Fr. Z's Blog

Benedict XVI has been engaged in a fight for the soul of Europe, but the scope of the war is far wider.

Catholics have a role to play.

I have often written about what I call Pope Benedict’s "Marshall Plan".  After WWII, the USA helped rebuild Europe so it would be a good trading partner and would be a bulwark against encroaching communism.

Benedict XVI is trying to revitalize our Catholic identity so that we have an effect in the world once again.  This is especially true for Europe… or as Oriana Falaci popularized it "Eurabia".  There is another encroachment going on in Europe.  Pope Benedict has been concerned about the loss of Christian identity in Europe for a very long time.  There is not only a loss of Christian identity – without which Europe is no longer Europe – but also a real threat from without: Islam.

This threat is being realized in the USA.  If it succeeds, the results will be far worse then the mere loss of Europe.

I recently starting reading The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America by former federal prosecutor and terrorism expert Andrew C. McCarthy.  I urge you to think about reading this book.  People in the UK and Europe should read it as well (a link to it on Amazon.co.uk). In case anyone thinks that this guy is shooting from the hip, there are 60 pages of end notes!

Now a priest reader, Fr. GR, alerted me to this on Roger’s Rules to which I add my emphases and comments:

Islam vs. the West: What you need to know

Posted By Roger Kimball On July 31, 2010

My college Greek tutor used to tell the story of his college Greek tutor, who would end every class by stepping to the blackboard, writing down two or three points, and saying, “Gentlemen, this is the irreducible minimum you should take away from this class.”

Let me emulate that example and offer the irreducible minimum you should take away from the news today. It’s from the indispensable Andy McCarthy over at National Review Online. His column is called “It’s about Sharia,” and the irreducible minimum I’d like to highlight is this striking proposition:

“Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.”

Please, commit that to memory. Think of it every time someone tells you that Islam means “peace” or starts making excuses for the latest chapter in the annals of Islam’s war against the West.

For that’s what were talking about here: Islam’s war against the West. It’s not Islam’s misuse of commercial airliners, its penchant for sawing off the heads of people they disapprove of, or even its profound lack of sympathy for bacon. No, it’s Islam’s fundamental, essential  incompatibility with foundational Western values like free speech, the separation of church and state, and equality under the law. Such things are not simply missing from Islam: they are positively repudiated by Islam, a fact that is ingredient in the very word “Islam,” which, pace the multiculturalists, means not “peace” but “submission,” i.e., submission to the will of Allah.

Many well-meaning  people, I know,  will shudder when they hear this. Islam is “a great religion.” How could it be fundamentally incompatible with all those good things we like to celebrate in the West? Women’s rights, religious toleration, not to mention Chateauneuf-du-Pape and kindred potations. Aren’t we beyond all that hawkish, “divisive” talk about the “conflict of civilizations”? Very possibly — if wishes were horses, which they are not; ergo, etc.  Cf. Matthew 13:43: “He who has ears, let him hear.”

Andy’s column is a gloss on an important speech that Newt Gingrich delivered at the American Enterprise Institute a few days ago. Newt’s key insight is that we are engaged not in a war against terror but a war against Sharia, i.e., Islamic law. Would that our current masters in Washington had as clear-eyed an appreciation of the nature of the conflict in which we are immersed. “Gingrich,” Andy writes, “is going about the long-overdue business of resetting our understanding of the civilizational jihad that has been waged against the United States for some 31 years.” He continues:

“The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. . . .

Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. [Feminist on the political left are really going to love this part.  Ironic that they are working for this very thing.  True freedom for women – and everyone else – comes only from traditional Judeo-Christian values.] It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.”

One further point. The main front in the battle between the party of freedom and the party of Jihad is not unfolding in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or even in the colonized bits of Europe. It is here in the United States. [It is also in Europe.]  The Ayatollah Khomeini used to refer to America as “the Great Satan” not because he thought we America was the embodiment of evil (though he may well have thought that, too) but rather because America epitomized everything about the West that tempted good Muslims to abandon that which made them Muslims: their belief in, and adherence to, Sharia, i.e., a view of the world that embraced the will of Allah as the last word about, well, about everything. There is no “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” in Islam because Caesar, i.e., the secular realm, has no independent claims at all.  Allah is it and Sharia describes the implementation of his law.

Andy McCarthy and Newt are right:

“The war is about the survival of Western civilization, [Absolutely.] and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly.  . . .

Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former.”

To which I will only add, Amen. [Do I head an "Amen!"?]

We need to revitalize our Catholic identity.

To this end we need liturgical worship worthy of the name.