In the late 1930s Catholic historian Hillaire Belloc wrote:
It [Islam] is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…
It seemed an unlikely prediction. At the time, the Islamic world was practically moribund. A comeback did not seem to be in the cards. Yet, Belloc was proved right. Within four decades, Islam was once again a power to be reckoned with.
Had he lived, however, even Belloc would have been surprised to find that one of the chief agents of Islam’s resuscitation was his own beloved Catholic Church. Although Belloc referred to Islam as a “formidable and persistent enemy,” by the end of the century, practically no “respectable” Catholic would have described Islam as an “enemy.” On the contrary, Islam had become a “fellow Abrahamic faith” which, we were told, shared much in common with Catholicism.
At one time, the Catholic Church had defended the West against Islam, but by the beginning of the 21st century, the Church had become a reliable defender of Islam against its critics.
Despite abundant evidence to the contrary, Catholic leaders and educators assured the world that Islam had nothing to do with violence. They also insisted that “Islam” means “peace” and that “jihad” is an “interior struggle.” If you disagreed with any of this you were dismissed as an “Islamophobe.”
But I’m getting ahead of myself. The Church’s mission to fight “Islamophobia” came later. First came the Second Vatican Council and the 1965 declaration Nostra Aetate. Nostra Aetate was intended to examine the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions. In particular it sought to consider “what men have in common.”
What do Muslims and Christians have in common? Here’s the key passage:
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 prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.
In short, Islam was just like Catholicism…except it wasn’t. The Council fathers had come up with a list of surface similarities between Islam and Catholicism, but had ignored the deep differences.
For example, Catholics and Muslims supposedly worship the same God. And sure enough, the God adored by Catholics is “merciful and all powerful”—just like the Muslim God. But unlike the Muslim God He is also a Trinity—something that Muslims vehemently deny. He is also, from the Catholic point of view, a Father. Again, this is vehemently rejected by Muslims. In fact, to say that God is a father is, from the Muslim point of view the height of blasphemy. Moreover, in Islamic scripture, Allah is always associated with the Prophet Muhammad. In fact, when a Muslim avows that “there is no God but Allah,” he is obliged to add “And Muhammad is the prophet of Allah.” Unfortunately for the “same God” thesis, the name “Muhammad” does not appear anywhere in the Bible.
Strike one! The pious belief that Muslims and Catholics worship the same God does not hold water. The “common-ground” thesis is built on very shoddy scholarship.
But wait! There is a man named “Jesus” in the Koran, and he is considered a great prophet. So, you can at least say that Muslims and Catholics both “revere” Jesus. Perhaps the common-ground thesis is intact, after all. The only problem is, it’s not the same Jesus. On the one hand, you have Jesus of Nazareth, on the other hand, you have the Jesus of the Koran, who does not resemble the former in any way, shape, or form.
Jesus of Nazareth is a recognizable human being, who eats and drinks and converses with his disciples in a recognizably human way. He also says things of startling and profound originality, causing many to say with wonderment, “no man has ever spoken like this before.”
The Koran, on the other hand, provides no details on the life of the Koranic Jesus. He has no substance, and practically nothing of interest to say. He is little more than a cardboard cutout. If you think I exaggerate, then read the Koran for yourself. In doing so, you may well find yourself wondering if the Council fathers and their “expert” advisers ever bothered to do the same.
Strike two! The pious belief that the Jesus of the Gospels and the Jesus of the Koran share anything in common other than the same name is completely untenable.
But how about the final point? —the one in which the Council fathers assure us that “they [Muslims] value the moral life”? This is particularly misleading because the Council fathers must certainly have known that the Muslim moral code differs markedly in many respects from the Catholic moral code. The Muslim moral code allows for polygamy, child brides, wife beating, stoning for adultery, and execution for apostasy.
Oh! There’s one more thing. In the last sentence of the first paragraph of the section “on the Moslems,” the Council fathers mention that “[Muslims] worship God especially through prayers, almsgiving, and fasting.” But they forgot to mention “jihad,” even though the Koran explicitly states that jihad is more pleasing to God than prayer and almsgiving.
How could they have forgotten to mention the thing that is most pleasing to God– namely, jihad? It’s difficult to avoid the impression that the authors of the Muslim section had been deliberately dishonest.
And the deception continued. In the wake of the Council, the Church set up numerous Muslim-Catholic dialogues, Centers for Muslim-Christian Understanding, and Abrahamic faith initiatives of various kinds. And all of them presented a Pollyannish portrait of Islam.
When the English edition of the new Catechism of the Catholic Church appeared in 1994 it didn’t say much about the Muslims—only that “together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.” It wasn’t much to go on, but it did seem to suggest that Muslims were on the side of the angels. So, when Muslims struck New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, it seemed safe to assume as so many in government and media were saying that “this has nothing to do with Islam.” Moreover, once it became known that Muslims revered Jesus and honored Mary, all subsequent Islamic attacks could be dismissed as the work of a tiny minority of extremists who had misunderstood the peaceful tenets of the Islamic faith. And when Muslims began migrating into Europe by the millions, Catholic prelates only had to remind their flocks that “in the face of the migrant we see the face of Jesus.”
On the other hand, it didn’t pay to see the face of Jesus in the face of persecuted Christians. When Pope Benedict XVI asked for greater protection of persecuted Christians in Egypt, Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of Al-Azhar University cut-off the dialogue with the Vatican and wouldn’t resume it until Benedict’s successor, Francis, agreed not to criticize Islamic persecutions of Christians. Francis, of course, thought this was a good deal: the dialogue was his pet project—one that must be preserved at all costs.
The Church had for all intents and purposes become an enabler of Islam. But it wasn’t like the aiding and abetting of yore. In those days, some traitor or other would open the gates of the city to the enemy. In the modern era, the Pope simply warns the Christian population that if they don’t open the borders of Europe to the Muslim horde, they are guilty of closing the door of the inn on the Holy Family.
Belloc was right about Islam. It would return as a formidable enemy of Western Civilization. But Western Civilization—including the Catholic Church—couldn’t accept the fact of enmity and it invented all sorts of reasons why Islam and the West were really the best of friends. The Church which once had a well-deserved reputation for being both a Church of faith and reason even mistook Islam for a religion of peace.
The Ayatollah Khomeini could have set them straight on that. The man who overthrew the Shah of Iran once declared:
Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those are witless. Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword…People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for Holy warriors.
Despite the Ayatollah’s warning, there still seems to be a constant supply of “witless” ones in the Church who “pretend that Islam counsels against war.” Chief among them is Francis who in his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, asserted that “authentic Islam and a proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
It’s a remarkable statement, and also provably false. Moreover, it puts Christians in danger by misleading them about the nature of Islam. Catholic apologists for Islam have been repeating similar lies about Islam ever since the mid-sixties. Will they ever be held to account? One sincerely hopes so.
Who’s to say that the Catholic Church hierarchy like the Socialist/Globalist hierarchy isn’t well damn sure using Islam and the Muslim Invasion as a battering ram and wrecking ball against the remaining vestiges of freedom, liberty, and capitalism in the West with the expectation of eventually coming out on top of the heap of the different, warring, factions of totalitarianism and re-establishing a Roman Catholic global, universal, theocracy?
The Roman Catholic Church and Christianity were responsible for the one-thousand years of the totalitarian, theocracy, which were the Christian Dark Ages.
“Observe, in that conflict, men’s fear of identifying or challenging philosophical fundamentals: both sides are willing to fight in silent confusion, to stake their beliefs, their careers, their reputations on the outcome of a battle over the effects of an unnamed cause. One side is composed predominantly of men who dare not name the cause; the other, of men who dare not discover it….
This is the spectacle of religion climbing on the bandwagon of statism, in a desperate attempt to recapture the power it lost at the time of the Renaissance.
The Catholic Church has never given up the hope to re-establish the medieval union of church and state, with a global state and a global theocracy as its ultimate goal. Since the Renaissance, it has always been cautiously last to join that political movement which could serve its purpose at the time. This time, it is too late: collectivism is dead intellectually; the band-wagon on which the Church has climbed is a hearse. But, counting on that vehicle, the Catholic Church is deserting Western civilization and calling upon the barbarian hordes to devour the achievement’s of man’s mind.
There is an element of sadness in this spectacle. Catholicism had once been the most philosophical of all religions. Its long, illustrious philosophical history was illuminated by a giant: Thomas Aquinas. He brought an Aristotelian view of reason (an Aristotelian epistemology) back into European culture, and lighted the way to the Renaissance. For the brief span of the nineteenth century, when his was the dominant influence among Catholic philosophers, the grandeur of his thought almost lifted the Church close to the realm of reason (though at the price of a basic contradiction). Now, we are witnessing the end of the Aquinas line—with the Church turning again to his primordial antagonist, who fits it better, to the mind-hating, life-hating St. Augustine. One could only wish they had given St. Thomas a more dignified requiem.
The encyclical is the voice of the Dark Ages, rising again in today’s intellectual vacuum, like a cold wind whistling through the empty streets of an abandoned civilization.
Unable to resolve a lethal contradiction, the conflict between individualism and altruism, the West is giving up. When men give up reason and freedom, the vacuum is filled by faith and force….
It’s either-or. If capitalism’s befuddled, guilt-ridden apologists do not know it, two fully consistent representatives of altruism do know it: Catholicism and communism.
Their rapprochement, therefore, is not astonishing. Their differences pertain only to the supernatural, but here, in reality, on earth, they have three cardinal elements in common: the same morality, altruism—the same goal, global rule by force—the same enemy, man’s mind.
There is a precedent for their strategy. In the German election of 1933, the communists supported the Nazis, on the premise that they could fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, capitalism. Today, Catholicism and communism may well cooperate, on the premise that they will fight each other for power later, but must first destroy their common enemy, the individual, by forcing mankind to unite to form one neck ready for one leash.” – Ayn Rand
I’m with you on this issue, 1000 years ago Christianity was bad news and experts say that this is the very reason Islam was formed.
Which experts? You?
At least you didn’t say Trump is the reason Islam was formed.
Crap. Pure and simple. Fortunately you currently on a site that has even less reach than it did two weeks ago. So your message is reaching fewer people. Well done moron.
And your satanic, homosexual approved ELCA Lutheran fake church is no better than the satanic catholic fake church…
Since it also teaches you worship the fake god allah of satanic islam.
Every time you attend your fake church and bow your head in prayer… you’re praying to the fake god allah, once called Baal…
Just your silly childish elementary school opinion. No one cares. Must really suck for you that you haven’t influenced me or anyone else re: my church.
We just keep going and going and going.
Your so called church approves of homosexual marriages and homosexual pastors…
Your so called church also teaches that it worships the god allah of islam…
Those aren’t opinions… they are facts!
And those facts makes your so called church… a satanic fake church. <<< period.
I did get your message about “welcome to the club.” I was traveling and then the format changed, so no opportunity to reply. Thank you for taking time to respond. I find your counsel and insight wise and encouraging.
Thank you…
Christ Jesus is Lord… 🙂
As soon as he was elected I named him Pope Che I.
Ayn Rand, a great polemicist, and sometimes effective fiction writer. For historical understanding, however, quite pedestrian. Even non-Christian scholarship has thrown out the discredited notion of “the thousand years of Dark Ages.” It is not a tenable concept, and was little more than the product of Petrarch’s imagination, which Rand adopts uncritically. Wake up, man.
Wake up! Ayn Rand is a WOMAN…
Pretty dark for my ancestors in terms of how they were treated. But sure sure just sweep it all under the rug.
A leftist pope doing what leftists do; being nauseatingly obsequious to islam.
This leftist pope is a serious fool. Pope John Paul (who helped win the Cold War) has got to be spinning in his grave.
“This leftist pope is a serious fool,” which he made embarrassingly obvious when he allowed the Mayan shamans to perform their pagan rituals on the grounds of the Vatican last year.
That was both stupid, and foolish.
Hardly the behavior befitting a pope.
I will believe these Catholic leaders when I see a line of imams waiting to condemn a terrorist attack. A single imam will start the process.
The great phantasmagoria of reconciliation between the Church and Islam. While Christians are persecuted in these countries: Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Eritrea, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Sudan, Iraq, Syria, Qatar, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Algeria, Mauritania, Turkmenistan, Morocco , Turkey, Tunisia, Kuwait.
Nigeria and Pakistan, “sad champions”, with a “44% increase in the number of Christians detained because of their faith”, (4,277 cases recorded in 2020, 6,175 cases in 2021).
— “All persecution combined, Afghanistan topped this annual ranking, dethroning North Korea, in 2nd position. Followed by Somalia, Libya, Yemen, Eritrea, Nigeria. In Afghanistan, persecution took “a new dimension with the takeover of the Taliban”, says the NGO.
“The Taliban have obtained documents allowing the identification of certain converts to Christianity. They actively sought them out. Converted men are killed on the spot, women or girls raped, or forcibly married off to young Taliban,” said Guillaume Guennec, another Portes Ouvertes official.
The US Constitution & Bill of Rights is clear with the 1A. All is Moot when it comes to involving religious interests into government policy. 200 years ago this would be unacceptable.
Having said that, WE have much to say about the errant policies of the US Administration that allow hostile immigrants to enter our country under permanent status, and funding religious States abroad with a perpetual religious war between belligerent States.
We pray that the Argentine attack on the UK will be the last Catholic attack on Protestants among Nations…but now we have an arcane war of Christian killing Christian in Ukraine/Russia. How could this happen? They are not Amish.
The unconstitutional tax provisions afforded religious groups, especially for realty in New York will be challenged and the SCOTUS may follow the above first paragraph. This will effect many corporate religious groups with large land holdings, as they do not pay taxes in NY.
Interesting times we have.
The Messiah’s name in the Bible was Yeshua until the Catholic Church changed it to Jesus. Jesus is the name of the deity of Universalism a.k.a. Catholicism that has always tried to become a one world religion. That one world religion includes Christianity, Islam, as well as, atheism, etc. which is why the current pope is bowing down to pagan idols. You can actually google videos of the current pope actually saying that the Jesus is not the only way to heaven. He says this because his Jesus is the deity of Universalism that says that everyone is going to heaven regardless of whether you accept Jesus as your savior. Of course, the pope’s Jesus is obviously different than the Messiah that the Bible talks about, Yeshua.
I would also like to point out that Revelation 18 indicates that the Vatican is going to be nuked. The Catholic Church welcomes in those who will destroy her.
The Messiah’s name was Yeshua until the New Testament changed it to Iesous. It was the English who changed it to Jesus.
Revelation 18 doesn’t say “nuked”… that is an assumption…
Revelation 18 doesn’t say “vatican”… it says Babylon… a pagan city with the blood of the saints slain…
I would suggest Mecca… a huge glittering city… with a history of paganism… which worships the fake god Baal, now called allah.
Mecca is being built up as the center of the earth… where timezones will start with it.
Where are Knights Templar ?
One of the best articles explaining how catholicism is satanic!
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The satanic catholic fake church clearly teaches they worship the same one god of satanic islam! This is professed in their book called the “catechism”…
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Also… the fake Jesus of the satanic quran is pronounced “Esau”… and this fake Jesus will stand with the Antichrist, on the Temple Mount, breaking the Christian Cross in a symbolic display… to announce that islam is the extension of Christianity…
This fake Jesus will be the False Prophet…
And who else proclaims to be Jesus on earth? The Poop of the satanic catholic fake church…
Anyone who denies that Jesus is Divine, and the only way to Heaven (cf. John 14;6), simply cannot be a Christian.
They may adopt a fraudulent external label, but Jesus was quite explicit on this point.
So, until he recants his redefinition of God and Jesus (and thereby recants his accommodation of islam), I am left with only one choice to believe…that the pope is not a Christian.
The satanic catholic fake church essentially believes that God has retired and has passed all authority from heaven unto the catholic fake church…
Which is why the Poop is called the “Vicar of Christ”… basically… a fake Jesus…
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Of course… satanic islam teaches that Jesus (fake) will stand on the Temple Mount with the leader of the islamic world… smashing the Cross…
Virtually every warning from the Holy Bible mirrors satanic islam…
1) What Christians see as the number 666… muslims view as a holy number
2) What Christians see as the 7 year Tribulation… muslims view as a time period of victory
3) What Christians see as the Antichrist… muslims view as their leader
4) What Christians see as the False Prophet… muslims view as Jesus
5) What Christians see as the Two Witnesses… muslims view as demons/devils
BEWARE!!! Of the coming One World Islamic Economic System! Which America has been helping to establish…
The WEF Great Reset… is all about ushering in the Mark of the Beast, satanic islamic Economic System… called Sharia Finance…
The current pope published an encyclical where he stated that Islam is peaceful and there is no violence in Islam. This pope lies through his teeth and does not take care of his flock.
There is some slight chance that the pope really believes that islam is peaceful…which would make his statement something…not a lie, per se, but a total falsehood nonetheless.
Of course, as Raymond Ibrahim has so well documented, 1,400 years of nonstop violence against all things Christian, and all things female, proves that islam is not peaceful.
Proverbs 27:6 Faithful are the wounds of a friend, But deceitful are the kisses of an enemy.
But he is a socialist!
Islam and Islamism are jointed at the hip.
The “good news”, the people who give up on “religion” won’t join Islam!
Wisdom, brainwashing or laziness or all of the above?
Who knows!
What happened to my comments?
Hardly surprising. The Catholic Church has always been a totally amoral enterprise that has little to do with Christianity.
The profit Mohammed was a pedophile, and that’s something the Catholic Church knows well.
Even the “much loved” Pope John Paul II was very favorable towards Islam. There are actually pictures of him kissing the Qu ‘ran. That religious book is not only the foundation for Islam but the Qu ran denies many very important core Bible doctrines of which Christianity is based on. Those Christian Bible based doctrines that the Qu ‘ran rejects are the Trinity , the Sonship of Jesus to God the Father and that Jesus is God the Son, Hebrews 1 :8.
Now there is Pope Francis , who is also very approving of Islam, and he even strives to appease the Muslim clerics by praising Islam and he goes so far as say extremely positive statements about Islam at the expense of the truth.
Pope Francis must or should know better that to say such false and flattering words about Islam . For there is no excuse for him to speak as does about how “good and wonderful” islam is.
For he has access to the Vatican library as well as his being available to other good , well researched sources of information about the dangerous and menacing essence of Islam.
Likewise, Pope John Paul II also had such information sources that he had easy access to about the deceptive violent and deadly nature of Islam.
Therefore , the is no valid excuse for either of those two popes to be so naive, uninformed and ignorant about the many things that are wrong about Islam and then to say so many approving statements about Islam, that religion of violence and death.
Surely, after observing how favorable John Paul II was towards Islam and how praising Pope Francis is for Islam, this is therefore a reminder to me to be glad that I’m a Protestant.
The Catholic Church is making fools move
The pope is no Christian and Catholicism is marginally Christian at best.
On the issue of religion, Ayn Rand was about as uninformed, even stupid, as they come.
There is ONLY God and no religion has a monopoly on God.
Actually… there are several fake gods… including the fake god allah of satanic islam…
Allah is not the same god as the One True Living God of Abraham, Isaac & Jacob… the Father of Christ Jesus…
allah was once called Baal… a proven fake god… mentioned in the Old Testament…
There are a number of apologists for Islam, some are imams and mullahs and strangely enough, even some so called “Christian leaders’, as Pope Francis, who have the outstanding and false claim that Christians and Muslim both believe in and worship the same God. So it stands to reason that it’s important to know if this claim is valid and true or invalid and false. The facts are that the god of Islam, or the Muslims is a single being. In great contrast the God of Christianity, of the Christians consists as the Trinity. By the Trinity it means that “Within the essence of the one True God there are Three Persons. Being God the Father. God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Not three gods in one But Three Distinct Persons in One God. Being the Tri-Personal Nature of God, Matthew 3:13-17. Second Corinthians 13:14. . The Bible teaches, the Father is God, Galatians 1:1.The Son is God, First John 5:20. The Holy Spirit is God, Acts 5:3,4. Not three gods but the one and only Triune God.
As further explained in the Christian book MAJOR BIBLE THEMES by Lewis Sperry Chafer on page 39 which informs the readers that “Many believe that the doctrine of the Trinity in implicit in the use of the word Elohim, as the name of God which is in a plural form and seems to refer to the Triune God. “Likewise, in the Christian magazine PERHAPS TODAY November/December 2013 on page 8 it reads about Genesis 1:1. “In the beginning God [this is the plural noun Elohim, meaning ‘more than one’] created the heaven and the earth.”
Furthermore, a bit of a view of the inner workings of the Trinity together may be seen in that the God the Father raised Jesus from the dead. Romans 10:9,10. Jesus raised Himself from the dead, John 2:19,20. The Holy Spirit raised Jesus from the dead, Romans 8:11.The inner-workings of the Trinity of God may also be seen in the fact that the Father sanctifies, First Thessalonians 5:23. The Son sanctifies, Ephesians 5:26. Hebrews 2:11; 9:12,14;13:12.The Holy Spirit sanctifies ,Romans 15:16. Second Thessalonians 2:13. Getting back to the Bible book of Genesis. In Genesis 1:26 in reads “The God said let US make man in Our image , according to our likeness…” The words are the plural “Us” and “Our.” As in “We the Trinity” For the very next verse, 27, it further reads “So God created man in His own image…” In verse 26 it’s the plural “Us” and “Our” to the singular “His” That is Three Persons in One God.
In conclusion the many apologists and propagandists for Islam for Islam who make the claim that Christians and Muslims believe in and worship the same God are make an untrue and outright false claim. For the God of Christianity, Christians and the Bible is not the god of Islam, Muslims, and the Qu ran.
Pope Francis is an outright liar when he said that Christians and Muslims have much in common, because they both “believe in Jesus.”
To explain this is that many Muslims claim that they “Love Jesus, too.” Nevertheless, it’s very important for Christians to understand that “jesus” of Islam is not the Jesus of the Bible and Christianity. For the “jesus ” of Islam and the Qu ‘ran is not God.
By strong contrast the Jesus of Christianity and the Bible is God. Meaning God, the Son of God the Father. Matthew 3:16. Hebrews 1:6-8.
That Jesus is God many be seen in John 1:1-3. 20:28 Romans 9:6. First John 5:20.
Furthermore, by comparing John 5:22 with Romans 14:12. Reveals that Jesus is God.
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In addition, by comparing the Old Testament with the New Testament shows that Jesus is God. As in comparing Psalm 89:8,9. with Matthew 8:23-27. Proves Jesus is God.
Likewise, by comparing Isaiah 46:22,23. With Philippians 2::5-11 shows that Jesus is God. Also
Daniel 7:13,14. Compared with John 5:25, 26 clearly reveals Jesus to be God.
In conclusion, .the “jesus” that Muslims love is not the same Jesus Who Christians love.
The photograph says it all, ” Satan kissing Satan”
The Catholic. church is the False Church. They are participating in the illegal invasion of our country, supporting gay priests, and abortion. Not every Catholic goes along with these affronts to God, but many don’t stand true to God’s 10 Commandments, especially our President, and Speaker of the House. Pope Francis claims to be the Vicar of Christ, (Vicar means replacement.). The False Church and the False Prophet help usher in the New World Order through false religion.