Pope Francis, Indifferentism, and Islamization
Two young Scandinavian women who were hiking in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco were found dead in mid-December in their tent. ISIS terrorists later posted a video of themselves decapitating one of the victims.
The mother of one of the women told reporters, “Her priority was safety. The girls had taken all precautionary measures before embarking on this trip.”
“Except,” as Robert Spencer commented in JihadWatch, “that it no doubt didn’t even occur to them that what they thought they knew about Morocco’s religion and culture might be inaccurate and designed to whitewash Islam, leaving them ill-informed about a threat that they actually did end up facing.”
If one depended on European media and European schools for one’s knowledge of Islam, one would indeed come away with a misleading picture of Islam. But the same could be said of Catholics who rely on Church pronouncements about Islam. Ever since the Second Vatican Council, Church leaders have presented a smiley-faced version of Islam which emphasizes the commonalities with Catholicism and leaves out the scary parts.
Over the last six years, the chief proponent of this bowdlerized view of Islam has been Pope Francis. He has reassured Christians that Islam is opposed to violence, advised Muslim migrants to find comfort in the Koran, and has portrayed terrorists as betrayers of true Islam.
More significantly, he has become perhaps the world’s foremost spokesman for an open-borders, let-everyone-in policy toward immigration. Seemingly indifferent to the increasingly dangerous situation created by jihad-minded Muslims in Europe, Francis has encouraged a welcoming attitude toward all while scolding opponents of mass migration as fearful and xenophobic.
In short, Pope Francis has acted as an advocate for Islam. He has portrayed it as a religion of peace, the moral equivalent of Catholicism, and a force for good. A number of people, however, now feel that the pope has seriously misled Christians about the nature and goals of Islam and Islamic immigration. Like the teachers and other cultural elites who left the two Scandinavian women “ill-informed about a threat that they actually did end up facing,” Pope Francis, by whitewashing Islam, has left millions of Christians unprepared for the escalating threat that is now facing them.
The analogy between the misinformed Scandinavian friends and misinformed Europeans does break down in one respect, though. No one forced the young women to travel to Morocco. They went there of their own accord. It’s one thing to invite yourself into the high mountains of Morocco and take your chances. It’s another thing altogether to invite Morocco into Europe and let ordinary Europeans bear the consequences. That is what European elites, with much encouragement from Francis, have done.
The combination of high Muslim birth rates, mass Muslim migration, and European concessions to Islam’s blasphemy laws has set Europe on a course toward Islamization. Islamization, in turn, will spell dhimmitude for Christians. As the Islamic influence grows, Christians will be subject to increasing restrictions on the practice of their faith, perhaps even to persecution. It’s possible that Christianity in Europe will be exterminated.
Is Francis Naïve About Islam?
The pope has done much to promote the cause of Islam—so much so that he has been praised by Islamic leaders for his defense of their faith. The questions that then arise are these: Is Francis aware of the possibility that Islam will become dominant in Europe? Is he aware that this may spell the end of European Christianity? And if he is aware, does he care?
For a long time, I thought that Francis was simply naïve about Islam. His counterfactual statements about Islam and his Pollyannaish view of mass Muslim migration must, I thought, be the result either of blissful ignorance or of bad advice from “experts,” or a combination of both.
Now, however, I have my doubts. The catalyst for these doubts is Francis’s approach to the current sex-abuse crisis. I originally supposed that he was naïve about that also: perhaps he didn’t realize the full extent of the problem or the full extent of the cover-ups; perhaps he wasn’t aware of the numerous lavender networks in seminaries, in dioceses, and in the Vatican itself. But in light of recent revelations, it no longer seems possible to give him the benefit of the doubt. In several cases, he not only knew of the crimes and cover-ups, he took steps to protect and/or promote those involved. Francis seems determined to push through a revolution in doctrine and morals—what he calls “a radical paradigm shift”—and it doesn’t seem to matter that the men he has chosen to help him achieve his goals are the ones most deeply implicated in the scandals. By all accounts, Pope Francis is a “hands-on” pope who knows exactly what he wants, carefully calculates his moves, and leaves little to chance.
Why, then, should we suppose Francis is completely naïve about the extent of the threat from Islam and from Islamic immigration? It’s difficult to imagine that he isn’t fully aware of the widespread persecution of Christians in Muslim lands. And it’s just as difficult to think that he’s ignorant of the Islamic crime wave on his own doorstep—the escalating incidence of rape, riots, and terrorist attacks in Europe. Does he really believe that such things have nothing to do with Islam?
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2018/pope-francis-indifferentism-and-islamization
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