under the patronage of St Joseph and St Dominic

By the rivers of Babylon there we sat and wept, remembering Zion;
on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. . . Ps 136

ISLAM AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

“There is one thing in this world which is different from all other.
It has a personality and a force.  It is recognised, and, when recognised, either loved or hated.  It is the Catholic Church…”                                                                 
                                                                    Hilaire Belloc, in a letter to The Evening Standard[1]

“We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate! …”                               
                                                                                                        G K Chesterton, Lepanto

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The Mohammedan zealot understands better than the citizen of the derivatively Christian West the issues between their two cultures.  He understands that Islam’s eternal enemy is that entity whose power, now apparently in eclipse, has underlain every defeat Islam has suffered since the 7th Century when its brooding presence first appeared to afflict mankind.  He understands far better than his western counterpart the power of that Force to bring his gnosis to perdition.  He laughs (as the orthodox Catholic laughs) at the folly of Stalin’s ‘How many Divisions has the Pope?’, and Voltaire’s vacuous defence of the irrational to indulge their irrationality.  He knows better than these sophists that the issues that confront mankind are not material, but immaterial; that they are not physical, but metaphysical.  While the Muslim focuses upon the civilisation which bears the remnants of Christian culture, he knows that it is not the traces of greatness in it that matters, but the source of that greatness.

He knows that the plague of atheism which afflicts the western world is the result of the systematic engagement in vice by those who once called themselves Christian.  He knows that once a man loses respect for the moral law, it is inevitable he will lose respect for its Author.  And he knows this even though Mohammedanism has distorted his own conceptions of virtue and of vice.

The Muslim has a long memory for the reverses Islam has suffered at the hands of the Catholic Church.  The Church Militant means more to him than it does to contemporary Catholics, the vast majority of whom would disavow the preaching of St Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Urban II in 1095 that precipitated the First Crusade.  He remembers in their detail the defeat of the Mohammedan forces in the Holy Land that followed, and that of the Second Crusade: he remembers the defeat at Lepanto on 7th October 1571 under Don John of Austria; the lifting of the Muslim siege of Vienna by Prince John Sobieski on 11th and 12th September 1683; and the Muslim defeat at Zenta (Hungary) on 11th September 1697.   He understands the significance, as his western counterpart does not, of the date of the Muslim attacks on the World Trade Centre and The Pentagon, in September 2001.  He knows why the fake addressees of the ink cartridge bombs discovered in an air freighter in the United Kingdom in October 2010 should have borne the names of knights who persecuted his confreres in times past: ‘Reynald Krak’, French knight of the Second Crusade, and ‘Diego Deza’, Dominican Archbishop of Seville from 1504 to 1523.

The Mohammedan Gnosis

At the root of the Muslim mindset is a rejection of what God has revealed about Himself.   St Paul exposed not only for the Jews but for all of mankind its ambit—

“In many and various ways God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets.  But now, in these our days, He has spoken to us through His Son.”[2]

Mohammed rejected God’s revelation, Jesus Christ, when he uttered his own ersatz ‘revelations’.   The provenance of those ‘revelations’ may be seen from the way they reverse the truths that God revealed for man’s salvation.  For they mock, even as they reflect, those truths.

• Christ warned his followers of the perils of the flesh—Mohammed seduced his followers by promises of the pleasures of the flesh.
• Christ called His followers to go out and convert the whole world through love—Mohammed called his followers to do so through violence.
• Christ taught that perfection lies in laying down one’s life that others may live—Mohammed taught that perfection lies in laying down one’s life in the killing of others.
• Christ revealed God’s intimate life to man as a community of persons in the one Being whose essence is existence—Mohammed asserted that God, and the life of God, is beyond all comprehension.
• Christ’s Church teaches that man works out his eternal destiny by his own choices.  Mohammed taught that man is ruled by fate: whatever befalls a man, evil as well as good, is pre-ordained by Allah.
• Christ is our Mediator with God Who bends down to our frailty and provides us with subsidiary mediators, Mary the Mother of God and the saints, to intercede for us. Mohammedanism denies there can be any intermediary between God and man.
• Christ’s Church encourages her members to keep and to revere images of her Founder and of the saints as they keep and revere the images of those they love[3] —Mohammedanism is iconoclast, rejecting all use of images.

In these and other inversions of what God has revealed, and in the rejection of the governance of His Church, we may detect the hand of the Father of Lies.  We may see, also, why the Catholic Church has ever regarded Mohammedanism as her mortal enemy.  What St Thomas Aquinas wrote in the 13th century is true today:

“Mohammed produced no signs in a supernatural way, which alone fittingly gives witness to divine inspiration; for a visible action that can be only divine reveals an invisibly inspired teacher of truth.  On the contrary, Mohammed said that he was sent in the power of his arms—signs that may be found among robbers and tyrants.” (Summa Contra Gentes I, 6, [4])

The Catholic Church is God’s creation.  God is its founder: God is its head.  God is its soul: God is its end.[4]    Against this Thing God has created, the gates of Hell will never prevail, no matter how comprehensive the endeavours of its dark Gatekeeper.  Against this Entity whose vigour has, for the present, been weakened by the follies of bishops, theologians, and sometimes even popes, the Devil will never prevail.

Islam’s Defects

Islam is not only theologically unsound, but philosophically so.  While it has produced philosophers of note, true philosophers (among them, Alfarabi, Algazel, Avicenna and Averroes) not the gutter philosophers of the last four centuries, the deliberations of none of them have matched the wisdom of those of the Catholic Church, notably St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas.

The thought of Islam is unsound precisely at the point where philosophy meets theology, in the rationale underlying the created world.  The most shallow appreciation of living creatures—once the thinker lifts himself out of the materialist mire represented by Darwinian theory—recognises in each instance of the multitude of their natures the inbuilt order and inclination for what is fitting for itself and for its progeny.  Each demonstrates the truth taught by St Thomas that the created thing loves itself, manifesting in this trait the character of the One who created it and keeps it in existence.  It is this character—order and inclination towards what befits self—which God revealed to men through the prophets, which mankind’s Lord and Saviour taught during his earthly ministry, and fulfilled so eloquently by His death.[5]

Here is the fundamental contradiction in Mohammedanism.  Man was not, according to its thesis, created to love and serve God, and to love his neighbour as he loves himself, but to be a slave to Allah.[6]    The Muslim may love his wife, his child, but the ‘religion’ to which he submits himself excludes love.   It drives the Muslim to reduce his loved ones as means to a diabolical end.  The Mohammedan god, Allah, is a despot who shares many of the less attractive features of the ancient semitic god, Moloch, and the gods of the Mayan civilisation, demanding the sacrifice of human offspring for their appeasing.[7]   Witness, daily, the harm throughout the world effected by Muslim girls and boys sacrificing themselves “to the will of Allah” as they slaughter their fellow men.

The Atheist and his Blindness

Sin consists in formal aversion from God.  The more a sin severs a man from God, the graver it is.  But man is more than ever separated from God by unbelief because he is deprived even of true knowledge of Him.[8]   This deprivation severs him intellectually from the source on which he is dependent; blinds him to his contingency; fills him with arrogance.  Any breach of the moral law affects the intellect.  The sinner, precisely because he is a sinner, is incapable of judging rightly about principles.  Atheism compounds the defect and disposes its adherents to the philosophical error of materialism.

These are rendered easy converts to the simplistic protocols of Freemasonry in which, quite unknowingly, they are indoctrinated through films and plays, television, radio, and the print media.[9]   This subservience is manifest in their conversation.  Hardly a thought they express owes its provenance to a source other than some radio or television commentator parroting the Masonic line.   No mention of ultimate things ever passes their lips; no thought of them penetrates their minds.

Abandonment of moral principle leads them first to support, then to attempt to legitimise, divorce, contraception, in vitro fertilisation, abortion and the variety of sexual perversions.  Again quite unconsciously, they conform to Christ’s warning, “He who is not with me is against me.”[10]   The man who will not live in accordance with the principles the Son of God has enunciated for his temporal and eternal wellbeing inevitably becomes God’s opponent.

The Consequences of this Blindness

With the errors of atheism and materialism now well entrenched in western countries, the majority of their citizens have lost the sense of the civilisation that gave them birth.  Happy to enjoy the remnant of its fruit, they do not understand the need to return to its principles if it is to be preserved.

This blindness renders them incapable of appreciating the fundamental contradiction of its values at which Mohammedanism aims.  In their naïvety they think the derivatively Christian principles of love of one’s fellow man, of ‘a fair go’, inhabit the Muslim breast.  They do not.  The Muslim gnosis is not grounded in love for one’s fellow man, but in a will to power.  They are incapable, moreover, of seeing how the Muslim will use the weak and the vulnerable to achieve his ends.  The situation is worse still.  Even were they to grasp what is at stake, indulgence has rendered them ineffectual.  Daily they watch and read of the violence which characterises Mohammedan societies, but commitment to materialist ideologies—secular humanism, feminism, and the innumerable varieties of political correctness—has crippled their ability to prevent their own civilisation falling victim to these evils.

The Muslim makes no bones about his intention to penetrate western culture.  He is quite open: the only perfect society, he says, is one ruled by Muslim law.  He is missionary: he wishes all the countries of the world to be subject to that draconian ‘law’.  He knows his quarry is weak and he plays upon his weaknesses to achieve his ends.  He uses against the materialist westerner his own ideological tools. Against criticism of Mohammedanism he alleges ‘religious discrimination’, while never mentioning that no one is more ruthless in ‘religious discrimination’ than the Muslim.  Against those who object to his provenance from middle eastern or far eastern countries, he alleges ‘racism’.  But the strongest tool in his armoury is appeal to his opponents’ misplaced sentimentality. 

The point is well illustrated in Australia.  Since restrictions on illegal immigration were lifted by the Labor Party Government under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in December 2007[11] , hundreds of small boats, the vast majority laden with Muslim ‘refugees’ from these countries, have landed on Australia’s litoral.

The voyages are imprudent and perilous.  Quite unnecessarily these boats include the most vulnerable, women, babies and young children.  In April 2009, in calm sea and good weather, one of these boats exploded whilst being towed by an Australian Navy vessel.   Five of the passengers died and some 46 were injured.  The explosion was caused deliberately to excite public feeling against the isolation and likely deportation of its Muslim passengers.  On 15th December 2010, in bad weather, another such boat ran onto the coast of Christmas Island and foundered under the eyes of video cameras with the loss of some 40 lives, including women and children.

That the vulnerable might be lost in this way does not concern the Muslim: such losses are simply ‘the will of Allah’.  If the Muslim zealot will send young men and women to their deaths to further the ends of Islam, why should he hesitate to use mothers and tiny children as means to penetrate the bastions of western culture?

The presence of the vulnerable excites Western materialists to indulge sentiment over reason.  Instead of weighing the issues, the most significant of which is whether their countries should permit the entry of further practitioners of Islam’s troublesome religion, politicians succumb to moral pressure to grant the vulnerable permission to stay.[12]    This permission having been given, it is inevitable those responsible for their attendance will also be permitted to stay.  Some 10,000 Muslims have entered Australia irregularly in this way since December 2007.

Attempts by Western materialists to move the Muslim to reasonable commitments are doomed.  The loss of the understanding of Christian principle prevents them comprehending its contrary.  They do not see that the Muslim has another agenda than right reason: he has a higher knowledge to guide him, ‘the revelations’ of ‘the Prophet’.   There is only one thing that will restrain him—superior force.

The Paradigm of Iberia

The effects of the loss of grasp of Christian principle may be seen in the history of the peoples of the Iberian Peninsula.  The Moors, the Umayyad Muslim dynasty, penetrated this Christian enclave from North Africa early in the 8th century, and had it conquered by 718 AD.[13]    The first reversal of Muslim dominance occurred in the battle of Covadonga in 722 when Pelayo of Asturias secured one small principality of the country for Christianity.  His symbolic victory marked the beginning of the Reconquista.  The reader may review its progress on the Wikipedia website[14] , or study it in any history of Spain and Portugal.[15]   The process was not concluded until the fall of the last Muslim stronghold, the Kingdom of Granada, in 1492.   Thus, it took the Catholic kings of the various principalities that made up Spain and Portugal almost 800 years to remove Mohammedanism from their midst.

Some 80 years later Pope Pius V was faced with two evils either of which could prove fatal to Europe’s Christian civilisation.[16]   Turkish Muslim forces threatened in the Adriatic while the Protestant revolt attacked civilisation’s very structure.   With the aid of heaven, Pius V achieved the downfall of the first in the Battle of Lepanto.  The Protestant evil would continue to grow, however, and two hundred years later assume a particular virulence in Freemasonry whose antipathy to the good of mankind was revealed in the French Revolution.[17]

The Revolution affected the Peninsula profoundly.  Napoleon conquered its peoples in 1807, forcing the Spanish King Ferdinand VII to abdicate and replacing him with his brother, Joseph.  The Iberian peoples revolted and Napoleon had to intervene to subdue them.  A coalition which included British and Portuguese forces opposed the French and was ultimately successful in 1814.  Bickering among the heirs of the late King as to the rightful heir led in 1873 to the first Spanish republic.  Between that date and 1931, authority in the state moved between monarchy and republic, culminating in a republic.

 Meanwhile, Freemasonry’s pernicious doctrines had infiltrated the Spanish populace and moved many to embrace the spirit of unbelief.  Opposition to the second Republican Government culminated in 1936 in the Spanish Civil War in the course of which atheistic malice led Republicans and their supporters to commit wholesale slaughter of Catholic priests and religious in the name of ‘liberty’.   The victory of the Nationalist forces in 1939 under General Francisco Franco served to suppress this mood.  But there was a cost, for Franco brought in some 10,000 Moorish troops from North Africa to assist.  The atheistic mood remained in check during Franco’s often draconian rule as dictator.  His death in 1975 opened the way for the Spanish peoples to resume their abandonment of allegiance to Christ and His Church.  The burgeoning of secular humanism, a further element of the Masonic agenda, throughout the world brought added pressure.  By 2006 some 40% of the population had declared themselves atheist or agnostic. 

The lack of unity consequent upon this abandonment of principle affected the will to oppose a new Mohammedan incursion.  The evil which had taken their fathers some 800 years to remove from the Peninsula re-established itself in less than thirty.   Mohammedanism is now Spain’s second largest religious denomination. The coordinated bombings by Muslim terrorists in Madrid in March 2004 in which 191 people died and almost 2,000 were wounded, are testimony to its evil effects.

The Catholic Bishops abandon Principle

A major contribution to this abandonment of principle came from an unexpected source.   The bishops of the Catholic Church meeting in council in the Vatican between 1962 and 1965, abandoned their Church’s teaching in favour of the Masonic principle of ‘religious liberty’.[18]   This entailed an implicit rejection of another principle the Church had upheld since the time of Constantine, that there could be no greater contribution to the good of any society than that its citizens should adopt the guidance of the Church founded for them by their Creator and Saviour.

“[W]hen states were governed by the philosophy of the Gospel...  the power and divine virtue of Christian wisdom diffused itself throughout the laws, institutions, and morals of the peoples, permeating all ranks and conditions of society.  Then… Church and state were happily united in concord and the friendly interchange of good offices.   States so constituted bore fruits significant beyond all expectation… Christian Europe subdued barbarous nations, changing them from a savage to a civilised condition; from superstition to true worship.  It rolled back the tide of Mohammedanism…; stood forth… as leader and teacher in every branch of national culture; bestowed on the world… a true and many-sided liberty; and… founded innumerable institutions for the solace of human suffering...  Even more significant effects might have resulted if obedience had only waited upon the authority, teaching, and counsels of [Christ’s] Church...” [Immortale Dei, 1.11.1885, nn. 21,22.]

The bishops had endorsed the Masonic doctrine of ‘separation of Church and State’.

That these same bishops aided and abetted the world slide into atheism is manifest in the effects of their pronouncement on religious liberty.  For they rejected there ipsissimis verbis the trenchant teaching of their Church to the contrary.

“To hold… that there is no difference in matters of religion between forms that are unlike each other, and even contrary to each other, most clearly leads in the end to the rejection of all religion in both theory and practice.  This is the same thing as atheism, however it may differ from it in name.  Men who really believe in the existence of God must, in order to be consistent with themselves and to avoid absurd conclusions, understand that differing modes of divine worship involving dissimilarity and conflict even on most important points cannot all be equally probable, equally good, and equally acceptable to God.” [Immortale Dei, op. cit. n. 31]

The Concordat between Spain and the Vatican which had secured the influence of the Church and maintained a bulwark there against the tsunami of world secularism was qualified by the Vatican’s acknowledgement of ‘religious liberty’.[19]   It was only a matter of time before the country would be penetrated by heterodox sects, and by Mohammedanism.[20]

The Issue

The western world has been blessed with an immense privilege: its civilisation derives from the one religion founded and established by God.  Five hundred years ago, two Catholics of influence betrayed that privilege and the world has suffered the consequences ever since.  Great numbers have now embraced the spirit of unbelief and abandoned moral principle.

Every breach of God’s law brings its condign sanction, and this conduct does not go unpunished.  Having rejected the true religion and its blessings, western civilisation is now to be punished with the false, Mohammedanism, and its banes.

But the punishment is not inevitable.  The people of Nineveh, threatened with destruction, acknowledged their wickedness and repented in sackcloth and ashes.[21]   God saw their contrition and withdrew His punishment.  So, too, the people of the derivatively Christian West may yet repent of their misbehaviour, and be relieved of the Mohammedan curse.  But this will only occur through Divine intervention.   St Peter’s words are true even in the natural order—

“[O]f all the names in the world given to men, there is the only one by which we can be saved.[22]

Will they repent and return to God?  Or will they, overborne by indulgence, submit to the ‘religion’ of violence and fear?

But what more oft in nations grown corrupt
And by their vices brought to servitude,
Than to love Bondage more than Liberty;
Bondage with ease, more than strenuous Liberty…[23]

*                                                            *

Some years ago a colleague told the writer that a Catholic had once taken a Muslim into a Catholic church.   The Catholic prayed for a while on his knees.  As they emerged from the church, the Muslim said to the Catholic: “Do you say that God is in that tabernacle?”  The Catholic replied: “Yes.”  The Muslim replied: “It is not possible.  If God was in that tabernacle, you would have been flat on your face.”

The story illustrates the difference between Catholicism and Mohammedanism.  The reason why the Catholic should present himself before God not on his face but on his knees is that God Himself has invited this familiarity

“As the Father has loved me, so also have I loved you.  Remain in my love.  If you keep my commandments you will remain in my love, as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in His love… Greater love has no man than that he lay down his life for his friends.  You are my friends if you do what I command you.  No longer will I call you servants, but friends…”[24]

Catholics are not slaves as Mohammedans are.   They are friends of God.  For He is their loving Father.

Michael Baker
25th March 2011—The Annunciation of the Lord

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Appendix

THE MASONIC AGENDA

In sections 12 to 23 of his encyclical, Humanum Genus, 20 April, 1884, Pope Leo XIII set forth the manifold evils that Freemasonry seeks to put into effect in every civilised society.  This is a summary of its more salient features.

Freemasonry asserts—

1. human nature and human reason ought in all things to be mistress and guide;
2. nothing has been taught by God;
3. no dogma of religion or truth is to be allowed which cannot be understood by the human intelligence;
4. the teaching office and authority of the Church should be of no account in the State;
5. Church and State ought to be altogether disunited;
6. (consequently) States ought to be constituted without any regard for the laws and precepts of the Church;
7. it should be lawful to attack with impunity the very foundations of the Catholic religion, in speech, in writing, and in teaching;
8. only the least possible liberty should be allowed the Church to manage her affairs and this by laws framed and fitted to hinder her freedom of action;
9. exceptional and onerous laws should be imposed upon the clergy to the end that they may be continually diminished in number, and be in need;
10. the possessions of the Church should be fettered with the strictest conditions subjecting them to the power and arbitrary will of the administrators of the state;
11. religious orders should be uprooted and scattered;
12. it should be declared openly that the sacred power of the Pontiffs must be abolished, and the papacy itself utterly destroyed;
13. a regard for religion should be held as an indifferent matter;
14. all religions are alike and there is no reason why one should have precedence over another;
15. those things which are fully understood by the natural light of reason, such as the existence of God, the immaterial nature of the human soul, and its immortality, can no longer be considered certain and permanent;
16. marriage belongs to the genus of contracts and may be ended as may they may;
17. the civil rulers of the State have power over the matrimonial bond;
18. in the education of youth nothing is to be taught in the matter of religion as of certain;
19. each one must be left at liberty to follow, when he comes of age, whatever religion he may prefer;
20. each one is naturally free;
21. all men have the same right, and are in every respect, equal and of like condition.
22. no one has the right to command another;
23. it is an act of violence to require men to obey any authority other than that which is obtained from themselves;
24. all power is held by the command, or permission, of the people; and,
25. the State should be without God.

Freemasonry denies—

• that all things were made by the free will of God the Creator;
• that the world is governed by Divine Providence;
• that souls do not die;
• that after this life upon earth there will succeed another and everlasting life;
• that the last end of men involves a destiny far above human things and beyond his sojourning upon earth;
• that our first parents sinned, and, consequently, that free will is at all weakened and inclined to evil;
• that there is any need at all of a constant struggle and steadfastness to overcome the violence and rule of human passions.

Freemasonry presses its members to ensure that—

• the youth of the state be educated according to its own designs;
• education be exclusively in the hands of lay men; and,
• in that education nothing which treats of the most important and most holy duties of men to God be introduced in instructions on morals.

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