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When 'the Church' at its very top plays blind to the threat of Islam...
Europe and Islam:
Who is afraid of John Paul II?
Riccardo Cascioli, editor of La Nuova Bussola Quotidiana, has shared a letter sent him by Mons. Mauro Longhi, the Opus Dei priest from Trieste
who recently revealed a 1993 conversation with John Paul II in which the latter said "I see the invasion of Europe by Islam".
Dear Editor,
I was surprised by the echo produced by the words I said at a lecture in Bienno last October 22. I see that some interpret it in terms of 'the battle between Christians and Muslims'. I am greatly pained by such a reading and I apologize if I myself induces such a reading because I was lacking in clarity. In John Paul II's mind, there was no idea of 'battle' – on the contrary, he sought better relations.
In the conversation with the Pope that I spoke of at the conference, and which your newspaper disseminated, the Pope referred to certain groups of terrorists who even then had already started to be active, using the name of God (as Pope Francis often reminds us today), and in his comments, there was no kind of generalization.
Mauro Longhi
This is a surprising reaction from Mons. Longhi,
- first, because his story about John Paul II's remarks about Islam in 1993, when relating to him a vision he had, is only now being picked up by the media and the blogosphere, and
- more importantly, because the accounts I have read of those who have picked it up have not claimed textually that the late pope spoke in terms of
'a battle between Christians and Muslims" – they did not have to, because the words Longhi quotes him to say are in distinctly martial terms, even
if he says that the invasion will not be kept out with weapons alone.
“Remind those whom you will meet in the Church of the third millennium. I see the Church afflicted by a mortal scourge – more profound, more sorrowful than those we have suffered in the second millennium (referring to Nazism and Communism). It is called Islamism. It will invade Europe. I see the hordes coming – from Morocco, Libya, Egypt and the countries of the East.
They will invade Europe, and Europe will be a cellar of old relics, shadows, cobwebs, memories of family. But you, the Church of the third millennium, must keep out that invasion. Not with weapons – they will not suffice – but by living your faith with integrity”.
Nor has anyone said that John Paul II had not sought better relations with Islam – to the point of kissing the Koran, which many Catholics still find 'strange', at the very least.
- second, the Bussola account of Longhi's lecture had no mention at all of Longhi's reference in his letter to the pope speaking about 'certain groups of terrorists etc...'
It looks to me like Longhi, who is still an active priest with monsignorial rank (obviously gained before the present pope said he would stop naming priests 'monsignors'), appears more concerned right now about not getting into any possible 'hot water' with the Bergoglians.
Now, Riccardo Cascioli's reply to the monsignor.
Dear Mons. Longhi:
There is no need to apologize. You were very clear in simply reporting an episode in the life of St. John Paul II of which you were a personal witness and which opens a window on Karol Wojtyla's mystical life.
Rather, those who need to apologize are those curial circles who have wished to reduce the vision of John Paul II to their own ideological schemes or those clerical news organs who have constructed improbable behind-the-scenes theories on the motives of your narrative and our article.
We simply reported your words at the lecture in which you said John Paul II had a vision of an Islamic invasion of Europe and that we should oppose such an invasion above all by living our faith with integrity.
Does it bother the critics to speak of an invasion? But even Pope Francis called it so in an interview on March 2, 2016 with the French weekly magazine La Vie: "An Arab invasion of Europe is under way," he said, although he added he was optimistic about the outcome of this invasion. And two months ago, it had been Cardinal Schoenborn of Vienna who expressed fear over 'the Islamic conquest' of Europe.
So does it also bother the critics to speak of the need to live our faith with integrity? But is this not the task of all believers, Islam or not Islam?
Nonetheless, the real alternative Europe has was very well expressed by the late Cardinal Giacomo Biffi of Bologna, speaking at around the same time John Paul II had his vision:
Europe will either become Christian again or it will become Muslim. What seems to me without a future is the 'culture of nothing'. Of freedom without limits and without content, of skepticism vaunted as intellectual superiority, which seems to the largely dominant attitude among the European peoples, who are more or less all rich in means but poor in truth.
This 'culture of nothing' (fed by hedonism and libertarian insatiability) [nihilism?] will not be able to stand up against the ideological assault of Islam which is inevitable. Only re-discovering Christianity as the only salvation for man – and therefore, only a decisive resurrection of Europe's ancient soul – can offer a different outcome to the inevitable confrontation.
Does this mean calling for a new Crusade? Or taking refuge in 'dialog' and 'relationship'? But true dialog is possible only between two clearly identified entities - if I know who I am and I know my interoluctor, his values, what and how he thinks. Yet the dominant Catholicism today is merrily renouncing its identity and seems not to have the least idea of what it is facing, and has nothing more than a sentimental solidarity.
St. John Paul II lived through this, and in hearing his testimony, dear Mons. Longhi, we canot but look with wonder at the great spiritual gifts that he received. Who would have imagined in 1993 what is now before our eyes?
Only a few in Europe at the time were able to recognize the manifestations of an Islamic 'rebirth', let alone think of an Islamic 'invasion' of Europe. At the time of your conversation with John Paul II in March 1993, there was an atmosphere of great international optimism: Promising peace conversations between Israel and the Palestinians were under way which in a few months (Sept 1993) would culminate in the historic Oslo accords which would go on to earn the Nobel Peace Prize for its protagonists, Israeli Prime Minister Itzhak Rabin and PLO leader Yasir Arafat. [The shortsightedness, rashness and wishful thinking of the Nobel Peace Prizegivers is nowhere more evident than in this choice, in which the Oslo Accords have merely been used by the Palestinians as a pretext for going on doing what they always did (not forgetting that Arafat is the acknowledged father of organized terrorism as a political tool).]
Islamist terrorism was still to come [That is, of course, not true, since the Terrorist Age began at the Munich Olympics in 1972 when Palestinian assassins killed Israeli athletes, and Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israel were not uncommon. Except that until 9/11, most terrorist acts were by Palestinians against Israelis. Islamist terrorism involving larger non-Palestinian groups like AlQaeda and the Taliban, and against Western targets on general, did take a quantum leap in degree and frequency with 9/11, even if that, too, had been preceded by major terrorist attacks against US military facilities and embassies in Lebanon, Kenya and Tanzania and the USS Cole] whereas the Soviet Union had just collapsed thus bringing an end to the Cold War, leaving some hope for a peaceful New World Order.
Of course, all too soon, events would take on a different turn, and therefore we can for more reason appreciate how prophetic John Paul II's words were in 1993, and not just about the Islamic invasion. Just as Benedict XVI's words in Regensburg were prophetic when he exhorted that both the West and Islam must unite faith and reason.
Today, however, it seems that the principal concern in a significant part of the Catholic world is to silence such prophetic words.
Riccardo Cascioli
Editor
Beatrice on her site, benoit-et-moi.fr/2017, shares a an unusually strong reaction from a priest who sent her the following letter, expressing skepticism over the pope-saint's reported mystical visions [though JPII did write in the 2003 Ecclesia in Europa about his visions everytime he consecrates the Body and Blood of Our Lord at Mass, starting with his first Mass], and above all, his surprise that the pope would have "confided his vision [about Islam] during a break while mountain walking to someone who was, after all, a stranger to him".
The episode took place in 1993, and as Mons. Longhi narrates, for a period of 10 years till 1995, he was the pope's mountain guide during the 4-5 times a year that he 'escaped' to the Abruzzo mountains to ski, which means they would have known each other through at least 24 such visits in circumstances where the company was limited to the pope, Mons. Dsiwisz and a handful of Polish friends, plus then Fr. Longhi, so the occasions were pretty intimate, I would say, and after 24 visits, Longhi would no longer have been considered by the pope 'a stranger'.
Doubting Longhi's revelation
by Pere J***
Translated from
I am less enthusiastic than you are on the subject of John Paul II, and I must confess that I do not believe at all in the revelations made by this Opus Dei priest. It does not correspond at all to the actions of the Wojtyla Pontificate.
When John Paul II was elected, I was filled with immense hope. But disappointment and questions rapidly replaced that. In effect, under his pontificate, everything [about the faith] appeared to have grown worse, except [Catholic] morality which remained safe until the present pope [seems to have] sold it off.
But everything else was catastrophic: the liturgy, episcopal nominations, constant references to Vatican II, favoritism for Opus Dei and the Legionaries of Christ (with the protection and cover-up for Fr. Maciel), unrefined ecumenism (the Assisi prayer meetings), Islamophilia (he kissed the Koran), bad relations with the Russian Orthodox Church [not by his desire, though, but because Russians traditionally look down on Poles… One recoils at these denunciations of a pope-saint, but the priest's list is factual even if too generic and un-nuanced, and reflects what were in effect compromises born out of practical considerations, even if the 'optics' of it all was bad. Pere J's list is another way of expressing Hilary White's disillusion expressed in the post above, that John Paul II did not turn out, after all, to be the rescuer of the faith from the ravages of Vatican II.]
It's hard for me to imagine a pope who had visions of Christ and the Virgin Mary who could nonetheless lead the Church into such errors, and the present pope can well draw on that legacy without a problem (except, I repeat, with regard to Catholic morals). For my part, I have reservations about the many 'private revelations' [visions and apparitions] which have been flourishing for decades. The messages from direct Revelation as transmitted by the Church are enough for me.
Of course, you are free to accept these new reports about John Paul II as true, but I am not convinced. Having had the opportunity to get close to him often and even to have lived with him, I can assure you that I never felt any particular presence around him but a low of 'show'. Besides, he never looked at his interlocutors direct in the eye, as Cardinal Ratzinger did. [The last statement is a strange and unlikely criticism to make of someone who met hundreds of world leaders and tens of thousands of individuals in the course of a 27-year pontificate!]
It was not my desire to shock you with this, but simply to express my reservations.
[One would dearly like to know the circumstances in which Pere J*** "had the opportunity to get close to him often and even to have lived with" John Paul II. As for the fact that he 'never felt any particular presence about him', I can only say that perhaps feeling a particular presence about someone depends on the person who feels it - i.e., the feeling, if it comes, is usually spontaneous and probably, very subjective.
But I do know that the first time I saw John Paul II in 1978, a few days after his inaugural Mass as pope (I happened to be part of the official Philippine delegation to his inauguration, so we were given an audience with him at the Apostolic Palace and were presented to him one by one), I was totally unprepared for the impact of his persona on me, because I had never felt such an impact from anyone before – a wave of physical vitality and spiritual radiance that hit me like a blow. I would be able to meet him again twice after that at the Vatican, and it was always the same.
When he visited Manila in 1981, instead of joining my TV coverage team at the airport, I chose to cover his arrival by standing with the faithful that lined Manila's bayside boulevard to greet him on his entrance to the city – there was no popemobile then, but he was transported in an open vehicle on which he sat on a chair that was elevated so that the faithful could see him well. And as the vehicle passed, I swear I felt the selfsame impact that hit me those three earlier times at the Apostolic Palace, even if the closest I was on that boulevard must have been least 15 feet away...
In contrast, I cannot explain why, when I had the privilege of being presented to Mother Teresa during a visit she made to Manila in 1980, what her presence conveyed to me was pain and suffering, though I was very much aware, of course, that I was in the presence of someone who even then was already considered a living saint.
BTW, I never felt that whatever faults, errors and shortcomings may be acknowledged objectively in John Paul II's Pontificate, detracted at all from his personal holiness, though they certainly highlighted his human flaws.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 25/11/2017 13:21] |