Pope Francis refuses to acknowledge Middle East "War of Religion"

On Monday, in "Under Pope Francis, Christianity matters less", Walt gave you the key points from a lengthy interview with leading Vaticanista Sandro Magister, on the 40th anniversary of the beginning of his career as an analyst and commentator on the state of the Church and religion in general.

Sig. Magister noted several trends in the Papacy of Pope Francis that disturb not just Traditionalists but many mainstream churchmen, including leading bishops and Cardinals. One of these was the inexplicable silence of the Vatican on Islam and the Muslim world in general. He called the Vatican's political correctness "caution pushed to extremes.... I don’t see any advantage to it. It seems to me that it hasn’t resulted in any help, even minimal or partial, for the Christians in those regions. Caution is understandable, if it’s measured in proportion to the effect. It’s valid if it produces lesser damage.

"We have a power like ISIS and we are too fast in saying that Islam has nothing to do with it; that they are instead nurtured by radical Islam, which doesn’t resolve the question of rationality and the relationship between faith and violence. That is exactly what Pope Ratzinger had addressed in Regensburg. In fact the only true dialogue between Christianity and Islam came about after that lecture...."

Today, in his Chiesa blog, Sig. Magister takes up the question again. In the face of the offensive of radical Islam, he writes, Francis’s big idea is that "we must soothe the conflict." Forget Regensburg! And forget about the 1000s of Christians among the many victims of puritanical Islam.

Sig. Magister finds it "impossible not to see in this the features of a 'war of Islam' pushed to the extreme, fought in the name of Allah. It is illusory to deny the Islamic origin of this unbridled theological violence. This has been published even by the officially supervised La Civiltà Cattolica, only to be contradicted afterward by its fearsome director, Antonio Spadaro, the Jesuit who plays the role of Francis's interpreter.

"On Islam the Catholic Church stammers, the more so the higher up the ladder one goes.

"The bishops of the dioceses of the Middle East are calling upon the world for effective armed protection, which never comes. In Rome, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran publishes the most detailed denunciation of the atrocities of the caliphate, and declares an end to all possibility of dialogue with those among the Muslims who do not stamp out violence at its roots.

"But when the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, speaks in New York from the tribunal of the UN, as he did on September 29, he carefully avoids the taboo words 'Islam' and 'Muslims', and pays the obligatory tribute to the mantra that denies the existence of that conflict of civilization which is plain for all to see....

"In 2006 Benedict XVI, first in Regensburg and then in Istanbul, said what no pope had ever dared to say: that violence associated with faith is the inevitable product of the fragile bond between faith and reason in Muslim doctrine and in its very understanding of God."

But Benedict XVI isn't the Head of the Church any more, or so we're told. Instead we have Francis, who believes in "peaceful coexistence" with the Muslims. Perhaps next month he'll tell us he believes in Santa Claus too.