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Is Dealing with Islam the Next Pope's Great Challenge?

With the passing of John Paul II, a number of Church and geopolitical analysts are hoping that the conclave will elect as the next leader of Catholicism a man conversant with the world’s second-largest religion: Islam. Christianity is the world’s largest religion, with over 2 billion adherents and the Roman Catholic Church accounts for about 1.1 billion of those, while there are 1.3 billion Muslims. (And contrary to popular belief Christianity, not Islam, is the world’s fastest-growing religion1 with its explosive growth in places like Africa and China.) In that regard, it would be fruitful to ascertain what the Catholic Church’s official view of Islam is here in the early 21st century.

That might depend, in the famous formulation of a former U.S. president, “on what your definition of ‘official,’ is.” The Vatican’s modern stance toward Islam—like its stance on many issues—underwent a sea chance with the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) in the early 1960s. From the Middle Ages until then the doctrine articulated by Pope Boniface VIII (d. 1303) of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“outside the [Catholic] church, no salvation”) was operative, and although it was aimed at erring Christians (mainly the Eastern Orthodox), it also held doubly for non-Christian heretics like Muslims. In the 20 th century Pope Benedict XV (d. 1922) saw non-Christians as pitiable creatures living under a cloud of eternal damnation, and Pius XII (d. 1958) reiterated that only conversion to Christianity could save. 2 But the Church does not consist of the Curia alone, and since the Renaissance another train of thought had been gathering steam in Catholic intellectual circles, more expansive and philosophically-minded, which post-Enlightenment included scholars of comparative religion, Arabic and quite a few “Orientalists,” led by the great French scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon.3 By the 1960s their views of Islam would help shape the relevant sections of the Vatican II documents Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate.

Nostra Aetate was originally intended only to deal with the Catholic theological stance towards Judaism, but Arab Catholic, Maronite and Coptic bishops argued that a statement that did that and ignored Muslims was not politically viable.4 Thus Nostra Aetate would ultimately state that,

The Church has also a high regard for the Muslims. They worship God, who is one…the Creator of heaven and earth….They strive to submit themselves…just as Abraham submitted himself to God’s plan….Although not acknowleding him as God, they venerate Jesus as a prophet, his virgin Mother they also honor….Further, they await the day of Judgment and the reward of God following the resurrection of the dead. For this reason they highly esteem an upright life and worship God, especially by way of prayer, alms-deeds and fasting.5

In the same expansive, tolerant vein the Council, in Lumen Gentium, had this to say:

[T]he plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, In the first place amongst whom are the Moslems [sic]: these profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God, mankind’s judge on the last day.6

Yet the Council also stressed that while “the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy” in other religions such as Islam, “she proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth and the life.”7

Some Catholic theologians think that even these statements do not go far enough in admitting the inherent truths of Islam. The maverick theologian Hans Küng, despite his lack of Islamic Studies credentials, has weighed in on this, arguing that the New Testament allows for post-Messiah prophets and that Muhammad should be viewed as such.8 Even in more mainstream Catholic circles the validity of Muhammad’s prophethood is accepted by some, such as the Franciscan Islamicist Giulio Basetti-Sani9 and a past president of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Michael Scanlon, who categorically states that Muhammad disclosed the God of the Old Testament to the Arabs.10

Ultimately, however widespread this promotion of theological tolerance may be among some Catholic academics, they pale in importance next to papal pronouncements and actions. And based on many of his actions, John Paul II was influenced by broadmindedness toward Islam. He was the first pope to enter a Muslim house of worship, when he spoke at the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus in 2001. There he invoked the importance of John the Baptist to both Christians and Muslims (to whom he is known as Yahya) and of Mary the mother of Jesus, as well as reiterated the call for “respectful dialogue.”11 At a general audience in early 1999, the pope stated that “we Christians joyfully recognize the religious values we have in common with Islam,”12 a belief he had first stressed when speaking to Muslim youth in Morocco in 1985.13 But perhaps John Paul II’s most systematic treatment of Islam is found in his chapter on “Muhammad” in his 1994 book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope.14 There his holiness’ openness to Islam was tempered by a more traditional Christian view. For example, he said that “whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the Koran [sic], clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation….In Islam all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside.”15 And this: “Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad.”16 He also mentioned that “fundamentalist attitudes…make reciprocal contacts very difficult,” because for Islamic fundamentalists “religious freedom comes to mean freedom to impose on all citizens ‘true religion.’”17 However, the pope did conclude that chapter by reiterating “all the same, the Church remains always open to dialogue and cooperation.”18

So, the official stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward Islam can perhaps best be described as “tolerant disagreement.” Such a position is of course anathema to newspaper editors and the American intelligentsia, for whom nothing short of open, uncritical acceptance of every belief system (well, except for Christianity) is pilloried as tantamount to theocratism. Thank God that the cardinals who choose the next pope will not take their cues from such secular unitarians. Most Christians (even we non-Catholics) know that disagreeing with another’s religion does not grease the slippery slope to the Inquisition. The conclave might do well to elect a man such as Joseph Arinze of Nigeria (50 percent Muslim, 40 percent Christian) or Ivan Dias of India (majority Hindu, but ruled by Muslims for centuries). Either man as pope would constitute a “twofer,” as he would (presumably) not only know something about Islam but give the Church a non-white, non-First World leader.

But ultimately, can even the pope change the hearts and minds of the al-Qa`idah members of the world and their sympathizers? Recall that the open-mindedness toward another religion in Christian-Muslim dialogue comes almost entirely from the former. On the other side, only some Sufis (the minority of Muslims who are mystics) and modernist Muslims (an even smaller subset than Sufis) are willing to grant Christianity the same level of legitimacy that the Catholic Church has for four decades granted Islam. Note that the rector of al-Azhar in Cairo, the most prestigious religious institution in Sunni Islam, recently asked the Vatican to apologize for the Crusades.19 The next pope should only agree, on one condition: that al-Azhar apologize for the Muslim conquests and occupation of Syria, Egypt, Turkey, North Africa and Spain. When that happens, we’ll know that true religious dialogue is underway.

1 See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

2 William R. Burrows, “Tensions in the Catholic Magisterium about Mission and Other Religions,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research, vol. 9., nos 2-4 (Jan. 1985), pp. 2-4.

3 Georges Anawati, O.P., “An Assessment of the Christian-Islamic Dialogue,” in Kail Ellis, O.S.A., ed., the Vatican, Islam and the Middle East (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1987), p. 53.

4 Kail Ellis, O.S.A., “ Vatican II and Contemporary Islam,” New Catholic World, vol. 231, no. 1386 (Nov./Dec. 1988), pp. 269ff.

5 Austin Flannery, O.P., gen. ed., Vatican Council II, vol. I, Nostra Aetate ( Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company, Inc., 1987), pp. 739-740.

6Ibid., Lumen Gentium, p. 367.

7 John 1:6.

8 Hans K üng, Christianity and the World Religions, trans. Peter Heinegg ( Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1986), pp. 27ff.

9 Giulio Basetti-Sani, O.F.M, The Koran [sic] in the Light of Christ (Chicago: Francisan Herald Press, 1977), p. 203

10 Michael Scanlon, O.S.A., “Fidelity to Monotheism: Christianity and Islam,” in Ellis, The Vatican, Islam and the Middle East, pp. 43ff.

11 “Pope John Paul II-Address at Omayyad [sic] Mosque of Damascus-6 May 2001, www.catholic-forum.com/saints/pope0264qr.htm

12 “Muslims and Christians Adore the One God,” www.ewtn.com/library/PAPALDOC/JP2MUSLM.HTM

13 “Interfaith Relations with Muslims,” www.columban.org.au/Christian-Muslim/Bridges_Oct00_4.htm

14Crossing the Threshold of Hope, Vittorio Messori, ed. ( New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), pp. 91-94.

15Ibid., p. 92.

16Ibid., pp. 92-93.

17Ibid., p. 94.

18Ibid.

19 Robert Spencer, “A Vatican Apology for the Crusades?”, FrontPageMagazine.com, March 22, 2005.