Other Religions – Page 4

Should You Read Non-Catholic Materials?

A correspondent writes:

I am presently attending a Bible study. During our small group discussion, a question arose from someone in our group.We would like to know if it is wrong for us to read and examine other books and Bibles that are not Catholic-based to see what they have information-wise pertaining to spiritual matters. For example, we both have Life Application Study Bibles and enjoy reading the associated study footnotes.

My opinion is that the Holy Spirit guides us with discernment especially when we pray before reading or delving into other Christian denomination books and Bibles. I guard myself (my heart, mind and spirit) so that I’m not influenced in any way that could conflict with Catholic beliefs. If I’m not sure or confused about an issue (e.g., Why do we believe this and they that?”), I said I then will go to a religious authoritative person to have any questions or issues addressed or I check Internet sites like www.Catholic.com. I believe I am exercising my ‘child-like faith’ with wanting to know and love more, which draws me closer to Him and to others, while using my adult judgment. I also believe that, when we know more about other religions and philosophies (Christian, Jewish, Eastern, scientific, etc.), it helps us to practice love, respect others, and establish a common ground for our relationship and possible future discussions for witnessing for Catholicism. If I didn’t understand or have knowledge of what they believe, I may not be able to convey my Catholic beliefs and doctrines as accurately.

The other person in our small discussion group is concerned that when we read, we can be swayed / influenced to turn from our Catholic beliefs and choose another path. Are we able to guard ourselves enough (with the Holy Spirit’s assistance), spiritually and mentally, to protect our Catholic faith or is avoidance of other doctrines the answer? Is it a matter where it differs per individual and how strong their faith is (figuratively, those who are nursing vs. those eating solid food)?

Please share your opinion and feel free to correct me where I’m wrong. Thank you!

I think that you and the other person in your Bible study have valid points. There is not a one-size-fits-all answer on this one.

On the one hand, there is a great deal to be learned from non-Catholic sources, including non-Catholic religious and philosophical ones. St. Thomas Aquinas did an enormous service for the Church by showing how Christian faith can be related to the thought of non-Christian thinkers, such as (and especially) the pre-Christian philosopher Aristotle. Aquinas’s attitude was that all truth is God’s truth, and so if you find truth in a non-Christian source it not only will not contradict the Christian faith but it also will be of use to Christians. The more truth, the better!

His attitude was thus to exercise critical thinking in reading materials from non-Catholic sources (and from Catholic ones, for that matter!). Although St. Paul said it in a different context, the idea also applies here:

Test everything. Hold on to the good. Avoid every kind of evil. (1 Thessalonians 5:21-22)

This philosophy has also carried down to our day. In fact, in the books he is writing on the life of Jesus, Pope Benedict regularly interacts with the ideas of the American Rabbi Jacob Neusner, whose perspective on Jesus he finds to have value, even though he doesn’t agree with everything. (And he’s willing to reference Neusner in public—and thus implicitly encourage others to see what Neusner has to say.)

If you have a good grounding in your Catholic faith and can exercise critical thinking in what you read then there is nothing to fear in non-Catholic writings, and there is much to be learned from them! Though we have the fullness of religious truth, we do not have a monopoly on truth, and the perspectives of others can help bring out things that we as Catholics may not have known or may not have fully worked out yet.

In my own work, I use non-Catholic materials all the time. In fact, my favorite commentaries on the book of Genesis are by Jewish authors (Rashi and Nahum Sarna), there are Evangelical commentaries on certain books of the Bible that I learn a great deal from (the writings of N. T. Wright and James Dunn come to mind), and there are things to be learned even from folks who do not have any faith.

The key to being able to sift through this material and find what is good in it, though, involves more than praying to the Holy Spirit, and here is where I think your friend has a good point. One must also have a firm knowledge of your own faith in order to be able to think critically about material presented from other perspectives.

While one certainly should and must rely on the Holy Spirit for guidance, the Holy Spirit does not promise to protect us from coming to mistaken conclusions just because we pray to him. He also wants us to study, internalize, and thoroughly know our own faith. And then, with his guidance, we can approach materials from other perspectives profitably and with confidence.

Because everybody in our culture is taught to regard himself as an expert on religion from the time of birth, it is easy—often far too easy—for us to imagine that we have the kind of knowledge of our own faith that is needed to accurately identify beliefs that conflict with it. Indeed, we’d often feel insulted if someone suggested that we don’t! “What do you mean I don’t know my Catholic faith well enough to know what contradicts it!”

Yet there are a great many people who, in fact, don’t have a good grasp on the Church’s teaching even though they think they do.

And then there are people who, while they know the teaching of the Church well, may be experiencing an emotional crisis or a crisis of faith of some sort, and this would interfere with their ability to productively and serenely interact with materials from non-Catholic authors.

Certainly the safest course is to stick with Catholic materials, and as a general matter this is advisable, particularly for those who are less educated in their faith or who are going through difficult patches in their lives, but if you are well educated in your faith and able to exercise the critical thinking necessary to profitably sift what you are reading, there is nothing to fear from doing so.

There is thus no one-size-fits-all answer. It depends on each individual and where that person is in their intellectual, emotional, and spiritual journeys.

In terms of the group—since people may be at different stages of those journeys—I would recommend erring on the side of caution (a flock travels at the speed of its slowest member), and if you use non-Catholic materials (or less-reliable Catholic ones, which can even be more insidious since they may have been written by wolves in sheep’s clothing), point out their limitations and strongly caution people against using them uncritically.

I hope this helps, and best of luck!

What are your thoughts?

Eco-Fundamentalists? Hate, Actually.

Let me say up front that I have nothing against treating the environment in a responsible manner. It’s implied by the commission God gave mankind in Genesis 1. I also try to avoid fights about words, so whether one would call a responsible environmental position “conservationion” or “environmentalism” is a thing that does not need to be fought about.

But there is a very prominent strand in the environmental movement that takes matters to extreme and anti-human limits. In a previous post, I have referred to this position as environmental fundamentalism, to distinguish it from healthy concern for the environment.

I mean, nobody wants to make Iron Eyes Cody‘s iron eyes cry. Do they?

However that may be, the deeply misanthropic views and “convert-or-die” rhetoric of environmental fundamentalism was very clearly on display this week, with the release of a shock video produced by 10:10, an international initiative to get people to cut their “carbon emissions” by 10%.

Here’s the video . . . WARNING: EXTREMELY GROSS AND OFFENSIVE!

Oh, and that is Gillian Anderson of X-Files fame at the end, now sporting long blond tresses.

According to the 10:10 initiative, the script for this video was written by “Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis,” who is the director of the 2003 romantic comedy, “Love Actually.” What the video displays, however, is hate, actually. Hatred of those who disagree with you such that you find it funny to ironically lie to them (“No pressure”) and then depict their bloody and explosive deaths in graphic detail (shlurppp!) . . . even if they are children.

The Telegraph’s James Delingpole, “a writer, journalist and broadcaster who is right about everything” puts it well when he says:

With No Pressure, the environmental movement has revealed the snarling, wicked, homicidal misanthropy beneath its cloak of gentle, bunny-hugging righteousness.

Meanwhile, over at 10:10’s “media partner” The Guardian, we read the following from 10:10 founder Franny Armstrong:

“Doing nothing about climate change is still a fairly common affliction, even in this day and age. What to do with those people, who are together threatening everybody’s existence on this planet? Clearly we don’t really think they should be blown up, that’s just a joke for the mini-movie, but maybe a little amputating would be a good place to start?” jokes 10:10 founder and Age of Stupid film maker Franny Armstrong.

But why take such a risk of upsetting or alienating people, I ask her: “Because we have got about four years to stabilise global emissions and we are not anywhere near doing that. All our lives are at threat and if that’s not worth jumping up and down about, I don’t know what is.”

“We ‘killed’ five people to make No Pressure – a mere blip compared to the 300,000 real people who now die each year from climate change,” she adds.

GAH!

Well, the blowback on this one was such that 10:10 swiftly pulled its own video and issued this completely inadequate and insincere half-apology:

Sorry.

Today we put up a mini-movie about 10:10 and climate change called ‘No Pressure’.

With climate change becoming increasingly threatening, and decreasingly talked about in the media, we wanted to find a way to bring this critical issue back into the headlines whilst making people laugh. We were therefore delighted when Britain’s leading comedy writer, Richard Curtis – writer of Blackadder, Four Weddings, Notting Hill and many others – agreed to write a short film for the 10:10 campaign. Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn’t and we sincerely apologise to anybody we have offended.

As a result of these concerns we’ve taken it off our website. We won’t be making any attempt to censor or remove other versions currently in circulation on the internet.

We’d like to thank the 50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras and who gave their time and equipment to the film for free. We greatly value your contributions and the tremendous enthusiasm and professionalism you brought to the project.

At 10:10 we’re all about trying new and creative ways of getting people to take action on climate change. Unfortunately in this instance we missed the mark. Oh well, we live and learn.

Onwards and upwards,

Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie and the whole 10:10 team

The casual, breezy tone adopted by Franny, Lizzie, Eugenie, and the whole 10:10 team makes it clear that they just don’t “get it.” Note also how “many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but . . . some didn’t.”

Yeah. Nice defense of your own filmmaking in the first clause. Nice dissing of the people you’re apologizing to in the second. You’re so sincere.

And this is by no means that eco-fundamentalism has revealed its misanthropic face in the media.

Delingpole helpfully provides a link to this threatening videogram delivered by Greenpeace, in which a wee bairn stonefacedly appears to make patricidal and matricidal insinuations:

Charming lad, that.

So . . . nice to see the mask coming off.

What are your thoughts?

Are You Smarter Than an Atheist?

I am.

At least according to a quiz put out by the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life.

The quiz has 32 questions, of which atheists in America who took the quiz got an average of 20.9 questions right. American Jews got 20.5 right, American Mormons 20.3 right, American Protestants 16 right, and American Catholics 14.7 right.

I got all of them, but that’s nothing special since this is the field I work in professionally. I’m expected to know my own field. Give me a comparable quiz on another topic and watch the number plummet. I can say with great confidence that if you gave me a 32-question quiz on sports—something very large numbers of people would do very well on—I would be lucky to get even a handful of questions right.

However that may be, what are we to make of the numbers regarding the different groups? Pretty dismal for Catholics, right?

Not necessarily, and it depends on what you mean.

This is not a case of “Catholics don’t know their own faith but other groups do know theirs.” The quiz is not religion-specific. It’s pan-religious. So the majority of questions on the quiz do not relate to the faith of the person taking the quiz, but to other people’s faiths. And therein lies a significant reason for why the numbers line up as they do.

What do the three high-scoring groups have in common? They are all religious minorities in America. That’s significant because a religious minority has special reason not only to understand its own religion (so as to reinforce its intra-group religious identity) but also to understand the religions of those around it (because of the need to understand how to interact with the majority religion that surrounds it). A person in a religious minority has special reason to understand both the basics of his own faith and the basics of the majority faith. A person in the majority faith has special reason only to understand the latter.

A Jew in Israel or an atheist in China would have less reason to know the basics of Christianity than a Jew or an atheist in America.

When you look at the two mainstream American religious groups—Protestants and Catholics—they score both less than the minorities and quite close to each other (only 1.3 questions separating them, which may well be within the poll’s margin of error).

Then there’s selection bias in who chose to take the poll. Perhaps atheists are more motivated to take a (rather long) 32-question quiz than Catholics. Who knows? This is a perennial problem of surveys.

The questions in the poll are also likely to distort results in other ways, too. I counted at least three questions that were Mormon-specific but only two that were Catholic-specific. Who is that going to advantage?

There were also three questions on what public school teachers are and aren’t allowed to do in America regarding religion. That is a subject that atheists will be far more focused on (and thus likely to get right) than ordinary Christians. (It’s also worth noting that Catholics have their own parallel school system and many do not even use the public schools, giving them less reason to be familiar with the details of what is allowed.)

These last questions also aren’t actually about religion but about American politics regarding religion. Something similar applies to another set of three questions regarding what the majority religion is in particular countries (India, Indonesia, Pakistan). Those aren’t questions about religion but about the demographics of other countries. (Hey, everybody! Quick! What’s the majority religion in Gambia? It sure tells you a lot about religion if you happen to know that the answer is Islam, doesn’t it? You’re much more informed about religion if you know that.)

So . . . it’s not the most informative quiz in terms of religious knowledge. Nor is the news for Catholics as bad as the raw numbers suggest. The quiz simply isn’t a test of how much Catholics know about their own faith.

That’s not to say that Catholic religious education hasn’t been a disaster in the last generation. It has been.

That’s not exclusively the fault of the clerical class. Parents in many families did not do their part to see to their children receiving a proper religious education. But when many elements of the clerical class have been actively and deliberately subverting the teaching of Catholic doctrine, it’s going to contribute to the poor state of religious knowledge among Catholics today.

One bit of sort-of-encouraging news from the Pew survey was that 55% of Catholics were able to correctly identify their Church’s teaching regarding the status of bread and wine in the Eucharist. That’s not nearly what it should be, but it’s at least better than the Gallup poll a number of years ago that started the false rumor that it was far less.

This quiz isn’t the greatest, but quizzes are fun, so have at it . . .

ARE YOU SMARTER THAN AN ATHEIST? (Be sure to write down your answers as you go; the answers are given at the end of the last question.)

President Obama Defends Ground Zero Mosque!

In a speech at the White House on Friday—the Muslim holy day—commemorating the start of Ramadan—the Muslim holy month—President Obama expressed support for the right of Muslims to build a mosque near Ground Zero in New York City and, in fact, at the site of a building that was damaged in the 9/11 attacks when part of one of the planes used by terrorists crashed into the building’s roof.

In his usual snippy tone President Obama stated:

Let me be clear: as a citizen, and as President, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances

By the next day, he was backpedaling, stating:

I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making a decision to put a mosque there.

Okay, so he’s a politician. You gotta expect flip-flops.

And non-denial denials, which is what his second remark was. He is deliberately not telling us what he thinks about the wisdom of building a mosque at Ground Zero. Let’s take him at his word on that. He may very well think it’s a great idea. Or he may not. We don’t know because he isn’t telling. He just wanted to take some of the political edge off his remark of the previous day.

I could even give him credit for defending a legal right on the part of Muslims to build a mosque on private property “in accordance with local laws and ordinances”—assuming two things: (1) That they actually have such a legal right (the First Amendment does not guarantee the right to build a place of worship anywhere you want) and (2) if he was backed into a corner and forced to answer the question.

Whether condition (1) obtains, I don’t know. But condition (2) didn’t.

He wasn’t backed into a wall and forced to answer the question. This wasn’t a press conference where Helen Thomas (or someone) sprang the question on him. It was part of his prepared remarks for a Happy Ramadan speech. This means that he chose to put in his oar on this issue. He didn’t have to do that. He chose to.

And he chose to for political reasons—to try to curry favor with the Muslim community.

It’s a calculated risk, because in making such remarks the President also opened himself up to critique on the issue, so if it results in a net loss of political capital for him, he deserves it. He invited it.

While it’s understandable that the President getting involved would focus the spotlight on him, I think that some light also should be shown on the people who are providing the property (presumably by selling it) to the mosque builders and on the mosque builders themselves.

Why do they want to build a mosque right there?

According to their website, they’re all about “improving Muslim-West relations.”

Hmmm.

Build a mosque—a place for Muslims to worship—within two blocks of the site of the worst Muslim terrorist attack in living memory—at the site of a building that was itself damaged as part of the attack.

Let’s flip some religious identities around.

Suppose that there was a Christian terrorist organization and that it attacked an iconic site in a major Muslim city—say, the Kaaba in Mecca—and in so doing not only destroyed the site but also killed 3,000 innocent people, overwhelmingly Muslim.

Then a group of Christians, who have set about “improving West-Muslim relations” announce that they want to build a Christian cultural center and church—a place for Christians to worship—just outside the former site of the Kaaba, at the spot where once stood a building damaged in the Christian terrorist attack.

Would any of us (a) think that this really would improve relations or (b) believe claims that this was the real motive (as opposed, e.g., to being a kind of covert Christian triumphalism)?

I know the Kaaba in Mecca isn’t a direct equivalent of the World Trade Center. It is more important to Muslims than the latter was to Americans—far more so, in fact. But the point remains the same. (And yes, I know that Saudi Arabia would never allow this, but we’re doing a thought experiment to tease out an underlying principle.)

I could understand Muslims wanting to build some kind of inter-religious discussion facility near Ground Zero as a way of allowing visitors to the area to hear the message, “We are Muslims and we don’t approve of what was done here. Please don’t judge our religion by this horrible atrocity.”

But that’s not the same thing as building a mosque—a place of worship for Muslims.

One would always have to suspect the motives of the builders-of-churches-near-the-demolished-Kaaba, as well as the motives of Christians who would go there to worship, and in the same way one must suspect the motives of the builders-of-mosques-near-Ground-Zero, as well as the motives of Muslims who would go there to worship.

Something smells rotten here because something is rotten here.

This is at best a colossally tone deaf and insensitive venture (particularly so for the families who lost loved ones in the 9/11 attacks, but also for all Americans).

At worst it is something far darker.

What are your thoughts?

ISRAEL: Whose Land Is It Anyway? (Pt. 1)

Recently we were discussing the Helen Thomas broujaja and the question of who “owns” the land of Israel/Palestine inevitably arose.

I’m not going to solve that long-standing and thorny question in this blog post, but I can offer some considerations that need to be taken into account when forming an opinion on the subject.

First let me note that there is room for different opinions, here. The issue is a complex one, and people of good will can take different positions—regarding the founding of the modern state of Israel, regarding its role in God’s plan, and regarding what should happen with it in the future.

In previous comboxes, some readers asserted that support for Zionism is so important that opposition to Zionism ipso facto makes one an anti-Semite. This claim is etymologically ironic in that many of the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine are, in fact, Semites, but even allowing for this irony, it is simply not true. Zionism has been and remains controversial within the Jewish community itself.

Just to eliminate potential confusion at the outset, let’s define our terms. I will be using the term “Zionism” in two senses: (1) The belief that the modern state of Israel should have been founded and (2) the belief that the modern state of Israel should continue to exist. There are other ways in which the term can be and historically has been used, but these are the two ideas that we will interact with here.

Note that one can be a Zionist in one sense but not the other. One could be a Zionist in sense (2) only and hold that, while the modern state of Israel should not have been created, now that it has been, it has a right to defend itself and to continue to exist. On the other hand, one could be a Zionist in sense (1) only and hold—for example—that, while it was right to create the modern state of Israel, that state has morally forfeited its right to exist due to human rights violations or that while it may have been right to found the state of Israel in the 20th century, if unstable Arab states start getting nukes and a regional nuclear war is about to start then the best thing for the welfare of the Jewish people would be to leave the region.

Many Jewish people today are Zionists in both sense (1) and sense (2), though not all. There are quite a number who are sense (2) only Zionists, and an even-more-nuclear-future could give rise to a significant number of sense (1) only Zionists.

Some Jewish people are Zionists in neither sense (1) nor sense (2). This is the case, for example, with the gentlemen pictured, who are members of Neturei Karta, who hold a view that was quite common among Orthodox Jews prior to the founding of Israel.

This view is that the Jewish people should not try to control the land of Palestine on their own and that they should regain statehood there only through the coming and the actions of the Messiah. Trying to take control of Palestine prior to that point, on this view, constitutes a usurpation of God’s plan and is viewed as a violation of the three oaths held to regulate relations between the Jewish people and the nations during the present age.

Neturei Karta is by no means the only Jewish group holding this view, BTW.

These people are not anti-Semites. They don’t even deny that the Jewish people have a special title to the land of Palestine. They simply see the legitimate control of this land as an eschatological reality that should not be confused with contemporary Zionist aspirations.

I thus hope that the difference between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is a little more clear and that we can discuss the issue without people wanting to automatically play the anti-Semitism card.

That said: Who owns the land?

There are two main perspectives from which this question needs to be evaluated: the prophetic and the ethical. In this post we’ll look at the prophetic perspective.

Many here in America have reflexively treated the prophetic aspect of the question as unambiguous and definitive: God promised Israel the land in the Old Testament, and so it’s theirs. Case closed.

But prophesy often is not so straightforward in its interpretation or application. God also made it clear that, if Israel committed certain sins—or sins of a certain character and magnitude—that it would be dispossessed of its land, at least for periods of time. And there are passages warning the Jewish people to submit to their conquerors and that they will not be restored to the land for a set time and things like that.

There is also the question of the way in which many Old Testament prophesies have found fulfillment through Christ in ways that would not have been expected previously. The impact that this phenomenon has on the promises regarding the land is something that cannot be ignored.

For its part, the Catholic Church acknowledges that the Jewish people still have a special role in God’s plan. That’s something I’ve written about before. But the Church does not teach that the Jewish people have a right to possess the land of the modern state of Israel in the present day by divine promise. In fact, the Holy See has studiously avoided saying that.

It has even gone so far, in its 1993 Fundamental Agreement with Israel, to state:

The Holy See, while maintaining in every case the right to exercise its moral and spiritual teaching-office, deems it opportune to recall that, owing to its own character, it is solemnly committed to remaining a stranger to all merely temporal conflicts, which principle applies specifically to disputed territories and unsettled borders [art. 11:2].

In its specific application, this passage is referring to disputed territories like the West Bank and Gaza rather than to the territory of Israel as a whole, but the same principle applies in general. The Holy See treats the question of what people have title to what territory as a temporal affair and thus something that goes beyond the Church’s purview. The Church can certainly raise moral objections to various courses of action, like trying to forcibly kick out the people who currently have title to a territory. But the question of who has title is treated as a temporal rather than theological issue. The Church does not hold that any particular people has an immutable divine right to a particular territory.

This is not to say that a Catholic could not hold that Israel does have a right to the land in the present day due to God’s promise. That is an opinion within the realm of permitted theological speculation. But it is not something the Church has signed off on. The Church has remained conspicuously neutral on that theological question as it applies in our age.

One could thus hold the opinion that the Jewish people have a right to that land in our day, that they have a right to the land but not in our day (perhaps at the Second Coming or near it, if we are not now near it), or that they no longer have a special right to the land. Each view is permitted.

This deals with the subject from the prophetic perspective. What about the ethical one?

That will be the subject of our next post.

In the meantime: What are your thoughts?

Why So Few Gospels?

A correspondent writes:

I’m just in need of a helping hand from you, because I’m in the middle of a debate with a muslim friend.

While we’re in the middle of discussion, he happen to addressed me with a question that blew me away, because I don’t have any idea on how I could tackle his question.

This is what he said, “Could you also tell me that there are hundreds of Gospels, then how come only four made it through the New Testament?”

I know that the “Books or Gospels” contained in the New Testament are all inspired by the Holy Spirit, but I think there are much more broader explanation regarding this matter.

I hope you could give me a helping hand regarding this subject Sir. I would really appreciate it if you could give me at least a brief explanation and answer regarding this.

The correspondent is correct that the canonical gospels are inspired by the Holy Spirit and false gospels aren’t. The question is how the Holy Spirit guided the Church into a recognition of which were inspired and which weren’t.

Here’s how that happened . . .

I don’t know that there are literally hundreds of gospels (that would mean 200 or more), but there are a large number of purported gospels that were written between A.D. 100 and A.D. 400. There may have been hundreds written back then (and people continue to crank out false gospels even today, like the Aquarian Gospel of Levi), but only a few dozen survive from those centuries.

The reason that they are not in the New Testament is that they are all fakes. The Church recognized them as such because (1) they often theologically contradicted the canonical gospels that had been passed down from the apostles and their associates and (2) they showed up out of nowhere, with no history of having been read in the churches down through the years.

The canonical gospels, by contrast, all date from the first century, they were written by the apostles or their associates, they were given to the first churches to read, and the churches read them all the way down through history. Also, the doctrine contained in them agreed with the doctrine passed down by the apostles to the bishops and handed on by them.

The later-written “gospels” thus were spotted as phonies because they had not been passed down like the others and they contained bad doctrine.

Eventually, as a warning to the faithful who might be confused by the new gospels, some of the early Church councils—like Rome in 382, Hippo in 393, and Carthage in 397 (among others)—published official canon lists naming the specific books of Scripture that had been handed down as sacred from the time of the apostles.

Incidentally, the image is Matthew 23:3-15 from an Arabic New Testament. (Note also that it reads from right to left.)

Hope this helps!

Former Muslim Martyr Saints

Over at the First Things blog First Thoughts there is a post in which a (necesssarily) unnamed missionary in the Middle East is quoted as follows:

In August of 2008 a young lady named Fatima al-Mutayri, age 26, was martyred in Saudi Arabia. She is from that country and became a Christian there by means of internet and satellite TV ministries, and was martyred there—she had her tongue cut out and was burned to death by her brother, who was carrying out the command of the Prophet who said, “who changes his religion, kill him” (man badala diinahu faqataluuhu).

This is, of course, horiffic. Words cannot convey the emotions that such an incident calls forth.

The missionary goes on to as some thought provoking questions, and I was asked for an opinion on them, so I'll do my best.

The missionary continues:

She was most certainly a Christian. I suspect that she was baptized but do not know for certain. And here is my two-part question: first, was she in full communion with Rome? I believe that she knew nothing of the debates between Catholics and Protestants. Moreover, I don’t think she ever had access to becoming a Catholic because the Catholic Church does not evangelize in Saudi Arabia and, of course, there no actual church buildings in that country.

The Catholic Church doesn't evangelize openly in Saudi Arabia, for obvious reasons, but there are certainly Catholics there who share their faith in an underground way, and these are able to baptize people, so the absence of above-ground evangelization and the lack of church buildings would be a practical impediment to a Catholic baptism but not something that would have made it altogether impossible.

So if she was baptized, it was at least possible that she was secretly baptized in an explicitly Catholic ceremony. If so, she would have by that fact been placed in full communion with the Catholic Church.

But let's suppose, as is likely, that if she was baptized that it was not in a Catholic ceremony. What then?

My understanding is that in former centuries it was common to regard any baptism as a Catholic one unless there was an express intent otherwise. On this view a person who was baptized with no specific knowledge of the Catholic Church would be regarded as a Catholic up until such time as the person might learn of and repudiate the Catholic understanding of the Christian faith.

Apart from very usual circumstances–especially in the Internet age–this kind of situation would be unlikely to arise, and current canon law seems to handle the situation differently.

The Code does not spell it out in the detail I would like, but the Green Commentary on the Code summarizes what I take to be common canonical opinion on the matter, which is that a person receiving baptism from a non-Catholic is held to be a non-Catholic unless there is a conscious intent for the person to be Catholic–for example, you are on a desert island and, before you die, you want to be baptized Catholic and the only person there is a Methodist, but he is willing to baptize you so you can be Catholic. (See the paragraph starting on the botton of the first column and its continuation in the second column, here.)

We don't have any evidence (so far as I know) that Fatima specifically intended to be Catholic if she was baptized, so it would be presumed that she wouldn't have been–that she would have been reckoned as a member of whatever specific church she was baptised into (if any) or just as a "generic Christian" if she was baptized non-denominationally.

At least the way such matters would be handled now, mere ignorance of disputes between Protestants and Catholics would not result in a baptism performed by a non-Catholic putting the baptizand in full communion with the Catholic Church.

I also wouldn't be quick to underestimate Fatima's awareness of the fact that there are different kinds of Christians. She was, it is reported, a Arabic-language blogger, and any amount of poking around on the Internet will reveal that there are different kinds of Christians. The pope being in the news on al-Jazeera and other Arabic news stations will result in awareness of the same thing. Fatima is supposed to have watched al-Haya (a Christian Arabic channel) and seen the programs of Fr. Zakaria Botros, who is Coptic. She also was involved with a significant variety of Christians on the Internet, and I strongly suspect she knew about Christian differences.

Does that mean she intended to join a specific Christian group upon her baptism? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe she just wanted to be a Christian and would figure out the who-to-affiliate-with question later (or never). No one can really say unless someone who knew her were to come forth and shed light on the subject.

On the other hand, maybe she wasn't sacramentally baptized at all. (We've been making a lot of assumptions thus far.)

In that case she could be described as having "baptism of desire"–either implicitly or explicitly–by virtue of her adopting the Christian faith. She also could be described as having "baptism of blood" by virtue of her death for the faith.

These would suffice for salvation (nothing else standing in the way), praise God!

But they would not place her in full communion with the Catholic Church in this life.

The missionary then asks another ques
tion:

And second: given this information, is it possible for her to be canonized? The canonization of an ex-Muslim woman who was born, lived, and died in Saudi Arabia, and who was martyred by her own family, would be perhaps the single most powerful statement that the Church has made on Islam since Vatican II (hardly a clear statement, and one that led many Catholics to believe, incorrectly, that the Church no longer was interested in evangelizing Muslims).

Vatican II's statement regarding Islam could definitely have been better phrased, and canonizing Fatima would indeed be a powerful statement. And if the circumstances were different, it could even be a possibility. It would not, however, be done as a statement on Islam. Instead, it would be a statement about the heroic virtues of this young woman who accepted martyrdom for her love of Jesus.

Pope Benedict certainly has the wherewithal to do such a canonization. He personally–as pope, at Easter Vigil–baptized the notorious Muslim apostate Maghdi Allam. Allam is a firebrand and a controversialist who repeatedly got into disputes with Muslims in Italy long before his conversion to Catholicism, and now there are pictures of the pope baptizing him and everything.

Pope Benedict did this not as a statement about Islam but as an illustration of the Church's willingness to accept everyone, regardless of their background, and of the right of everyone to embrace the gospel.

Given his willingness to do this, I have little doubt that he would be willing to canonize a former Muslim who was martyred for the faith. (Providing it was a genuine martyrdom; early in his papacy Pope Benedict notably clarified what martyrdom is to prevent the concept from being used sloppily.)

I can easily imagine Benedict asking, "Should we deny canonization to someone who died for the faith simply because the person who killed them was Muslim? Why should Muslims be an exception? If we do not deny canonization to one who was martyred by atheists or polytheists or any other group, why should we do so in this situation? Is their heroic witness to Christ worth less because their killers were Muslim?"

So I don't doubt that Benedict would be willing to do this . . . if the circumstances were different.

But they are what they are.

At least at this time, we don't have evidence that Fatima entered full commmunion with the Catholic Church in her life or that he had embraced the Catholic faith specifically at the time of her baptism by blood. Consequently, I don't see grounds for her canonization.

That's not to say that she's not in heaven and is not, in fact, a saint. If the facts are as described, I am very, very hopeful of her salvation and thus her objective sainthood (I can't say I'm certain, because in this life we can never be certain), but the Church tends only to canonize those who were members of it or who were intending to be members of it at the time of their martyrdom.

If evidence were to emerge that overcame this hurdle, there would still be many others, of a practical nature, that would have to be overcome before canonization could occur.

There would have to be someone petitioning for her canonization, and the relevant local bishop would have to oversee the initial phase of the process. That would be tricky since there are no bishops in Saudia Arabia.

Investigating the case would also prove difficult since, so far as we know, there were no witnesses outside the family. Unless one or more of them decided to speak freely on the subject and describe what happened at the end, investigators would not be able to distinguish evidentially between a scenario in which she maintained her faith to the end and a scenario in which she renounced her faith at the last moment but was too injured to survive (or was killed anyway out of rage).

Given the sensitivity of the subject in Saudi society, getting any people with knowlege of the situation–even non-family members who weren't eyewitnesses–to speak freely could be very difficult.

Internet hearsay is not enough, given the difficulties of verifying it.

One of the first things I did in preparing to write this post was to do some checking to see if I could verify that Fatima al-Martayri even existed. I don't want to be overly skeptical, but there is a reason God created Snopes.com.

While I wasn't able to find the kind of evidence I would have liked (perhaps because it's largely in the Arabic-language Internet), I was eventually able to find and verify enough pieces of the story that it looks like it's real.

(I also verified that Mutayri is real clan and thus "al-Mutayri" is not simply an Arabic term for "the Martyr.")

Even then, though, details of the story diverge. Some sources say that it was her father who killed her. Others (who seem to be the majority) say that it was her brother (though it may only have been him who exposed her). Details also differ over whether she was 23 or 26 and whether the murder occurred in Qassim Province or in the Eastern Province. (One source, which claims to be a Muslim friend of Fatima but who nevertheless disapproved of the killing, tries to set the record straight; I'll link the source below
).

These facts aren't to say that the matter couldn't be sorted out, but they illustrate the problems of fact-finding in such a situation.

I thus don't see a plausible path to canonization for Fatima.

But we may still pray for her and all in similar situations–and there are many of those. (I know; I've dealt with delicate situations like this, with people behind the Muslim curtain who wish to be Christian. Fortunately, none of the ones I've dealt with have suffered Fatima's fate–yet.)

(And if anyone wonders why one might pray for a martyr–it may be a common and pious belief that martyrs go straight to heaven, but this isn't a doctrine of the Church; I'd rather pray on the safe side, trusting God at least to apply the prayers to the person cross-temporally in their final moments of life.)

A further note about Fatima: If she is in heaven, as an uncanonized saint, then her feast day is November 1st–All Saints Day.

At the First Thoughts blog, Joseph Bottum–who authored the post–has some additional insightful things to say, but he doesn't go into it at this length. (I'm long winded–at least if you don't give me a word count. Sorry.)

Oh, and as Lt. Columbo would say, there's one more thing . . .

If Fatima's case doesn't present a good instance for the canonization of a former Muslim who was martyred for faith in Christ, it should be pointed out that the Church actually does have saints who were former Muslims, such as St. Josephine Bakhita and St. Casilda of Toledo.

Furthermore, the Church also has saints who were former Muslims who were martyred by Muslims for their Christian faith. These include St. Abo the Perfumer, St.s Nunilo and Alodia of Huesca, and St.s Aurelius, Natalia, and Felix of Cordoba.

They may not be modern, contemporary individuals like Fatima, but they trod the same path, suffered the same fate, and may serve as inspiring examples for the many, many people today who yearn for Christ while being forced to live in the Islamic world.

May those in such situations look to them, and may their intercession guide us all.

You Are Probably Perfectly Safe

(AP Photo)

I find this story amusing on several levels. It seems, according to this AP story at Fox News,
that atheists in London plan to buy advertising – in the form of
posters – on thirty or so city buses, in order to promote their cheery
and robust philosophy.

The signs are to read "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.".

Probably.

They
hope, I'm sure, to present the bright side of the idea that the
universe is meaningless and empty. That is to say, since your life and
your relationships have no ultimate meaning at all, you can do as you
please and enjoy yourself. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow you
(and everyone) will be a mere sack of inert chemicals and will
thereafter dissolve into your composite elements and that will be
that… probably.

You can rest assured that there is no eternal
judge, no one to pay out justice and mercy, no life after death, no
heaven or hell… that is, very likely not.

At least
these signs acknowledge, in a backhanded way, that this is the most
that Science™ could possibly have to say against the existence of
God… "we see no scientific evidence for it". Admittedly, Richard
Dawkins (who contributed a good chunk of the money for this charitable
enterprise) doesn't like the "probably" part, which was a qualifier
more or less forced on the atheists by the bus company in order (in
their view) to keep from positively offending religious folk. He sees
no reason to place these kinds of limits on his philosophical hubris by
leaving room for the possibility of being in error. He knows
there is no God with exactly the same level of self assurance that
Pierre Pachet had when he declared that Louis Pasteur's theory of germs
was a "ridiculous fiction" or that Lord Kelvin experienced as he
announced that "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.".

But
the bus company (apparently afraid of running afoul of their own
advertising guidelines) insisted on some kind of qualifier, which turns
out to be the only sane or entertaining bit of the entire sentence in
which it appears. The second sentence is simply inane and could have
been tagged on by any group; Buddhists – "Life is an illusion. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."… Muslims – "There is no God but God, and Mohamed is His Prophet. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."… Insurance companies – "ABC Insurance is rated #1 in customer service. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.".

There
is entailed in this also the curious idea that atheists now find
evangelism and missionary work – that is, assertively trying to convert
people out of their own presently held beliefs – to be quite
commendable. Given that this has been a favorite charge against the
Church – that we don't respect others' right to their own beliefs and
culture, that we won't let things be – this is quite a step for
atheists. They now give tacit assent to the importance of "spreading
the good news", and it is refreshing and comforting that we now enjoy
their understanding and sympathy, at least on that point. Truth is
truth, after all, and sharing the truth with people is a good thing in
itself, apart from concerns about cultural niceties or hurt feelings.

The campaign was conceived, appropriately enough, by a comedy writer, Ariane Sherine, who the article states

…came up with the idea after
seeing a series of Christian posters on London buses. She said she
visited the Web site promoted on one ad and found it told nonbelievers
they would spend eternity in torment in hell.

"I
thought it would be a really positive thing to counter that by putting
forward a much happier and more upbeat advert, saying 'Don't worry,
you're not going to hell,'" said Sherine, 28. "Atheists believe this is the only life we have, and we should enjoy it."

She goes on –

"A lot of people say trying to organize atheists is like herding cats. The last couple of days shows that is not true"

This
concept of organized atheists made two things spring to mind; for one
thing, I wondered if later generations of young free-thinking atheists
will be fond of saying to their exasperated atheist parents, "I believe
in atheism, just not organized atheism".

Secondly,
I tried to remember what organized atheism has looked like in recent
history and couldn't get out of my head images of the disciplined,
assembly-line columns of Hitler's stormtroopers, the gulags of Soviet
Russia and the killing fields of Pol Pot. They kept appearing behind my
eyes, like a cloud of gnats that won't be waved away. But then, history
has never been my field, and I'm sure I must have overlooked the
numerous benevolent regimes of the more kindly organized atheist states.

There are some sensible London theists who are responding, I think in an appropriate way to the hubbub;

The religious think tank
Theos said it had donated $82 to the campaign, on the grounds that the
ads were so bad they would probably attract people to religion.

"It
tells people to 'stop worrying,' which is hardly going to be a great
comfort for those who are concerned about losing jobs or homes in the
recession," said Theos director Paul Woolley.

"Stunts like this demonstrate how militant atheists are often great adverts for Christianity."

(Visit Tim Jones' blog Old World Swine

PZ Myers Won’t Like This

The PZ Myers Must Be Fired post now has over 1,000 comments, and I’ve noticed that a lot of people who don’t normally hang out on the blog have been commenting, including people who don’t normally hang out on Catholic blogs from what I can tell.

I know some other Catholic blogs have linked the post (thanks, guys!), but I couldn’t help wondering if the post was showing up in some search results.

So I Googled "pz myers"–that’s it, nothing else, nothing about firing–and this is what turned up:

Coming up next . . . something (anything!) that has nothing to do with PZ Myers!

P. Z. Myers Must Be Fired

I am not going to provide an extensive response to P. Z. Myers’ recent desecration of the Eucharist, along with pages from the Qur’an.

I will simply say that he must be fired.

Although he carried out his action. in his words, to support the idea that "Nothing must be held sacred" (also trashing a few pages of The God Delusion, a book with which he is in sympathy), he did not merely tell people that nothing must be held sacred. Nor did he argue for it. Claiming that nothing must be held sacred or proposing arguments for this proposition are a subject that can be discussed in a civil, respectful manner.

Instead, P. Z. Myers surreptitiously obtained and then desecrated something that is held most sacred by numerous individuals. He went out of his way to offend, to provoke the most deeply held sentiments of others, and he did so in full knowledge of what he was doing, as witnessed by the fact that he complains repeatedly on his blog about all of the outraged complaints he has been receiving from Catholics via e-mail.

In desecrating what Catholics hold most sacred–and what Muslims hold sacred as well–P. Z. Myers has fundamentally compromised himself as an educator.

He has made himself unsuitable for employment as an educator.

In particular, he has made himself unsuitable for employment as an educator at a state-run school, such as the University of Minnesota Morris.

It would be one thing if an employee of a private school–say, Bob Jones University–had desecrated the Eucharist. But state schools have a special responsibility to the citizens of the state to employ educators who will be respectful in their conduct towards the students, parents, alumni, and citizens of the state–including the Catholic and Muslim ones.

P. Z. Myers has demonstrated that he will go out of his way to offend the sensibilities of anybody who holds anything sacred, to treat whatever they hold sacred with public contempt. The problem thus is not limited to Catholics and Muslims. Since, in Myers own words, "Nothing must be held sacred," and since he is willing to desecrate anything that others do hold sacred, the university must conclude that Myers is willing not only to outrage Catholic and Muslim students, parents, alumni, and citizens but members of any other group as well.

Myers is thus incapable of effectively carrying out his mission as an educator and his position must be terminated.

He also is in violation of the University of Minnesota Code of Conduct, which holds that faculty members "must be committed to the highest ethical standards of conduct" (II:2) and that "Ethical conduct is a fundamental expectation for every community member. In practicing and modeling ethical conduct, community members are expected to: act according to the highest ethical and professional standards of conduct [and] be personally accountable for individual actions" (III:1).

It also stresses that faculty members must "Be Fair and Respectful to Others. The University is committed to tolerance, diversity, and respect for differences. When dealing with others, community members are expected to: be respectful, fair, and civil . . . avoid all forms of harassment . . . [and] threats . . . [and] promote conflict resolution."

P. Z. Myers has done none of these things. He is in fundamental breach of the University of Minnesota’s Code of Conduct and must be discharged.

To voice your opinion on this subject, contact the offices of the president and the chancellor:

President Robert H. Bruininks
202 Morrill Hall
100 Church Street S.E.
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Via phone: 612-626-1616
Via fax: 612-625-3875
Via e-mail: upres@umn.edu

Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson
309 Behmler Hall
600 East 4th Street
Morris, MN 56267

320-589-6020
E-mail: grussing@morris.umn.edu