RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Let me be clear: there is wisdom and insight to be found in the writings, speeches and addresses of Pope Francis. He is at his best when he thinks and writes in continuity with the full weight of Christian wisdom and in continuity with the insights of his immediate predecessors. But when he departs from them, he tends to confuse humanitarian concerns with properly Christian ones. He often gives a one-sided “progressivist” reading of Catholic social teaching. Remarkably, he seems to have learned very little about the gravest evil of the twentieth century, totalitarianism, hence his troubling indulgence towards communist tyranny in Cuba. Pope Francis could benefit from paying more attention to the reflective experiences of John Paul II with totalitarian communism and Pope Benedict XVI with Nazi barbarism. No doubt, if he did so, his thought would resonate more clearly with the timelessness of the best of Catholic social and political thought. At the very least, he would be less apt in his writings and remarks to emphasise private judgments that too easily echo the progressive opinions and prejudices of his most vocal elite, Left-liberal fans.”

….Rather than indulging his inclination to echo the opinions and prejudices of the Left’s progressive choir, the Pontiff would benefit from the example of John Paul II and Benedict XVI in honouring the timelessness of the best Catholic social and political thought.
Pope Francis is widely acclaimed today, less for his Catholic wisdom than for the fact that he is perceived by secular (and some religious) opinion as some kind of “progressive”. Whether this will lead many to return to the Catholic Church or reconsider “the truth about man” that it proffers is highly doubtful. There is an element of the bien-pensant in Francis’s papacy, a tendency in his utterances and self-presentation to confirm widely held Left-liberal elite opinions about politics and the world.

The consensus around Pope Francis is selective and tends towards the ideological. His admirers, and the Pope himself sometimes, confuse Christian charity with secular humanitarianism. Francis’s ill-disciplined off-the-cuff remarks are treated with utmost seriousness, and the part of his thought that is in continuity with his great predecessors is largely ignored, if not explained away. Among conservative Catholics there is deep and, I would suggest, excessive suspicion of the Pope and a growing sense that he confuses his personal judgments, largely shaped by his Argentinian experience, with the full weight of Catholic wisdom.

How does one find one’s way in the midst of this confusion? What is needed is the deployment of a “hermeneutic of continuity”, one that forthrightly confronts Francis’s continuities and discontinuities with the great tradition of Catholic thought that preceded him. Out of justice, we owe the Pope both respect and the full exercise of the arts of intelligence.

Caring for our common home

Pope Francis’s May 2015 encyclical Laudato Si’ (Praise Be to You) is a perfect illustration of these continuities and discontinuities. There is much about it that is thoroughly orthodox and even traditionalist. Pope Francis repeats old Christian wisdom of a decidedly anti-modern cast when he laments the project of modern mastery which reduces human beings to “lords and masters” of nature. He affirms human uniqueness, “which transcends the spheres of physics and biology”, and emphasises our stewardship over the whole of creation. Nonetheless, Francis’s is noticeably more a theology of creation than a theology of redemption and is thus incomplete. Francis’s theological defence of biodiversity probably understates the fact that organisms and species come and go quite independently of the alleged rapaciousness of human beings. This brings us to a fundamental tension in his encyclical: a society that attempts to preserve pristine nature as it is, all in the name of not “sinning” against creation, cannot meet the goal of providing “sustained and integral development” for the poor, a goal that is also central to Francis’s pontificate.

When Pope Francis delivers his Christmas message this weekend, he will do so not just as the head of the Catholic Church but as the improbable standard-bearer for many progressives around the world.

With conservative and nationalist forces on the rise in many places and with figures such as U.S. President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande on their way out, many on the left—from socialists in Latin America to environmentalists in Europe—are looking to the 80-year-old pontiff for leadership.

“Pope Francis really inspires a lot of people to want to fight. I’m pretty sure if he weren’t the face of the Catholic Church, he’d be out in the street with us,” said Bleu Rainer, an activist in the “Fight for $15” minimum-wage movement in Tampa, Fla., who traveled to Rome last month for an international meeting of grass-roots activists addressed by the pope. “He reinforces our issues and makes them moral issues.”

Yet the pope’s support for some liberal causes, rooted in traditional Christian concern for the poor and defenseless, has meant joining forces with some partners who reject major Catholic moral teachings. Critics also say that the church’s leader shouldn’t take such strong stands on political questions about which Catholics are allowed to have a range of views.

Pope Francis has taken bold positions on a variety of issues, including migration, climate change, economic equality and the rights of indigenous peoples. His June 2015 environmental encyclical “Laudato Si’ ” called for a sharp reduction in the use of fossil fuels and described global warming as a major threat to life on Earth. The document was also an indictment of the global market economy, which he said has plundered the planet at the expense of the poor and of future generations. The Vatican now requires students for the priesthood to learn about environmental problems, including climate change, during their seminary studies.

The pontiff’s views on migration—he calls, in effect, for open borders for refugees and economic migrants—spilled over into criticism of Donald Trump earlier this year. The pope said that the Republican candidate was “not Christian” for calling for a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico. Just days before the American election, in a speech to grass-roots activists from around the world, Pope Francis warned against the “spread of xenophobia” and the “false security of physical and social walls”—remarks widely seen as a critique of Mr. Trump.

The pope has also been blunt about economic equality. He has said that “land, shelter and employment” are “sacred rights” and added that “if I speak of this, some people conclude that the pope is a communist.” In his 2015 address to the U.S. Congress, he praised the late Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, for “her social activism, her passion for justice and for the cause of the oppressed.”

Such statements have made him a hero to many politicians on the left. Sen. Bernie Sanders, who left the campaign trail for two days before the New York primary to attend a Vatican conference, called himself a “fan of the pope’s clarity, his humility, his vision and his courage.”

Cheerleading for killers and terror-mongering has become synonymous with the countries where religious extremists enjoy popular and official support.

This is exactly what is wrong with the Muslim world, where masses are kept ignorant by these radical mullahs from the real challenges such as poverty, illiteracy and disease.

Instead, at the behest of the powerful extremist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, which throw unlimited money into poor countries to expand their radicalization, extremist religious parties feed the people with the false notion of the supremacy of their creed.

Some of the terrorists have entered Europe with the refugees. If this amount is just one percent, that number comes to 10,000 people.

However, the wrong political policies of governments in Europe are also to be blamed for the rise of Islamic extremism in the world: they allowed the existence and breeding of such organizations on their soil at the first place.

Time has come for those who are still confused about the acts of these terrorists — or those who serve as terrorist apologists to try to cover up their deeds after every incident — to be exposed. A large number of Muslims are already sick and tired of these extremists.

We Muslims also need to leave no stone unturned to return the humane gestures that our fellow citizens have shown when we Muslims faced trouble. In the same way they took to the streets for us, it is now our turn to show all our fellow citizens — non-Muslims as well as Muslims — that we also stand by them. Merry Christmas!!!

The world saw a massacre in Aleppo, the assassination of Russian ambassador in Turkey, a brazen terror attack in Berlin and a shooting incident in a Zurich mosque – all just last week. We also saw religious extremists across the Muslim world cheering for the killers of both the Russian envoy and the truck driver in Germany.

ISIS hailed the Berlin terror attack and the killing of the Russian ambassador while themselves facing imminent extinction due to massive Russian, European and US led strikes against their strongholds in Mosul, Raqqa, Aleppo and other cities.

Terrorists such as ISIS and their sympathizers seemed translating this chaos into another opportunity to pour the “victim narrative” into the minds of naïve Muslim youths apparently in the hope of recruiting more soldiers for their holy war.

One incident of the behavior witnessed in Pakistan where the biggest religious political party was seen cheerleading for the anti-Russia attack, hailing the extremist Muslim killer, Melvut Mert-Altintas, as a hero.

“The apostate’s life and organs do not have to be respected and may be taken with impunity.” — Islamic State document found during a raid in December by U.S. Special Forces in Syria.

“Former prisoner Abo Rida stated that surgeons for IS terror group removed kidneys and corneas from prisoners. He said that they were told that jihadists were more deserving of organs.” — Anne Speckhard, International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism.

Iraq’s Ambassador to the UN, Mohammed Alhakim, asked the world body last year to investigate the killing of a dozen Iraqi doctors who rejected IS demands to cut out people’s organs.

According to the World Health Organization, illegal organ trading generates between $600 million and $1.2 billion in profits each year.

Charges that Islamic State (IS) engages in organ trading — taking body parts from their victims in Iraq and Syria and selling them to traffickers in Turkey — have surfaced again.

The Iranian news network Alalam reported on October 6 that IS has set up a market in Turkey where it sells human organs stolen from innocent people. Alalam also posted a photograph of a person whose organ was taken.

The Iraqi News also reported that IS has kidnapped and sold many children in Syria to Turkish organ traffickers in order to finance its operations.

Turkey’s government-funded news service, Anadolu Agency, reported months ago that ISIS opened a “medical school” in Northern Syria.

Wayne Madsen, an American investigative reporter and a former intelligence analyst at the US National Security Agency (NSA), told Gatestone that IS has been, and is, involved in organ trading. “The Uyghur battalions of ISIS are heavily engaged in this. They are also known to be involved in organ harvesting in China.”

“We have no reason to doubt them given similar atrocities that have been documented and other heinous crimes for which ISIL has taken credit,” U.S. State Department said in response to charges of IS’s organ harvesting. In December, the U.S. government revealed that it had obtained an ISIS document during a raid by Special Forces in Syria. “The apostate’s life and organs do not have to be respected and may be taken with impunity,” the document said.

Anne Speckhard wrote that ISIS is involved in organ smuggling and earns profits from it. “Former prisoner Abo Rida stated that surgeons for IS terror group removed kidneys and corneas from prisoners. He said that they were told that jihadists were more deserving of organs,” she added.

Speckhard told Gatestone that given their mentality – that anyone who does not believe as they do can be killed – it is believable that IS is involved in organ trading: “Defectors we talked to said it is happening.”

According to press reports, there is high demand for organs such as kidneys and hearts. Based on the same reports, a kidney is sold in the Turkish market for $4,000 and a heart for $6,000.

From “The Guardian ” March 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/mar/03/antisemitism-hatred-wont-go-away

What accounts, then, for the stubborn resilience of what has been called “the longest hatred”? Why does it continue to appear even among those educated, liberal elites who pride themselves on their opposition to racism?

We may want to believe it went away, but it never did. Not even in the late 1940s, immediately after the revelations of the Holocaust confirmed the murderous place where antisemitic discourse could lead. There were still English literary critics around in those years to refer to the Jews as “Shylocks”, still crime novels with the conniving Jew as the arch-villain. We may want to see the likes of Galliano ( “transgressive” designer dropped by fashion house Dior after delivering a drunken rant in a Paris bar to two women he took to be Jews: “I love Hitler,” he began. “People like you ought to be dead, your mothers, your forefathers would all be fucking gassed.”)as relics from another era or as mere eccentrics, but they are expressing a set of attitudes that remain deep in the soil and which have never been fully shaken off. They can appear in the most respected institutions, voiced by the most respectable people. Even when they seem to be dozing, they are never quite dead.

Then a statue of the Virgin Mary was ordered taken away by a court in the municipality of Publier. Senator Nathalie Goulet slammed the judges as “ayatollahs of secularism”.

A German school in Turkey just banned Christmas celebrations: the school, Istanbul Lisesi, funded by the German government, decided that Christmas traditions and carol-singing would no longer be allowed. A Woolworth’s store in Germany also scrapped Christmas decorations telling customers that the shop “is now Muslim”.

Europe is already mutilating her own traditions “to avoid offending Muslims”. We have become our own biggest enemy.

Muslims are also reclaiming “the mosque of Cordoba”. Authorities in the Spanish southern city recently dealt a blow to the Catholic Church’s claim of ownership of the cathedral. Now Islamists want it back.

The final result of Europe’s self destructive secularism could seriously be a Caliphate.

“Everything is Christian”, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote after the war. Two thousand years of Christianity have left a deep mark on the French language, landscape and culture. But not according to France’s Minister of Education, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. She just announced that instead of saying “Merry Christmas”, state officials should use “Happy Holidays” — clearly a deliberate intent to erase from discourse and the public space any reference to the Christian culture in which France is rooted.

Jean-François Chemain called it the “eradication of any Christian sign in the public landscape”. A year ago, the controversy was ignited in the French town of Ploermel, where a court decided that the statue of Pope John Paul II, erected in a square, had to be removed for violating “secularism”.

Then, a statue of the Virgin Mary was ordered taken away by a court in the municipality of Publier. Senator Nathalie Goulet slammed the judges as “ayatollahs of secularism”.

The newspapers of the French “left”, outraged by the “right’s” ban on burkinis on the French Riviera, have been endorsing this anti-Christian policy.

France’s Council of State has just ruled that “the temporary installation of cribs [nativity scenes] in a public place is legal if it has a cultural, artistic or festive value, but not if it expresses the recognition of a cult or a religious preference”. What precautions to justify a millenary tradition!

In the town of Scaer, a nursing home has been the subject of a similar secularist complaint, for the presence of a fresco of the Virgin Mary. Then, it was the turn of the manger in the train station of Villefranche-de-Rouergue, in Aveyron. In the town of Boissettes, the church bells have been muted by court decision.

Fortunately, some ideas from the Observatory of Secularism — the organ established by President François Hollande to coordinate his neo-secularist policies — have not been implemented. One proposed even to eliminate some Christian national holidays to make room for the Islamic, Jewish and secular holidays.

The hunt for the suspect in the deadly attack on a Berlin Christmas market ended before dawn Friday in a shootout with Italian police near Milan, but the political fallout was just beginning to gather force.

Anis Amri, a Tunisian, lived in Germany for more than a year, despite having been previously jailed in Italy and denied asylum in both nations. Even as Europe’s most-wanted man, he traveled hundreds of miles this week, crossing at least two European Union borders on his way to Italy, where police stopped him to check his identity.

Chancellor Angela Merkel responded to mounting pressure Friday over her approach to migrants and national security as she readies for a re-election battle next year.

“The Amri case raises a series of questions, not just about the deed itself but also about the time since he came to Germany,” she said. “We will now examine with urgency to what degree state practices must be changed.”

Police in multiple countries were working Friday to figure out how Amri, who authorities said had train tickets from France, made his escape and whether he had help.

“I am very relieved that there is no more danger stemming from this perpetrator,” German Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière said, but he added that authorities would continue hunting for any accomplices. As of late Friday, police hadn’t disclosed any additional arrests.

Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack. The terror group’s official Amaq news agency posted a video of a man it said was Amri urging followers to kill “crusaders.” The man strongly resembled photos of Amri released by German police.

On Friday U.S. President-elect Donald Trump tweeted: “Such hatred! When will the U.S., and all countries, fight back?”