Regarding Cardinal McCarrick’s invocation of Allah in prayer, some may defend him and say that the word “Allah” is just Arabic for “God.” in one sense, yes. When an Arabic Christian uses the word “Allah” in prayer, he means “God” because the words are analogues in the languages. But McCarrick wasn’t simply speaking Arabic, he was praying in a Muslim context and that’s different.
Because the Muslim concept of Allah is based, not on Christianity, but on a pagan god of pre-Islam Arabia.
“Allah” is from the compound. Allah was the personal title of the moon god. Allah was married to the sun goddess. They produced three daughters, whose worship Muhammad would later make the mistake of condoning. The crescent moon symbol of Arabia came from this god.
Muhammad’s family revered this particular god, and Muhammad declared him to be the only true god. Muhammad did not re-make the pagan god, he simply removed the lower deities from the rites of worship. That is why he never had to explain who Allah was. So Allah is a deified pagan idol converted into a god in the 7th century. Yet Muhammad claimed this was the God of Abraham that was revealed thousands of years earlier to the Biblical prophets. ...
Dear Dom,
But does not the new Catechism say “these (Muslims) profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and *** together with us adore the one, merciful God ***, mankind’s judge on the last day.” New Catechism 841
And I believe this section is quoting the Second Vatican Council. And we all know that the Council was inspired and guided by the Holy Ghost, don’t we?
BTW, my point above is to show that perhaps the problem could be with the sloppy way both Vatican II and the Catechism deal with this question.
Dom:
Actually, this is not the lead-pipe cinch some claim it is. The reliable “Answering Islam” site advises caution and taking a wait-and-see approach to the moon god idea, as there is a lot of crappy scholarship being circulated on the topic.
http://www.answeringislam.org/Index/M/moongod.html
Even supposing that Allah and the God of Abraham are one and the same, there is still the matter of the rejection of Jesus Christ.
We believe in a Trinitarian God—Three in One. You cannot separate Christ from God the Father in any meaningful way that would enable you to claim that we worship the same God that Islam worships.
Regardless of whether “Allah”=“God” in Catholic belief, what about evangelization? Have we come to the point where a Catholic Cardinal – a Cardinal, for crying out loud! – feels like he should not proclaim Jesus Christ?
The really sad thing is that I doubt very few Muslims would be offended by a Catholic Cardinal praying in Christ’s name. Perhaps it is just McCarrick who is offended by a such an idea in such a setting.
“Whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven”
Dear Francis,
The portion of the Catechism I quoted above starts out:
“The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Muslims…”
This comes very close to saying “being a good Muslim is salvific.” I refuse to accept that understanding personally, but I would not say someone was being dishonest if that was their interpretation of the Catechism. My point again is that the Cardinal words seem no more scandalous than the words of Vatican II.
Cardinal McCarrick is showing his timid, politically correct side yet again. He is more of a typical Irish politician in clerical garb than a true shepherd witnessing to the truth. It’s one thing to be respectful of everyone in your audience. It’s another thing to water down your faith so much that you border on outright heresy to avoid offending Muslims.
There is too much murky thinking on the ecumenism issue, especially since Vatican II. I am not saying the council itself or magisterial teaching since the council are to blame. What I am saying is, the fallen human tendency toward human respect and indifferentism is clouding the truth of our faith from reaching those who do not share it.
As for me, I pray every day in my daily rosary intentions for “the conversion of all non-Catholics to the One True Faith.” Yes, I’m all for an ecumenism of coming home to Rome.
God help us!
I have some old prayer books w/ the Sacred Heart prayer where it says: “Be Thou King of all those who are stilled involved in the darkness of idolotry and Islamism.”
There is such a contrast between those in our history who died a martyr’s death fighting Islam and the current appeasement being practiced. How to reconcile the two?
I don’t promote a return to the Crusades. Far from it. But we have just as much a human right to keep our faith as the Muslims have to keep theirs, and that does not even begin to address the heavenly mandate to convert the world. Syncretism will end us up at the point of worshipping nothing but our fellow man.
Which brings my thoughts right back to the Austrian death’s head service.
I’m still trying to understand what he was about when Benedict dropped a portion of his speech that had been published on the Vatican website, according to “The Tablet.”
The Sept. 10 “World Church News” at “The Tablet” website reported that Benedict’s actual talks to Muslims and non-Catholic Christians at World Youth Day varied from the official text. The article says in part:
<i>The Pope’s comments, especially at separate closed-door sessions with ecumenical leaders, significantly changed the form and substance of the original speeches. Journalists were unable to verify the discrepancies at the time because the media were barred from the encounters.
In his 19 August address to Protestant and Orthodox leaders, according to the [Vatican] website transcript, <b>Pope Benedict said the movement towards Christian unity did not mean “ecumenism of the return; that is, to deny and to reject one’s own faith history… Absolutely not!” He omitted the originally scripted line, “There can be no dialogue at the expense of truth; the dialogue must advance in charity and in truth.”</b></i>
Should we take this to mean that Benedict backed away from the position he took in his book TRUTH AND TOLERANCE? Perhaps he simply left out that portion of his scripted talk because he didn’t want to offend. St. Peter claimed not to know Jesus because it was politically incorrect to say that he did. Peter regretted it. Christ asks “Who do you say that I am?” Should we respond, “Allah”?
Masonic philosophy is a proponent of everyone worshipping his own deity, and making a syncretistic declaration in Lodge that all deities are the “Grand Architect of the Universe” while refraining from talking about each member’s specific choice for worship. How is that different from what Cardinal McCarrick and Cardinal Law have done?
This article may be of interest.
It was linked in a combox on my blog. An Eastern Orthodox commenter had this to say about it:
“Islam, Orthodoxy & Protestantism”
As much as he/she seems to have a pretty superficial knowledge of Orthodoxy, the article does point out at least one important point. Many of the Orthodox in the early days of Islam didn’t consider it to be a whole new religion, rather more like a really bad heresy. Mohammed mixed Bedouin paganism with Judaism, Orthodoxy, and Nestorianism. Islam, as Serge (sergesblog.blogspot.com) has said, can be considered to the East what Mormonism is to the West.
The “Serge” he refers to is a Russian Orthodox blogger.
If Islam is to the East what Mormonism is to the West, then Idries Shah, in his book THE SUFIS, is correct in stating (p. 205)
“Sufi-ism,” said Sir Richard Burton, was “the Eastern parent of Freemasonry.” Whether Burton was a Freemason or not, there is no doubt that he was a Sufi.
I first heard about the moongod theory from a Jack Chick cartoon. It was pretty convincing. Later as I was converting to Catholicism I realized that Protestants and Catholics don’t really worship the same God either.
And then I read in the Catechism, where it says that Catholics and Muslims both worship the God of Abraham. Oops. Once again my powers of deduction remind me of my pathetic attempts to “slam dunk” basketballs in gym class…I think my feet got about three inches off the floor, and that’s if you measure from the heel.
I can now admit despite the fog of convert’s zeal that my occasional prayers as a bad Protestant were to a god named God, who is the exact same God who eventually brought me home to the Catholic Church. It’s not that God has changed, I’ve just gotten to know Him better now.
From the posted excerpts of Card. McCarrick’s speech I’ve read, it seems that the Muslims in the audience didn’t get to learn anything new about God that day. Sad.
I’ve always defended Cardinal McCarrick but this use of allah in place of God saddens me.
“The plan of salvation” that the Catechism quotes is a plan which the Church has taught, in keeping with the writtings of Augustine and Aquinas, involves both faith and reason. God reveals himself in natural creation and in his special revelation to the Chosen People, Israel. All men have a desire for God in their heart, and this desire prompts them to seek out the first principle, as Aristotle says in Book I Chapter I of the Metaphysics—St. Thomas parrots this sentiment. Using Aristotle’s Metaphysics, St. Thomas details his “Ways” for demonstrating the existence of god, which arrives not at the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, per se but at a single necessary being. Thus in God’s plan of Salvation St. Thomas says that God provided man with the natural evidence to show the reasonableness of the existence of one god, but because this knowledge does not satisfy man’s natural desire for God, He also reveals Himself through supernatural means so that man may have surity in His existence and a glimps at His inner life to which man is called to share in through Christ.
Now I am not sure about any of the scholarship surrounding the moon god connection, however it is quite clear that the high Islam of the 9th through 12th centuries incorporated this rational monotheistic “first mover” concept of God, from classical greek philosophy, into (high) Islam. We see this fact in the fact that Thomas engages in dialogue with the Averoists, Aristoteleans of an Islamic bent, about Islamic misreadings of Aristotle, particularly how they used Aristotle against the Christian concept of God. Aquinas makes the arguement that Aristotle’s first mover is in fact the same rationally known god. The same god, i.e. the Altar to the unknown god, that St. Paul identifies with the God of Jesus Christ when he was converting the Greeks Now of course we can have a legitamate discussion about whether Hellenized Islam is true to Mohammed’s Islam or to the radical Islam of much of the Arab world, but insofar as a branch of Islam equated this god known by reason, with Allah and with the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob, the Creator God acknowledged by the Muslems does indeed fall into the plan of salvation, as does the simple concept of the divine seen in any religion. Vatican II goes furthur than this and says that because they equate the creator with the God of Abraham they have an even closer relation to Christianity that say one of the handful of other monotheistic religions that do not make this connection. This seems reasonable.
Now to say that the plan of salvation includes those who acknowledge the creator, including the Muslims, does not mean that the Koran is part of the plan of salvation, except insofar as it is a manifestation of man’s desire for the divine. The Koran is not being placed on the same level as the Holy Bible, and Mohammed is not being placed on par with Christ—this would be syncritism, a formal heresey. No, there is no salvation apart from Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the light. Extra Ecclesia Nulla Salus still holds true, but the Catachism simply means to point out that to those who are saved—granted by Christ, through his Church, even without knowing Christ or confessing his Church—can be lead to Salvation by means of God’s revelation in nature which is availible to all men and by means of the desire for God that God wrote onto the heart of man at creation.
As regards my above post, I refrain from commenting on what I think about Cardinal McCarrick’s transposition of the word Allah for God or Christ, out of Christian Charity. Maybe the situation warranted it, maybe not.