperfect manner.5 This makes the religious essence of Islam incomprehensible, for its definition as such is a refusal of the three principal mysteries revealed by God and entrusted to His Church in Christianity: the mystery of the Blessed Trinity, the mystery of the Incarnation, and the mystery of the Redemption.
The second technique makes use of the disposition of the believer. It consists in defining his faith as an existential and relational dimension between him and God. Attention is focused exclusively on the beautiful and admirable attitude of submission to the sovereign Being in the souls of Christian and Muslim believers. And the persisting contradiction between the objective elements of their respective beliefs is simply ignored. The similarity of their attitude serves as a basis for brotherhood among believers, a sort of theocentric humanism. This idea is to be found in the Pope’s recent address in Iraq: “God asked Abraham to raise his eyes to heaven and to count its stars. […] Today we, Jews, Christians and Muslims, together with our brothers and sisters of other religions, honor our father Abraham by doing as he did: we look up to heaven. […] The otherness of God points us towards others, towards our brothers and sisters. Yet if we want to preserve fraternity, we must not lose sight of heaven. May we – the descendants of Abraham and the representatives of different religions – sense that, above all, we have this role: to help our brothers and sisters to raise their eyes and prayers to heaven.”6 The Pope implies that all of us, Jews, Christians and Muslims, have the same beautiful and commendable attitude towards one and the same God; but the fundamental differences opposing Judaism and Islam to Catholicism, with their necessary consequences, are purposely not mentioned.
In his response to Fr. Anawati, Sheik Baraka categorically maintained that Islam has never believed that Allah “had granted man the right to use his reason to organize society in accordance with a natural law corresponding to a universal human nature as founded on reason.” For him, this would be opposed to Sharia law and would dissolve the articles of Islamic belief. He asserted that this would be a poor basis for interreligious dialogue, since it presents an obstacle to an agreement.7
A Non-Catholic Strategy
Both in his declaration in Abu Dhabi and in his address in Iraq, Pope Francis voluntarily avoided the Name of Jesus; Christ is mentioned neither directly nor indirectly, and the Christian social order, which has always been described by the Popes as the source of peace here below, is obviously not discussed. The Pope chose to adopt the same tactic as Fr. Anawati, a tactic that is neither that of a truly Catholic humanism, which finds its source of order and peace in the Faith, nor that of an atheistic humanism, that claims to find its source of peace in a humanity liberated from any imposed truth, but rather that of a so-called theocentric humanism. This humanism claims to find its source of peace in the fact that men all adopt the attitude of believers, which places them in an existential relation with God, even if their respective beliefs are contradictory. The immediate consequence, fully accepted by Pope Francis, is that anyone who adopts a tactic of this sort is obliged to abandon the exclusive perspective of Catholic doctrine and to keep silence about the only effective means of obtaining peace: Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Nations.
It is easy to understand how tempting this tactic is in the era of globalism when it is clear that the Church’s doctrine on the Kingship of Christ stands little chance of being accepted. The Second Vatican Council succumbed to the same temptation long before Benedict XVI and Francis. But does not the social doctrine of Christ the King present the Catholic Faith exactly as it is? Did St. Paul not say, “Praying withal for us also, that God may open unto us a door of speech to speak the mystery of Christ.”8 The Apostle showed that only faith in Jesus and our union with Him can unite men by protecting them from error, “…until we all attain to the unity of faith, and of the deep knowledge of the Son of God, […], that we may be now no longer children tossed to and fro, and carried about by every wind of doctrine devised in the wickedness of men, in craftiness, according to the wiles of error. Rather we are to practice the truth in love, and so grow up in all things in him who is the head, Christ.”9 St. Paul is affirming that far from being just one religion among many others, the religion of Jesus Christ is the only true religion, the universal religion. “This mystery is that the Gentiles are joint heirs, and fellow-members of the same body, and joint partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus, through the Gospel. To me, the very least of all the saints, there was given this grace, to announce among the Gentiles, the unfathomable riches of Christ.”10 Is this not the attitude we should expect of the one to whom has been entrusted the role of “religiously guarding and faithfully expounding the revelation or deposit of Faith”?11 Is this not what we should expect of the successor of St. Peter, the Pope, pastor and doctor of all Christians?
Pope Pius XII, too, was faced with the same difficulties as Francis, a world tearing itself apart. How did he react? Did he invite the believers of different monotheistic religions to raise up to the one God the common prayer of the children of Abraham? No. Pius XII recalled with precision the role of the Church in the establishment of world peace. The Church must contribute to the establishment of this peace by preaching a specifically Christian and Catholic order:
“What should be the Church’s contribution to peace? What is the legal title, the specific nature of her contribution? The legal title is the Eternal Son of God made man, whose name is Princeps Pacis, the Prince of Peace. The Prince and founder of peace, that is the characteristic of the Savior and Redeemer of the human race. His lofty and divine mission is to establish peace between each man and God, among men and among peoples. But the Divine Savior is also the invisible head of the Church, and for this reason, His mission of peace continues to subsist and be at work in the Church. […] We find ourselves obliged to declare: the world is far from the order willed by God in Christ, an order that guarantees real and lasting peace. This approach will convince any impartial observer that the heart of the problem of peace today is spiritual, that it is a spiritual deficiency or lack. A profound Christian sense is too absent in the world today, and there are too few true and perfect Christians. Men themselves places obstacles to the realization of the order willed by God.”12
The Pope went on to warn against a false peace that, by refusing the source of peace, Christ and His instrument the Church, dooms itself never to exist:
“This world speaks of nothing but peace and it has no peace; it lays claim to every possible and impossible legal title by which to establish peace, but fails to know or to recognize the pacifying mission that comes directly from God, the mission of peace of the religious authority of the Church.”
Going even farther, Pius XII denounced the false peace that Pope Francis preaches today:
But “if the religious authority of the Church is deprived of that which is indispensable for it to work effectively for peace, then the tragic condition of the modern world that is already in such upheaval is worsened. The defection of many men from the Christian Faith has led to this almost intolerable fault. And God seems to have responded to this crime of abandoning Christ by the plague of a permanent threat to peace.”
By choosing a stance that excludes the role of Jesus Christ and of the true religion, does the Pope not shackle the freedom of the Church and her missionary charity? He certainly runs the very real risk of being passed up by cleverer strategists, which is exactly what seems to have happened in Iraq. Indeed, the Pope sustained three resounding defeats.
The Pope’s first defeat was the interreligious meeting in the Plain of Ur. Francis wanted to invite all the descendants of the faith of Abraham, from his perspective of peace and coexistence. But the Jews did not come, for the Iraqi and Shiite authorities refused their presence.
The second defeat took place at the meeting in Najaf with Ayatollah al-Sistani. He refused to sign the Abu Dhabi document on human fraternity.
The third humiliation was that the Pope was unable to avoid listening to the frank and courteous explanations of Ayatollah al-Sistani at this same meeting. He pointed out to the Pope the profound reasons that made it impossible for him to agree with the Abu Dhabi document. The first of these reasons was theological and has to do with the definition of fraternity. “Ayatollah al-Sistani has a saying which I hope I recall correctly. Men are either brothers by religion or equals by creation.”13 The saying comes from the Imam Ali, who limits fraternity (beyond that of the family) to the true faith in Allah and admits only an equality of nature among all humans. Ayatollah refused to sign a declaration based on ambiguous phrasing in which each party reads a different meaning into the text he signs.
His second reason was political. For what Islamic countries expect of the Pope is not words but actions. Sistani declared that the current human, social and material evils described in the Abu Dhabi document are mostly due to wars. He explicitly accused the great powers waging these wars of complete disregard for human rights and cited the oppressed Palestinian nation as a perfect example. Consequently, the secondary role of religious leaders is to bring these same powers to abandon their logic of war and not put their own private interests before people’s right to live with freedom and dignity. What is more, religious leaders have a duty to protect the people hurt by these wars, as is the case in Iraq. Ayatollah seems to have reminded the Pope of his own responsibility to act upon Western leaders and bring wars to an end, rather than multiplying ambiguous declarations.
Ayatollah did not accept ambiguous language. But he did take advantage of the Pope’s irenic illusions to use the head of the Catholic Church as a spokesman through whom he was able to present the entire Western world with a very satisfying image of Shiite action in Iraq.
… drawing the Pope right to the edge of the Muslim faith
The Pope began his speech in Ur by declaring, “In these stars, Abraham saw the promise of his descendants; he saw us. Today we, Jews, Christians and Muslims, honor our father Abraham.” In the prayer he then recited, he called Abraham “our common father in faith” and Jews, Christians and Muslims “children of Abraham.” With comments of this sort, did he realize that he was closer to the Muslim doctrine than to the doctrine of the Church?
For Islam, the faith of Abraham is a faith of pure monotheism (hanif) that associates nothing with God. “They say, ‘Be Jews or Christians so you will be guided.’ Say, ‘Rather, we follow the religion of Abraham, truly monotheistic (hanif), and he was not of the polytheists.”14 Islam considers that the Jews and Christians deviated little by little from the faith of Abraham, and that Mohammed was sent to bring them back to monotheism, but they did not accept and have since remained halfway between belief and disbelief: “Say, ‘We have believed in Allah and what has been revealed to us and what has been revealed to Abraham and Ishmael and Isaac and Jacob and the Descendants and what was given to Moses and Jesus and what was given to the prophets from their Lord. We make no distinction between any of them, and we are in submission to Him.”15 “Indeed, those who disbelieve in Allah and His messengers and wish to discriminate between Allah and His messengers and say, ‘We believe in some and disbelieve in others,’ and wish to adopt a way in between (belief and disbelief): those are the disbelievers, truly. And We have prepared for the disbelievers a humiliating punishment. But they who believe in Allah and His messengers and do not discriminate between any of them, to those He is going to give their rewards. And ever is Allah Forgiving and Merciful.”16
What is more, certain religious terms used in the Abu Dhabi declaration take on an Islamic meaning.
The declaration speaks of “awareness of the great divine grace that makes all human beings brothers and sisters.” The word “grace” is used here in the Islamic sense of a natural benefit from God. Taken in the Catholic sense, this word would express a grave error and imply that all men are children of God through sanctifying grace by the very fact of their creation.
It also speaks of “the importance of these values as anchors of salvation for all.” In the Christian doctrine, the word “salvation” is used in reference to sin which prevents us from entering into Eternal Life. Obtaining salvation means being liberated from sin, and this salvation is brought to us by Christ who expiates for our sins, a notion that Islam categorically refuses. In this declaration, it is simply the Islamic sense of the word, a salvation for the life of humanity on earth.
“We, who believe in God and in the final meeting with Him and His judgment,” is another typically Islamic expression.
The document goes on to say that “the pluralism and the diversity of religions, color, sex, race and language are willed by God in His wisdom, through which He created human beings.” Besides conveying explicit heresy,17 this phrase expresses pure Muslim doctrine. Muslim commentators made no mistake when saying that it “thus abandons all claims to an apologetic exclusivism and rejects the arrogant denial of another God-revealed faith.”18 And that is indeed the stumbling block: while the Quran maintains that the Gospel was revealed by God, the Church has always maintained that Islam is in no way revealed by God, as it presents no real sign of revelation, no motive of credibility, and rather contains all the signs given six centuries earlier by Sacred Scripture by which to recognize antichrists. And yet… the Pope signed the text containing this Muslim profession of faith, faithful to his aversion for everything he calls “proselytism” and that is in reality the most authentic expression of the missionary spirit of the Church.
Lastly, other affirmations implement the strategy of Islamic Cultural Action whose objective is to use a Western moral authority to bring Europeans to accept Islamization and to exonerate Islam of any violence:
“Good relations between East and West are indisputably necessary for both. They must not be neglected, so that each can be enriched by the other’s culture through fruitful exchange and dialogue. The West can discover in the East remedies for those spiritual and religious maladies that are caused by a prevailing materialism.” The text explicitly affirms here that the spiritual and religious evils of the Western world will find their remedy not in the Roman Church but in Eastern civilization—in other words in Islam, thanks to an interreligious declaration.
“Dialogue among believers means coming together in the vast space of spiritual, human and shared social values and, from here, transmitting the highest moral virtues that religions aim for. It also means avoiding unproductive discussions.” In the light of the experience of more than half a century of dialogue, we now know what is meant by “unproductive discussions”: the desire to convert others and to show them that their religion does not come from God.
“Moreover, we resolutely declare that religions must never incite war, hateful attitudes, hostility and extremism, nor must they incite violence or the shedding of blood. These tragic realities are the consequence of a deviation from religious teachings. …Terrorism is deplorable and… is not due to religion, even when terrorists instrumentalize it.” “In the name of innocent human life that God has forbidden to kill, affirming that whoever kills a person is like one who kills the whole of humanity, and that whoever saves a person is like one who saves the whole of humanity.” This altered and truncated quotation from the Quran (5.32), which is actually a paraphrase of the Talmud, modifies its true Koranic meaning, which is that God only authorizes killing people if they are guilty of murder or corruption on earth. The following verse makes this explicit: “The penalty for those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger and spread mischief in the land is death, crucifixion, cutting off their hands and feet on opposite sides, or exile from the land.” We cannot but be appalled to see a Pope sign such affirmations from the Quran presented as the word of God.
Based on all of the above, it is quite clear that Pope Francis’s approach is but one of the many facets of an instrumentalization by Islam to the detriment of non-Muslim Western societies, and even more importantly, to the great scandal of Catholics, whose faith suffers an unprecedented alteration. Because of this, the present head of the Church bears a grave responsibility before God and men.
Endnotes
1 For example, the dialogue forum islamchretien.forumactif.com.
2 Paul VI, Encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, August 6, 1964, §67.
3 Benedict XVI, Letter on the occasion of the Study Day for Interreligious Dialogue and Culture, December 3, 2008.
4 Cf. Article “Les acteurs et leur stratégie dans le monde musulman” (The Actors and Their Strategy in the Muslim Universe), June 2021 issue of Courrier de Rome.
5 As John Paul II does in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope.
6 Francis, Address in the Plain of Ur, at the Interreligious Meeting during his Apostolic Visit to Iraq, March 6, 2021.
7 Cf. The study by Fr. Emmanuel Pisani, OP, Le dialogue islamo-chrétien à l’épreuve : Père Anawati, OP – Dr. Baraka. Une controverse au vingtième siècle, L’Harmattan, 2014. Fr. Emmanuel Pisani, a Dominican from Montpellier and member of the IDEO (Institut Dominicain d’Etudes Orientales du Caire) is the director of the ISTR of the Institut Catholique in Paris. He teaches Islamology in Paris, Lyon and Rome. He presented a doctoral thesis in philosophy and theology on heterodox and non-Muslims according to al-Cazâlï.
8 Col. 4:3.
9 Eph. 4:13-15.
10 Eph. 3:6-9.
11 Vatican Council I, Constitution Pastor Aeternus, ch. 4.
12 Pius XII, Radio Message to the World, December 24, 1951.
13 Pope Francis, Press Conference on the flight back from Iraq, March 8, 2021.
14 Quran 2.135.
15 Quran 3.84-85.
16 Quran 4.150-152
17 See article “François et le dogme (II)” (Francis and Dogma) in the Feb. 2019 issue of Courrier de Rome.
18 Commentary on the Abu Dhabi Document by an international group of Muslim scholars and intellectuals, available on the website www.christians-muslims.com.
Picture Sources
TITLE IMAGE: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Kaaba_during_Hajj.jpg (Adli Wahid)
ISLAMIC CENTER: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Islamic_Center_of_Washington_DC.jpg (dbking)
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