“#NotMyPope.” In the wake of Pope Francis’ equivocal response to the murder of a French priest by two Islamic jihadists, that’s the top trending hashtag in France and in Belgium.
Which raises a question: Is the Pope doing more harm than good by continuing to deny—in the face of a mountain of evidence—that Islam has anything to do with violence?
As I’ve noted several times in the past, the Church’s handling of the Islamic crisis may prove to be far more scandalous than its handling of the sex abuse crisis. The main scandal surrounding the revelation of priestly sex abuse was that it was covered up for a very long time by priests, pastors, and even bishops. By their silence, many Church officials were, in effect, denying that there was a serious problem. The effect on Catholic morale was profound. In those places which were most seriously affected by the scandals, such as Massachusetts and Ireland, church attendance dropped off dramatically. Disaffected Catholics didn’t necessarily lose their faith in God but they did lose faith in the Catholic Church.
The Church’s handling of the numerous cases of “Islamic abuse” has the potential for causing a greater scandal. The similarities are striking. Once again we have Church leaders who deny that there is any serious problem. This can be seen, for example, in Pope Francis’ repeated assurances that Islamic violence is the work of “a small group of fundamentalists” who, according to him, don’t have anything to do with Islam. And once again, we have a cover-up—this time of the aggressive nature of Islam. After every terrorist incident, the Pope or some Vatican spokesman leaps to the defense of Islam lest anyone get the idea that there is a link between Islam and violence. READ ARTICLE HERE
(By the way, perhaps now that things are becoming a little clearer we might persuade the good folks at Crisis to remove from their archives an unfortunate piece of yellow "journalism," recklessly penned a few years back by something called Sandra Miesel. Uncharitable in the extreme, if not libelous, the thing is entitled "Swinging at Windmills," and it’s still hailed as a "Crisis magazine classic" on that website. Crisis Editors, please, take down that slanderous, SPLC-accommodating rant. It's embarrassing and well beneath the standards of the new and improved Crisis magazine, which The Remnant is only too eager to congratulate for having the courage to do what must be done, even at the risk of being ridiculed as “rad trads" by folks still trying to get the sand out of their eyes.)