Before I get any farther behind, let me make up for having failed to post anything about this controversy so far... And quite interestingly, it refers to the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church which was the subject of one of the earlier posts on this page.
Cardinal Turkson apologizes for offending
anyone with video on Muslim demographics
that he showed to the Synodal Assembly
by Gerard O'Connell
Oct. 21, 2010
In an exclusive interview, Cardinal Peter Turkson of Ghana, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, regrets showing a controversial video to the 13th Assembly of the Bishops' Synod last week, but explains his rationale for doing so.
“For me to attack Islam would be to attack my own family. I come from a family which has an Islamic component. My paternal uncle was a Muslim and he took care of me when I was a boy, and when he grew old I took care of him until he died”.
With these words ,Cardinal Turkson responded to those who accused him of encouraging or supporting anti-Islamic sentiment by showing a YouTube video on “Muslim Demographics” to the synod fathers on Saturday evening, October 13.
“The point was not to be anti-Islam. Absolutely not! The point was to highlight the demographic situation as a result of the anti-life tendency and culture in the Western world where, as I see it, there is a great need to apply the values of the Kingdom of God and of the Gospel to the social order”, the 64-year old Ghanaian cardinal told me.
He said he regrets showing the controversial video. “I showed the video to illustrate this reality in the Western world and to emphasize that if we do not evangelize the social order, it is capable of giving rise to all kinds of problems for society.”
After the animated debate following the video’s projection, the cardinal recognizes that others viewed that documentary differently to him. Up to then he said, “I had never viewed that video in the anti-Islamic optic with which so many others have viewed it.” He believes this divergence in perception is due to his personal background.
“From my own personal experience I cannot have such anti-Islamic fears, nor can I ever buy into anti-Islamic propaganda or scaremongering. I come from a family that has an Islamic component. My paternal uncle was a Muslim. We lived together; we don’t have any trace of fear of Islam in my family. My mother was a Methodist, my father a Catholic. This is the inter-religious family and context in which I grew up”, he said.
He showed the video at the synod, he said, to press home a point he had made earlier that day when he addressed the gathering as President of the Council for Justice and Peace.
In that speech, he presented the Church’s Social Teaching as “a useful tool for evangelization” and requested that the
Compendium of the Church’s Social Teaching be put on the Vatican’s website alongside the
Catechism of the Catholic Church, and that a future synod be held on evangelizing the social order.
He used the video to emphasize more forcefully that second point, namely
“the need for evangelizing the social order, especially in relation to the anti-life culture, the culture of death that we find in the West and which is now being exported to Africa and other parts of the world as –to quote Pope Benedict - ‘a toxic spiritual refuse which contaminates’.”
He felt the first part of the video brought out this point well by highlighting the falling birthrate across Western Europe as a result of this “anti-life culture” and the consequences it brings, even if he now admits the figures may not be accurate.
But, he insisted, no one denies that the birthrate has fallen dramatically low in Europe with serious consequences for the whole of society. It was this point that he wished to bring to the synod’s attention, together with the need to evangelize the social order in the West, so as to change its anti-life culture.
Some synod participants questioned the wisdom of showing the video, because of its anti-Islamic slant. Cardinal Turkson said he now wishes he had not shown it. “I understand that I chose the wrong video to stress the point of my concern.”
Last Monday evening, the Cardinal apologized to the synod fathers for showing the video, and for whatever distress it may have caused them. At the same time he hopes his central point will not get lost, namely, the need to evangelize the social order.
Here is the earlier story...
Cardinal Turkson sparks outcry
by showing Synodal fathers a video
some felt to be offensive to Islam
by Gerard O'Connell
Oct. 16, 2010
A Vatican cardinal sparked the liveliest debate in recent memory at the synod of bishops when he showed a video on “Muslim Demographics” to the assembly of prelates from all over the world, on October 13.
Cardinal Peter Turkson, the Ghanaian President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, took the synod by surprise last Saturday evening when he decided to show the video instead of giving a speech in the hour set aside for free-discussion.
The YouTube video, which first appeared on the Internet in 2008 and
has been viewed no less than 13 million since then, purports to be “A Report on the world’s changing demographics”.
Basing itself on fertility rates and Islamic immigration, the seven-minute video predicts the Muslim conquest of Europe as well as of Canada and the USA before the middle of the 21st century.
“Some of you may have already seen this video, others may not”, the cardinal told the synod participants, without providing any rationale for showing it. After the screening, while several fathers engaged in lively comments on the video, Cardinal Turkson listened in silence.
A source close to the cardinal told Vatican Insider that his intention in showing the film was to get people to reflect on the choices they make and the values they treasure, and to inject an element of realism into the synod’s discussion on the new evangelization. On Monday evening, October 15, the cardinal spoke to the synod fathers, explained that this was his real intention and apologized for any misunderstandings that may have arisen.
Reporting from inside the synod, Vatican Radio’s Philippa Hitchen said this “fear-mongering presentation of statistics” attempted to show “how Islam is conquering Europe and the rest of the world.” She said its “scary music, stark white words on a black background and the warning that dropping fertility rates in Europe, plus high birth rates among immigrant Muslim families” sought to convey that “our children face a threatening world of Islamic domination in the very near future.” [But this is the kind of commentary that does not belong to a news report. It is commentary that could have been laid out in an editorial by Fr. Lombardi, although he has not written about the video at all so far. If Hitchen's editors allowed her to get away with her editorializing within a news report, one can only think that it's a craven act reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's repeated denunciations of a 'repugnant and reprehensible' anti-Muslim video that the Obama administration has been blaming for the killing of the US ambassador to Libya on the 11th anniversary of 9/11 last month. In short, that some at Vatican Radio were bending over backwards not to offend Muslims. All Hitchen had to say to show that the video was questionable was that it was a propaganda film prepared by a US evangelical group and that the figures it uses may not all be reliable. She could read this report by O'Connell to show how a professional reporter does it!]
The video highlights the current low fertility rate in Europe, and asserts that the 31 countries of the European Union have an average fertility rate of 1.38%, with Germany (1.3%), Italy (1.2%) and Spain (1.1%) at the bottom of the league. “As the population shrinks, so too does the culture” and - it predicts - “Europe as we know it will cease to exist”.
It notes that the population of Europe is not decreasing but says this is entirely due to Islamic immigration which contributed 90% of the birthrate since 1990. Europe had 52 million Muslims in 2008, it says, but it claims that number will double within 50 years.
It predicts that by 2050 “France will become an Islamic republic”, so too will Germany. Based on present trends, it forecasts that half of the population of the Netherlands will be Muslim in 15 years, as will one in five of the Russian population. It notes that over the past 30 years the UK’s Muslim population has risen from 82,000 to 2.5 million, and says many of the 1000+ mosques in the country were former churches.
It recalled how Muammar Ghadaffi said, “There are signs that Allah will grant victory to Islam in Europe without swords, without guns, without conquest….The 50+ million Muslims in Europe will turn it into a Muslim continent within a few decades.”
“Closer to home” in Canada and the USA, the anonymous narrator in the video says, “the figures tell a similar story”. It noted that between 2001 and 2006 the Canadian population increased by 1.6 million, but 1.2 of them were Muslim immigrants. The video then turns to the USA and says there were 100,000 Muslims there in 1970 but by 2008 the number was “over 9 million”.
“The world is changing, it is time to wake up!” the video’s narrator said. It recalled how the Catholic Church had announced some years ago that Muslims had surpassed Catholics worldwide. It predicted that if current rates of fertility are maintained then, “Islam will become the dominant religion of the world.”
The video concluded dramatically with “a call to action” saying, “As believers we call upon you to share the Gospel message with a changing world.”
While the video’s producer remains anonymous, the commentary would suggest that it originated in the USA. It should be noted, however, that the data given in the video has long been contested, including by the BBC, but it is not known if the cardinal was aware of this.
At the synod, a European bishop promised to provide more updated projections from a recent European Bishops’ Conference study, but had not done so by Monday evening’s free discussion session when some speakers again expressed concern about the showing of the video.
While one must question Cardinal Turkson's judgment in using a 2008 propaganda video to make his point about the inevitable demographic and social crisis posed by the Western world's negative birth rate, it does not invalidate his point. The European bishop who promised to provide accurate figures should do so ASAP, because the birth rates cited for Europe seem to be accurate - it's the projected growth of Islam in the Western world that may be exaggerated.
Here's a reaction to the video by traditionalist author Roberto de Mattei after he viewed it (he also embeds the YouTube link to the video in his post):
Watch the video
and decide for yourself!
by Roberto de Mattei
Translated from
Octobefr 19, 2012
Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, showed the participants of the 13th General Assembly of the Bishops' Synod a seven-minute video entitled "A report on demographics in a changing world".
It is an English-language video that has been on YouTube for many years and which shows in a realistic way the implications of the demographic expansion of the Muslim population in Western countries.
But Cardinal Turkson's initiative triggered a wave of protests in the mass media and even among many of the Synodal Fathers, such as the Archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, who was reported to have said, "This is a Manichean vision which is not ours - we cannot possibly start an anti-Muslim crusade".
Cardinal Turkson was forced to express an apology: "I never intended to deceive, raise fear, or do wrong to anyone. I was not calling Christians to arms".
Well, we would like to show this video, and say, "It has nothing to do with calling Christians to arms - but it does call on all Christians, starting with the Synodal Fathers, not to close their eyes to reality, whether we like it or not. It is a dramatic reality because Islam is advancing, and not just on the demographic level but even on the religious. European churches are closing down or pass on to other hands, mosques are multiplying in almost a vertiginous fashion, and Islam clearly aims to be the leading religion in Europe."
And why would the pastors of the Church not want to listen to this tragic situation? What are they afraid of? Islam is not a threat to the Christian faith itself. Are they afraid to speak up about Islam because doing so could lead to martyrdom?
But has the Pope not just called on us to bear witness to our faith to the point of martyrdom if need be> What better occasion then the Synodal Assembly in this Year of Faith to brandish the standard of Catholic truth against
false religions like Islam?
[That's the traditionalist bigot in De Mattei who will not even pay lip service to show respect for another religion which does not need to be gratuitously branded 'false'.
Those who have faith have no fear of a video which presents the expansion of Islam in the West that is apparently impossible to halt.
But the words of the Angel to Mary has to resound in the heart of those who have faith: Everything is possible to God. And whoever chooses to fight back knows that it is possible, with the help of God, to make the West of the future not the land of Allah
[I think the correct phrase should be 'land of Muhammad' since 'Allah' is God], but a new Christian civilization, faithful to the Christian message. The Church fears nothing and no one.
It is in this spirit that I would like you to watch and disseminate the video that Cardinal Turkson showed to the Synodal Fathers.
www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=h5-z23qslLg
Well, I have seen the video, and it is far tamer than I had been led to expect, from some of the reactions it provoked. I did not think there was a single word in it that can be construed as anti-Islam. It is certainly not Manichean, as Cardinal Vingt-Trois sees it, much less a call to an anti-Islam crusade! It is, in effect, a call to action for the Western world to stop its demographic suicide. If the video is anti-anything at all, it is against the inaction and seeming passivity of the West to the realities of demographc decline.
If we just stick to the fundamental premise that Muslim expansion - and possibly, its eventual dominance - in the West is made more likely by the continuing decline of the birthrate among most of the nations of the so-called Western world, which includes at this time, all of Eastern Europe and Russia (which has one of the most alarming denatalization rates in the world), then even allowing for possibly skewed statistics built into the video, it should act as a jolt to the cultural and social complaisancy of Westerners - seculars and Christians alike. Committed Christians will resist any threat to their faith and their way of life. But would the seculars resist at all? And yet, this is a question of their very survival as Europeans or Canadians or North Americans.
Facing the reality of Islam in our day is a matter of necessity, if not urgency. A world where most Westerners opt for less children or no children at all must once again learn to be a culture of life, not a culture of hedonism that sees children as obstacles to the pursuit of pleasure ,and is therefore ultimately a culture hostile to new life.
If the peoples of Europe are truly not interested in the survival of their respective nationalities and cultures, the alternative might be to let the Christians of Latin America, Africa and Asia flood Europe and let their birthrate and numbers counteract those of the European Muslims! [According to the video, the USA, alone among the leading Western countries, is at the minimum 'cultural survival rate' of 2.11 children per family only because of the Latinos in the USA.] Either way, the European races will be moribund.
The simple faith of Third World Christians might also prove to be a good foil for the universal religiosity of Muslims who apparently do not fail to pray five times a day, attend mosque on Fridays, observe a month of fasting once a year, and do all they can to be able to travel to Mecca at least once in their lifetime. When was the last historical era when Catholics were so universally devout and disciplined in their religious practices? Not that slavish adherence to Islam's basic religious precepts necessarily makes Muslims 'holier' or 'more moral' or 'better' persons than most Christians are. But at least, they do observe the discipline of their faith. How many of us can say that of ourselves?
In a spirit of fraternal humility, Cardinal Turkson has apologized for showing the video. He needn't have done so - especially if, as he is in a position to do (and is actually part of his Council's work), he had supplemented it with sourced and verifiable figures as a countercheck to the statistics cited by the video - which does not cite any sources for its figures. Too bad that many of his fellow bishops took umbrage for the wrong reasons.
Last January, I posted two articles on the world's 'demographic winter', particularly evident in the West. They are worth re-reading. And just to round out the picture, I also excerpted what Benedict XVI writes in Caritas in veritate about the social and economic consequences of the birth rate falling below 'replacement level'.
benedettoxviforum.freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=85272...
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/10/2012 05:36]