If you want to know one of the things wrong with Rome, listen to how the Archbishop of Detroit described his visit to a mosque:
“There is no place where I feel more respect, fraternity, and kindness,”
Archbishop Weisenburger said at the mosque’s opening ceremony on June
12, according to The Arab American News. “From the moment I entered this beautiful site, I felt a profound divine presence.” [emphasis added]
Frankly, I do not get it. I am not Islamaphobic. I am a Christian. By nature that means a rejection of Islam and the deity the Quran [or Qur'an or Koran] is rejected as not the true God whom Jesus Christ has revealed. Feeling at home within the sacred place of worship for a faith that rejects core Christian teaching is to feel at home with error. It is a sign of the constant need on the part of some to reaffirm the rights of Muslims to worship as they please (and who says anything against this?) but at the same time causing offense to the core confessions of Christian faith established and proclaimed in the basic creeds of Christendom.
Rome has an alarming way of somehow giving place and recognition to faiths which deny basic Christian teaching yet without calling them out on this. No one is suggesting that Christians need be rude or offensive in the way they speak or interact with Muslims but that does not justify to over the top rhetoric about feeling at home with the divine presence in a mosque. Really? A liturgical church which insists that the Mass is the most profound entrance into the presence of the Eternal and a sacramental church which insists that the sacraments mediate God's presence and grace in a unique manner which supersedes any and all other means of God's presence does not give enough of a sense of the divine presence that one must leave the cathedral and find a rug to kneel upon in a mosque? Perhaps the good archbishop has been breathing in the wrong kind of smoke.
2 comments:
What is formally accepted in much of the RCC is informally accepted by the majority (it seems) of the rest of Christendom. Survey after survey show that evangelicals are accepting of anyone who can hold 1% of Christian doctrine.
The Archbishop could have just been respectful and civil, but his quoted words went further, becoming pandering and foolish. He does need to be called out on his unfortunate remarks. Indeed, it would have been better had he said nothing at all, than to praise a false religion for the sake of being publicly seen as egalitarian and tolerant of values contrary to the word of God. Those who see spiritual equivalency between all religions for the sake of coexistence must turn their back on God in order to embrace this false narrative. Anytime a Christian feels he or she is being lulled into believing the popular false notion of relativism or secular humanism, humbly go straight to your Bible and read the words of Jesus again: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Me.” John 14:6. There is no other way, no other religion, no other manner of living. To accept false ideas and to advocate for them is to deny Christ. By the convicting of the Holy Spirit, no true believer in Christ can accept foolish thoughts which denigrate the integrity and sovereignty of the Lord over all of creation. Soli Deo Gloria
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