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July 20, 2006

Egypt: Islam not Moderate when it Comes to Apostasy

This article, found via Isaac Schrodinger, explores the response of the Catholic Church to apostates from Islam who convert to Catholicism. My evaluation: not good. This happens because there is a fundamental contradiction between the goal of protecting Christians and the Church's pacifist tendencies. The desire to "maintain the peace", whether from conviction or cowardice should be reconsidered in light of Islam's nature.

Here is the article: "Moderate" Islam in Egypt - But not for Converts to the Christian Faith

ROMA - Broken by the very well-informed agency "AsiaNews" of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions, the news of the arrest in Egypt of citizens guilty only of being ex-Muslim Christians sheds new light on the dangers encountered by those who convert from Islam to another faith.

The dangers are there even in the West, for Muslims who convert. These protect their decision with a thousand precautions. And the Church does the same toward those who convert to the Christian faith. About their preparation for baptism, the Italian bishops¿ conference published in 2000 a booklet of instructions. The first: "From the initial greeting, it is important to guarantee discretion." Even the total number of baptisms is kept secret. It is known that, in Italy, approximately one half of the converts are Albanian: and these face the least danger, because in Albania Islam is almost exclusively a nominal religion, with very little social command. But for the Maghrebs, or the Syrians, or the Pakistanis, the risk is serious. Both the Muslim community at home and their own family ban them like apostates. It can happen that their very lives hang by a thread.

Muslim Kurds are another island of relative tolerance toward the converts. Daniel Ali embraced Christianity while he was still living in northern Iraq and fighting against Saddam Hussein. He emigrated to the United States in 1993, was baptized in 1995, and in 1998 entered the Catholic Church. Working together with the Jesuit expert in Arabic studies Mitch Pacwa, he has created a "Christian-Islamic Forum" and travels around the U.S. to preach Christianity to other Muslims.

But a clandestine life is the rule almost everywhere in the world. And on the part of the Catholic Church, there is a widespread tendency to respond to this situation simply by refusing to "create the problem"; that is, to proselytize among Muslims. An Italian director of the Fondazione Migrantes, who asked to remain anonymous, has worked for years with Tunisian Muslims and says: "We decided not to encourage conversion to Christianity in any way, no matter what cardinal Giacomo Biffi thinks about it." The bellicose cardinal has exactly the opposite conviction: "Preaching and baptizing are statutory duties of the Church. For all. Jesus did not command us to preach the gospel to all creatures except for the Muslims, the Jews, and the Dalai Lama."[...]

Posted by Ruy Diaz at July 20, 2006 10:00 AM

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