THE CRESCENT AND THE PEPPERED MOTH:

The crescent and the conclave (Spengler, 4/19/05, Asia Times)

Now that everyone is talking about Europe's demographic death, it is time to point out that there exists a way out: convert European Muslims to Christianity. The reported front-runner at the Vatican conclave that began on Monday, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, is one of the few Church leaders unafraid to raise the subject. Hedonistic dissipation well may have condemned the existing Europeans to infecundity and extinction, but that does not prevent Europe from getting new ones. It has been done before.

Europe in the 8th century was a depopulated ruin. The loss of half the Roman Empire's population by the 7th century left vast territories open to Islam, which rapidly absorbed the formerly Christian Levant, North Africa and Spain. By converting successive waves of invading pagans - Lombards, Magyars, Vikings, Celts, Saxons, Slavs - Christianity reinvented Europe, and held Islam at bay. [...]

Christian missionaries will get nowhere in Muslim countries except into trouble. But Muslims in Europe no longer live in traditional society, much as they might attempt to re-create it on European soil. As long as they are strangers on European soil, they are vulnerable to Christian proselytizing, if there exist a Christian agency with the temerity to attempt it. [...]

As the late pope's adviser, Cardinal Ratzinger shares responsibility for past Vatican policies, but his tone has changed during the past six months. He opposed Turkey's entry into the European Union. Last week he published a tract titled Werte in Zeiten des Umbruchs ("Values in Times of Upheaval"), calling for Europe to return to its core Christian values. He denounced Europe's "incomprehensible self-hatred", adding that if Europe wants to survive, "it must consciously seek to rediscover its own soul". He wrote, "Multiculturalism cannot survive without common constants, without taking one's own culture as a point of departure."

Ratzinger deplored the exclusion of Christianity from the proposed European Constitution. Unlike the United States, where politicians of both parties agree that revelation is the source of virtue, secular Europe insists upon an entirely secular approach to ethics. In this regard I sympathize with Ratzinger, and refer readers to an extensive debate on the subject of Kant's Categorical Imperative in the Asia Times Online Forum. Kant initiated the modern attempt to derive ethics from reason. His approach (oversimplified) is to ask, "What if everybody did?" You are not supposed to do something to which you would object were someone else to do it. This approach has some obvious weaknesses. Bertrand Russell observed in his History of Western Philosophy that a depressive very well might wish for everyone to commit suicide, and thus commit suicide himself with perfect justification. Just that attitude describes the mindset of today's Europeans, who naturally prefer a Kantian approach to a religious one.

That earlier phenomenon is why the "Dark Ages" were the true period of enlightenment. Similarly, a Europe that is taken over by a Reformed Islam will be vastly preferable to the one that exists today.

MORE:
Vatican Is Rethinking Relations With Islam (Daniel Williams and Alan Cooperman, April 15, 2005, Washington Post)

After two decades of contact and dialogue with the Islamic world under Pope John Paul II, the Vatican is rethinking an outreach program that critics say is diluting Catholicism and has brought almost no benefits to beleaguered Catholic minorities in Muslim countries.

The late pontiff undertook the drive as part of a broad effort to open channels to other religions. He applied a personal stamp by stepping into a mosque in Damascus and meeting with Muslim groups more than 60 times. He also visited a synagogue in Rome and Jerusalem's Western Wall.

Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, said the next pope might more emphatically demand rights for Christian minorities in Islamic countries and the freedom of all people to choose their faith.

"There may be a greater insistence on religious liberty," said Fitzgerald, the church's point man on Islamic relations. "But I don't think we're going to go to war. The times of the Crusades are over. . . . I don't see any fundamental change in the way the church has been dealing with these questions."

Justo Lacunza Balda, who heads the Pontifical Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies, a Vatican research group, said criticism was focused on the lack of reciprocal goodwill gestures in many Muslim countries. "Humanly speaking, it is of course important to see some payback," he said.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 19, 2005 12:00 AM