Cardinal Bertone, check in at the office: "A manifesto of multicultural theories"

Sandro Magister notes, with some alarm, the lead article in the 21 October issue of La Civiltà Cattolica, published by the Roman province of the Society of Jesus.  The contents of the journal have traditionally been vetted by the Secretariat of State prior to publication.

The editorial furnishes a very detailed and alarming description of fundamentalist and terrorist Islam, behind which “there are great and powerful Islamic states”: an Islam aiming at the conquest of the world and fostered by violence “for the cause of Allah.”

 
But it does this without even the slightest note of criticism of this nexus of violence and faith.

 
And it is as if this nexus were an inescapable reality, against which the West and the Church should do little or nothing: little at the practical level--it’s enough to look over the scant measures against terrorism that are recommended--and nothing at the theoretical level.

 
Above all, it is as if Benedict XVI hadn’t even delivered, last September 12, his lecture in Regensburg.

Dr Magister continues:

If defeating one’s enemy requires, in the first place, knowing who he is, the editorial is perfect: it describes the logic of violence present in Islam – both the terrorist and fundamentalist sort, and that of the entire umma – with scientific precision.

 
But it describes this logic of violence so well as to practically agree with it on everything. It does so to the point of denouncing those Muslims who deviate from orthodox doctrine. The paragraphs on Israel are exemplary: those Palestinians who accept its existence should know that “the viewpoint shared by the entire Islamic world” is the contrary, and that Hamas and its “martyrs” represent this much more consistently; Israel must be uprooted from a land that “ belongs to Muslims ‘by divine law’ until the end of time.”

 
The passages on democracy are also indicative. “La Civiltà Cattolica” says that this should not be imposed upon Islamic peoples, but “hopes” that they may adopt it on their own initiative. But in another passage, the same editorial maintains that democracy is incompatible with Islam. An earlier editorial from February 2, 2004 even describes it as “offensive to the Islamic community.”

My judgment is that Benedict XVI is faced with opposition to his 'program' for the Church both considered in her own life (e.g. the clamorous nonsense that one hears contra a liberalisation of the use of the Pian missal) and in her relations with the secular and Islamic worlds: let us hope that the divine Majesty grants him many more years on the Chair of Peter.