(Editor's note: Below are excerpts from Robert Spencer's essay in FrontPageMagazine.com of October 31, 2003 followed by extensive excerpts from the article in La Civilta Cattolica itself. Mr. Spencer's most recent book is Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threats America and the West, published by Regnery. His article on replacement theology, co-authored with Andrew G. Bostom, appeared in September's Outpost.)
The semi-official Jesuit magazine La Civilta Cattolica has done nothing less than shock the world by publishing an absolutely scathing criticism of the mistreatment that Christians suffer in Islamic societies. Why so shocking? It's a sharp break with Pope John Paul II's long-standing policy toward Islam, which some have characterized as "dialogue to the point of extremism." Nothing is published in La Civilta Cattolica without the approval of the Vatican Secretary of State -- so this blistering article presumably corresponds to the views of some very high placed Vatican officials, if not the ailing Pope himself.
The Civilta Cattolica piece represents the first indication that any Catholic Church officials recognize the dimensions of the religious conflict that jihadists are waging against Christians and others around the world.
The Civilta Cattolica piece represents the first indication that any Catholic Church officials recognize the dimensions of the religious conflict that jihadists are waging against Christians and others around the world. Up to now, the signals have all been in the other direction: the Pope has been such a relentless proponent of dialogue with Islam that Rome's criticism of the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries has been muted. And in a paroxysm of enthusiasm for peace and brotherhood, he actually kissed the Koran on May 14, 1999, during an audience with several Muslim officials from Iraq and the late Chaldean Catholic Patriarch, Raphael I Bidawid....
Certainly the Pope's Koran kiss was a moment that would have appalled the saints and martyrs who encountered in Islam a relentless and implacable enemy over many centuries of the Church's life. But perhaps those great souls were mollified by this new Civilta Cattolica article, which is just the opposite of naive and appeasement-minded irenicism. The article brushes aside decades of misleading historical revisionism about the Muslim conquests, daring to point out that "in all the places where Islam imposed itself by military force, which has few historical parallels for its rapidity and breadth, Christianity, which had been extraordinarily vigorous and rooted for centuries, practically disappeared or was reduced to tiny islands in an endless Islamic sea...."
One of the most disheartening aspects of the post-9/11 world has been the general unwillingness to acknowledge the true nature of the conflict. Donald Rumsfeld just drew flack when he recently remarked: "We are in a war of ideas, as well as a global war on terror." But radical Muslims are waging a war of ideas, on behalf of their vision of a society constituted according to Islamic law. If the West is unable to counter this vision successfully with ideas of its own, no amount of daisy cutters and high-tech weaponry will be able to forestall its ultimate defeat. A key first step to fighting and winning a war of ideas is having the courage to point out the deficiencies of the competing ideas. Clearly someone at the Vatican has gone from kissing the Koran to reading it, and has at last taken this step.
(La Civilta Cattolica, October 18, 2003)
How do Christians in Muslim-majority countries live?.... We must first highlight a seemingly rather curious fact: in all the countries of North Africa (Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco), before the Muslim invasion and despite incursions by vandals, there were blossoming Christian communities that contributed to the universal Church great personalities, such as Tertullian; Saint Ciprian, bishop of Carthage, martyred in 258; Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo; and Saint Fulgentius, bishop of Ruspe. But after the Arab conquest, Christianity was absorbed by Islam to such an extent that today it has a significant presence only in Egypt, with the Coptic Orthodox and other tiny Christian minorities, which make up 7-10 percent of the Egyptian population.
The same can be said of the Middle East (Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Jordan, Mesopotamia), in which there were flourishing Christian areas prior to the Islamic invasion, and where today there are only small Christian communities, with the exception of Lebanon, where Christians make up a significant part of the population.
As for present-day Turkey, this was in the first Christian centuries the land in which Christianity bore its best fruits in the areas of liturgy, theology, and monastic life. The invasion of the Seljuk Turks and the conquest of
[(Continued on p.9)]
Outpost - 8 - December 2003