"Moderate schism, if there may be such a thing, draws in supporters who would otherwise have been inattentive to the matter, and teaches men to think upon religion" - Anthony Trollope
In this changing and very troubled world it's always nice to know who your friends are.
And I suppose the converse is true - it's important to know who your enemies are, too. And this week we realised that one of our enemies is the Roman Catholic Church, which this week allied itself with the Muslim terrorists by thanking them "for bringing God back into the public sphere in Europe".
Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, head of the Catholic Church's department for interfaith contacts, said religion was now talked and written about more than ever before in today's Europe.
"It's thanks to the Muslims", he said in a speech printed in Friday's L'Osservatore Romano, the official daily of the Vatican. "Muslims, having become a significant minority in Europe, were the ones who demanded space for God in society."
Vatican officials have long bemoaned the secularisation of Europe, where church attendance has dwindled dramatically in recent decades, and urged a return to its historically Christian roots.
But Tauran said no society had only one faith. "We live in multicultural and multi-religious societies, that's obvious", he told a meeting of Catholic theologians in Naples. "There is no civilisation that is religiously pure."
Jewish leaders have reacted with dismay, understandably given the Muslim obsession with sweeping Jewry into the sea, but Catholic leaders simply obfuscated their motives in their own sea of meaningless drivel. Tauran said religions were "condemned to dialogue", a practice he called "the search for understanding between two subjects, with the help of reason, in view of a common interpretation of their agreement and disagreement." He said "Every religion has its own identity, but I agree to consider that God is at work in all, in the souls of those who search for him sincerely. Inter-religious dialogue rallies all who are on the path to God or to the Absolute."
Early this month, the Vatican held a pioneering conference with a delegation from the 'Common Word' group of Muslim scholars who invited Christian churches to a new dialogue. A week later, Saudi King Abdullah gathered world leaders at the United Nations as part of a dialogue he launched with a conference of faith leaders in Madrid last July.
An Indian prelate, speaking after the Mumbai attacks began, said in Rome that a lack of courage to meet across faith lines was often behind religious violence in his country. Archbishop Felix Machado of Nashik diocese, just east of Mumbai, told Italian priests the violence was caused by "inequality, a lack of justice and understanding and, above all, a lack of courage to dialogue", which must have come as a great consolation to the shocked inhabitants of Mumbai.
But no matter how these prelates seek to disguise their worldly ambitions with lofty phrases and vague rhetoric, the fact is simple and obvious: they think they have something to gain from religious turmoil and violence. The secular world that goes about its business without a thought for religion, the masses of Europeans who don't give a fig for the authority of the Church - they're finally getting their come-uppance thanks to the Muslims, and the Pope and his satraps are gleefully seeking some advantage from it.
(Thinks): "God, send me down a machine-gun …"
Even the dreadful loss of life in India recently is not too high a price to pay if you're a fat cardinal pigging safely at the Vatican trough. Who cares how many industrious Indians, weird Jews and idle Western tourists are murdered so long as the Catholic Church gets its place in the sun? Anything's better than being ignored.
Bastards.
Oh, and … er, Pax vobiscum, my sons.
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
Copyright © 2008 The GOS
This site created and maintained by PlainSite