From Jihad Watch:
Opening the Gates of Hell
Most of the time in these pages when I have the melancholy duty of rebuking my fellow Christians for suicidal, irresponsible idiocy, conducted in the name of self-serving sentimentality or idiotic post-Christian ideology, I have at least the comfort that I am talking about liberal Protestants. This time I face the necessity of taking a large, live fish and slapping it in the face of the Vatican. Ah well, at least I read the story on a Friday in Lent, so it doesn't violate the abstinence regulations. Those of you who have particularly strong stomachs, please read the following:
Europe Is Disappointing Holy See on Immigration
Cardinal Bertone Laments Closing Borders to North Africans
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 15, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The closing of Europe's borders, given the wave of immigrants and refugees resulting from the conflicts and social crisis in several countries of North Africa, has disappointed the Holy See.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict XVI's secretary of state, expressed this disappointment on Tuesday, reports the semi-official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
"There is no doubt that Europe has disappointed profoundly" in this emergency, said the Italian cardinal. "Europe has lost its profound spirit, a spirit of great solidarity first of all among the peoples of Europe and then among other peoples. Let us think of Africa, which it has abused so much: it seems that Europe has turned its back on it."
The air attacks against Libya's regime, led by European nations, have caused the flight by land from that country of 500,000 people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Tens of thousands of people have taken to the sea to arrive in Italy or Malta.
According to UNHCR, it is feared that in the crossing from Africa to Europe over the past two weeks, 800 emigrants have lost their lives. In addition to the 250 who died in the shipwreck April 6 in the Sicilian Channel, nothing is known of the 560 people who took to the sea in three barges that never arrived at their destination.
Despite this emergency, France and other European countries have prevented the passage of these refugees and immigrants from Italy, leaving to the latter the management of the crisis.
"We wish to raise our voice so that this Europe will find its soul again," said Cardinal Bertone, "a soul of great solidarity and generosity with these peoples who face an emergency and great needs."
Is this the same Holy See that recently received the request of the Pakistani bishops to canonize Shabaz Bhatti? That is helping to organize a day of prayer for Asia Bibi? That is engaged in ecumenical talks with the beleaguered Patriarch of Constantinople? That hears the cries of Christians in the Balkans, victimized by the aggressive intolerance of an Islam imposed through demographic competition and Western intervention? Are there no Maronites walking around in Rome, to tell nincompoops like Abp. Tauran what happens when large numbers of Muslim refugees (like the Palestinians who swarmed into Lebanon in the 70s) flood into a previously Christian society? Are there no representatives of the hunted Assyrian Christians of Iraq, the Ethiopian Christians who are suffering persecution by Muslim gangs who represent a faith that is still (thank God) a minority in that country? Has anybody inside Vatican City ever heard of a place called the Sudan?
The Catholic Church is not an instrument of Kantian humanitarianism, but the guardian of the orthodox Christian faith, and the civilization which sustains it. How can the Vatican on the one hand complain when secularized Europeans reject the hanging of crucifixes in schools in Italy, and on the other demand that European nations admit hundreds of thousands of refugees who will soon be organizing radical mosques, outbreeding the natives, forming “no-go” zones in historically Christian cities, and demanding (as Italian Muslims already have in Bologna) that artworks in Christian cathedrals be bowdlerized to suit their sensibilities? How will a Holy See that insists that the European welfare state be harnessed to fund the reproductive habits of orthodox Muslims respond to the haughty demand of Islamic believers that they be given use of “underutilized” churches in places like Paris?
There are no legitimate arguments or precedents grounded in Christian history for demanding that one country promiscuously admit every refugee from another, regardless of the effects such an influx would have on the native citizens. The entire Germanic invasion of the Christian Roman empire in the fifth century consisted of tribes fleeing economic and political disadvantage, in search of a land of opportunity. Did St. Augustine insist that the Vandal tribes be admitted wholesale into Hippo? Did St. John Chrysostom demand that the Byzantine emperor open the gates to the Persians? Of course they didn't. They knew that the duty of secular rulers was to defend public order, preserve the liberties and property rights of their citizens, and protect their peoples from foreign colonization. Indeed, the central claim in Augustine's The City of God was that Christians would prove better citizens of the empire for their faith—not that their “higher” principles would render them civilizational traitors. If the Holy See wishes to make good the principle claimed by Abp. Tauran, it could avoid the charge of hypocrisy by a simple step: It could open the gates of the Vatican city-state to every Muslim living in Rome, and grant each of them full citizenship, along with democratic voting rights that allowed them to change its system of government. The Holy See would have to accept the inescapable outcome: a vote to remove the pope as head of state and replace him with an elected demagogue, whose first act would be to auction off all the artworks of the Church, followed by the transformation of St. Peter's Basilica into a mosque. Until and unless the Holy See is willing to put its money where its mouth is, its representatives ought to shut their mouths about the (fleeting, failing) attempts of Christian nations to defend their identities against invasion.
I think it's time for the laity to prescribe some lectio divina to the clergy: In the waning days of Lent, every prelate at the Vatican ought to spend his time meditating on the novel The Camp of the Saints.
Posted by Roland Shirk on April 15, 2011 10:35 PM
Opening the Gates of Hell
Most of the time in these pages when I have the melancholy duty of rebuking my fellow Christians for suicidal, irresponsible idiocy, conducted in the name of self-serving sentimentality or idiotic post-Christian ideology, I have at least the comfort that I am talking about liberal Protestants. This time I face the necessity of taking a large, live fish and slapping it in the face of the Vatican. Ah well, at least I read the story on a Friday in Lent, so it doesn't violate the abstinence regulations. Those of you who have particularly strong stomachs, please read the following:
Europe Is Disappointing Holy See on Immigration
Cardinal Bertone Laments Closing Borders to North Africans
VATICAN CITY, APRIL 15, 2011 (Zenit.org).- The closing of Europe's borders, given the wave of immigrants and refugees resulting from the conflicts and social crisis in several countries of North Africa, has disappointed the Holy See.
Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, Benedict XVI's secretary of state, expressed this disappointment on Tuesday, reports the semi-official Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.
"There is no doubt that Europe has disappointed profoundly" in this emergency, said the Italian cardinal. "Europe has lost its profound spirit, a spirit of great solidarity first of all among the peoples of Europe and then among other peoples. Let us think of Africa, which it has abused so much: it seems that Europe has turned its back on it."
The air attacks against Libya's regime, led by European nations, have caused the flight by land from that country of 500,000 people, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Tens of thousands of people have taken to the sea to arrive in Italy or Malta.
According to UNHCR, it is feared that in the crossing from Africa to Europe over the past two weeks, 800 emigrants have lost their lives. In addition to the 250 who died in the shipwreck April 6 in the Sicilian Channel, nothing is known of the 560 people who took to the sea in three barges that never arrived at their destination.
Despite this emergency, France and other European countries have prevented the passage of these refugees and immigrants from Italy, leaving to the latter the management of the crisis.
"We wish to raise our voice so that this Europe will find its soul again," said Cardinal Bertone, "a soul of great solidarity and generosity with these peoples who face an emergency and great needs."
Is this the same Holy See that recently received the request of the Pakistani bishops to canonize Shabaz Bhatti? That is helping to organize a day of prayer for Asia Bibi? That is engaged in ecumenical talks with the beleaguered Patriarch of Constantinople? That hears the cries of Christians in the Balkans, victimized by the aggressive intolerance of an Islam imposed through demographic competition and Western intervention? Are there no Maronites walking around in Rome, to tell nincompoops like Abp. Tauran what happens when large numbers of Muslim refugees (like the Palestinians who swarmed into Lebanon in the 70s) flood into a previously Christian society? Are there no representatives of the hunted Assyrian Christians of Iraq, the Ethiopian Christians who are suffering persecution by Muslim gangs who represent a faith that is still (thank God) a minority in that country? Has anybody inside Vatican City ever heard of a place called the Sudan?
The Catholic Church is not an instrument of Kantian humanitarianism, but the guardian of the orthodox Christian faith, and the civilization which sustains it. How can the Vatican on the one hand complain when secularized Europeans reject the hanging of crucifixes in schools in Italy, and on the other demand that European nations admit hundreds of thousands of refugees who will soon be organizing radical mosques, outbreeding the natives, forming “no-go” zones in historically Christian cities, and demanding (as Italian Muslims already have in Bologna) that artworks in Christian cathedrals be bowdlerized to suit their sensibilities? How will a Holy See that insists that the European welfare state be harnessed to fund the reproductive habits of orthodox Muslims respond to the haughty demand of Islamic believers that they be given use of “underutilized” churches in places like Paris?
There are no legitimate arguments or precedents grounded in Christian history for demanding that one country promiscuously admit every refugee from another, regardless of the effects such an influx would have on the native citizens. The entire Germanic invasion of the Christian Roman empire in the fifth century consisted of tribes fleeing economic and political disadvantage, in search of a land of opportunity. Did St. Augustine insist that the Vandal tribes be admitted wholesale into Hippo? Did St. John Chrysostom demand that the Byzantine emperor open the gates to the Persians? Of course they didn't. They knew that the duty of secular rulers was to defend public order, preserve the liberties and property rights of their citizens, and protect their peoples from foreign colonization. Indeed, the central claim in Augustine's The City of God was that Christians would prove better citizens of the empire for their faith—not that their “higher” principles would render them civilizational traitors. If the Holy See wishes to make good the principle claimed by Abp. Tauran, it could avoid the charge of hypocrisy by a simple step: It could open the gates of the Vatican city-state to every Muslim living in Rome, and grant each of them full citizenship, along with democratic voting rights that allowed them to change its system of government. The Holy See would have to accept the inescapable outcome: a vote to remove the pope as head of state and replace him with an elected demagogue, whose first act would be to auction off all the artworks of the Church, followed by the transformation of St. Peter's Basilica into a mosque. Until and unless the Holy See is willing to put its money where its mouth is, its representatives ought to shut their mouths about the (fleeting, failing) attempts of Christian nations to defend their identities against invasion.
I think it's time for the laity to prescribe some lectio divina to the clergy: In the waning days of Lent, every prelate at the Vatican ought to spend his time meditating on the novel The Camp of the Saints.
Posted by Roland Shirk on April 15, 2011 10:35 PM
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