ISIS attacked again yesterday, their favorite target, apparently, Christians, this time worshiping Coptics participating in Palm Sunday Mass. Forty seven were killed in the two suicide bombings in Egypt, with dozens more injured, the victims living in a more real and vivid way than they imagined, and likely hoped, the Passion of their Lord and Saviour. God rest their souls, and bring healing to the injured.
We must pray for the victims and perpetrators, but also face the truth of the ongoing struggle, ‘jihad’ in their terms, between Christianity and Islam, many of the tenets and principles of which are incompatible.
Islam did not begin as a religion of peace, and will likely not end as one either. To see it as such will lead to more outcomes like this tragedy. The Catholic Church has no ‘authority’ to define what Islam is, or is not, for such falls outside divinely revealed truth, the only proper object upon which the Magisterium may propound and bind in conscience. Islam is not a religion revealed by God, and therefore the Church has no power to declare whether Islam is, or is not, a ‘religion of peace’, like she does with Christianity. Individuals within the Church may have their own opinions and hopes, but that is a different matter.
Rather, we must make up our own minds about Islam, its place in our ‘multicultural’ society, what freedoms are given, and not given, to its adherents, what security measures are put in place, immigration policies and restrictions, and all the other complex particulars that go into ensuring ‘just public order’ as Dignitatis Humanae, the Vatican II decree on Religious Freedom, declares.
But the further we drift from our Christian foundation, the more difficult it will be to discern these particulars, for our principles will become more unsound, more unreliable, more false, and we will not see what we should, and see what we should not, through distorting rose-tinted multi-culti glasses. The spirit of ereinism, of seeking peace at all costs, when there is no peace, is strong indeed.
Only the truth will set us free, and allow us to see clearly what is at stake.