A pedant would scream that His Holiness didn’t say that and, true enough, Pope Francis didn’t utter those words. But I challenge you to interpret what he did say in any other way:
“Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Jehovah, Allah. These are all names employed to describe an entity that is distinctly the same across the world. For centuries, blood has been shed because of the desire to segregate our faiths. This, however, should be the very concept which unites us as people, as nations, and as a world bound by faith… We are all children of God regardless of the name we choose to address him by. We can accomplish miraculous things in the world by merging our faiths…”
If I were a semi-nude African animist, I’d be mortally offended. How come my bull’s head sitting atop a totem pole was left out? What am I, chopped human buttock on toast? The Equality Commission is going to hear about this.
Now I’ve heard of ecumenism, but the Pope’s tirade is ridiculous. I don’t think any pontiff has uttered such blasphemous, arrant nonsense since 955, when the title of John XII was assumed by an 18-year-old youngster who immediately turned the Vatican into a place of ill repute.
Not only did he drink, gamble and fornicate but, much worse, the Holy Father celebrated mass without taking communion, gave regular banquets in honour of pagan gods and even offered toasts to Satan.
A full millennium later, Pope Francis has set out to outdo his medieval predecessor – not in deed but in word, and in the damage caused to the Church.
One wonders if His Holiness even begins to understand the religion over which he presides as heir to the throne of St Peter, or whether he worships Christ as fervently as he promotes his bien pensant Leftie ideology.
Since Christianity presupposes freedom of choice, anyone is free to espouse it or not. But believing in the sole truth of Jesus Christ as divine Saviour and the second hypostasis of the Holy Trinity surely must be a job requirement for any priest, never mind the world’s highest prelate.
None of the deities the Pope saw fit to mention as “distinctly the same” as Jesus Christ can even remotely act in that capacity for any Christian, to say nothing of anyone whose mission it is to carry Christ to the world.
Even to the Muslims Mohammed isn’t God but merely Allah’s prophet, while for old times’ sake Christians still accept Christ as God. As to Jehovah, he is to Christians God the Father, the first hypostasis of the Holy Trinity from whom the Holy Spirit proceeds as it does from Christ.
The Pope is duty-bound to regard all religions other than Christianity and Judaism (in as far as it forms part of the Christian canon) as heresies. They may be variously dangerous but they are all equally wrong.
By effectively denying the exclusive truth of his faith Pope Francis relegates it to the status of a secular club socially and an extension of Leftie radicalism politically. A few hundred years ago much milder heretics used to be burned for less.
Religious tolerance is undeniably a good thing but, just as undeniably, religious suicide isn’t. And, by being unable to tell one from the other, that’s what Pope Francis is committing, wittingly or unwittingly.
In this world men accomplish “miraculous things” (otherwise known as miracles) not by “merging our faiths” but by heroically asserting the truth of one, Christian, faith over all others.
If the Pope doesn’t believe in this truth, he ought to be run out of the Vatican, unfrocked and – ideally – excommunicated. Ditto, if he doesn’t believe the drivel he utters but says it anyway to mollify his Leftie comrades.
In the first instance he isn’t a Christian because he doesn’t believe in Jesus Christ. In the second, he isn’t a Christian because he betrays his religion to its haters. One just hopes that Francis goes before the Church does.
Oh Pope Benedict XVI, where are you when we need you? Please come back, Your Holiness – your successor is running Christianity into the ground.