An interesting commentary on Hillaire Belloc's warning concerning Islam:
"It’s hard to engage in interfaith dialogue when your head has been cut off."
Belloc’s prophecy was twofold. He identified the cause of Islam’s enduring success, and he warned, when such warnings seemed irrelevant, of its resurgence. The reason for its success, we have seen: simplicity and lack of reason. For its resurgence: lack of resistance. “We are divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way,” Belloc wrote, in 1937, “ . . . and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.”
The Middle East, from Syria and Iraq to Lebanon and Egypt, is once again a land flowing with the blood of Christian martyrs. The Christ-haters are not only the scimitar-wielding psychopaths of the “caliphate.” They are those who willingly and deliberately fail to come to the aid of entire communities threatened with ethnic cleansing, even genocide. Perhaps if we lose, Belloc wrote, 80 years ago, “our Faith will rise.” The blood of the martyrs is the seed of holiness. It has always been so. - Father Benedict Kiely
Thanks for this from Belloc!
ReplyDeleteRelated: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/mullarkey/2014/06/misuse-of-prayer
ReplyDeleteI recommend Robert Reilly's "The Closing of the Islamic Mind" that shows that Islam jettisoned its earlier embrace of philosophy around the 10th century thus preventing it from exercising reason in its understanding of God and His ways. If God is pure will (as opposed to pure love) then what's the point of employing philosophy in developing a theology? In this worldview there are no secondary causes -- God is the first cause of every single action, change and motion in the universe.
ReplyDeleteFather Benedict Kiely who authored the piece on Belloc is no shrinking violet. Three summers ago, my wife and I went to Blessed Sacrament Parish in Stowe, VT while vacationing there. During his homily Father Kiely was talking about how we're in no position to criticize the world with all the sin we have in the Church. I thought he meant the priestly scandals but the sin he wound up talking about was the massive dissent from the Church's teaching on contraception. Not only did no one walk out, but the congregation was in a good mood after Mass and people were laughing and joking with Father Kiely.
Hilaire Belloc was indeed a prophet.
"So far, the West has been "utterly unable to comprehend the threat of militant Islam"
ReplyDeleteI read the news, I see the pictures, I have cried at the loss of so many innocent people and still...I cannot comprehend it either. I am too comfortable.
Who wants to budge? Not me. I have too much too give up if I do.
But of late, there is a still small voice that reminds me to pray, to give thanks, to prepare.
Whatever it means I cannot fully grasp, but I will pray to listen and to follow because in the end, it will be all I have.
Holy Mary, Queen of Peace, pray for us!
Thanks for explaining the Islamic belief that God is pure will as opposed to pure love.
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