Bishop calls God “Allah”—and what basis does the post-Vatican II Church have to say no?

(Note: In the discussion following the initial entry, I analyze key passages of the Church’s radically liberal document Nostra Aetate.)

This is from MSNBC (no link):

AMSTERDAM—A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.

Bishop Tiny Muskens, from the southern diocese of Breda, told Dutch television on Monday that God did not mind what he was named and that in Indonesia, where Muskens spent eight years, priests used the word “Allah” while celebrating Mass.

“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah? … What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

Does this bishop not have an archbishop to straighten him out? Acch, the archbishop is probably worse than the bishop. Ok, then, what about the Pope, can’t he do something about this? Hmm, well, the Pope would appeal to the highest authority on the subject, which is the Catholic Catechism and the 1965 document Nostra Aetate, both of which describe Muslims as “fellow adorers” with Catholics of “the one God.” So really, doesn’t it make sense to call God by his Islamic name, as an act of love and charity to our fellow adorers of the one God?

There is no solution to our mortal civilizational crisis so long as liberalism—including the Catholic Church’s own version of liberalism, which is Vatican II—remains in the saddle.

- end of initial entry -

George R. writes:

Consider this passage from Nostra Aetate:

“No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.”

Translation: The basis for any and all distinctions between good and evil is hereby abolished.

This document is not just weak in the section concerning the Muslims. It is an irredeemably evil document that must be rejected in its entirety.

LA replies:

I had not read or remembered this passage. It’s pure liberalism. And it makes central the concept that I have repeatedly said is the defining concept of modern liberalism: non-discrimination.

Now, people may say this is only about equality of “rights” and “dignity,” or right-liberalism, not about equality of behavior and culture, or left-liberalism. In reality, once right-liberalism has to be followed in all circumstances, as is made clear in this passage, then any line between right-liberalism and left-liberalism becomes vanishingly thin. If we believe that there can be no discrimination between people as far as their human dignity is concerned, is it possible to make any discrimination between them at all? For example, if we say that the followers of religion X are incompatible with our society and we don’t want them to come here, are we not lessening their dignity? Therefore we must simply admit everyone into our society who wants to come. Therefore, once right-liberalism, the belief in the equality of individual rights and dignity, is made the ruling principle, it automatically morphs into left-liberalism, the belief in substantive group equality and total openness.

However, Nostra Aetate is even worse than what I’ve said. Nostra Aetate is not even facially right-liberal. It is facially left-liberal, since it prohibits discrimination not only between individuals, but between peoples, and thus explicitly denies the basis for the existence of distinct nations, cultures, civilizations, and religions.

LA writes:

First, I cannot call all of Nostra Aetate evil as George does. Some of the below passage on Jewish-Christian relations in my view is right and proper:

Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God’s saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ—Abraham’s sons according to faith—are included in the same Patriarch’s call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people’s exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.

Unfortunately, in the last sentence, beginning, “Indeed…” the document goes too far and says that Jews and Christians are one in Christ. How can the Jews be one in Christ with gentiles, when Jews don’t believe in Christ? Jesus said that those who followed him would be one with him: “Abide in me, and I in you.” How can a non-follower of Christ abide in Christ? We know the answer. It’s the Vatican II and Karol Woytila doctrine that Christ’s advent transformed human nature itself, making everybody one with Christ, and thus implicitly making Christianity unnecessary. This idea of a transformed or “divinized” human nature does not come from any teaching of Christ, it comes from the modern liberal imperative to treat man as a god and to remove all barriers between all groups.

The document doesn’t stop at rendering the Christian Church defunct; it makes every society defunct. Consider the passage George quoted earlier, along with the paragraph that immediately follows it:

No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.

The Church reproves, as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against men or harassment of them because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion.

I’ve already analyzed the first paragraph, showing how the prohibition on discrimination insofar as it relates to people’s dignity inevitably translates into a prohibition on any discrimination at all. However, I didn’t need to do that interpretative work, because in the second paragraph the prohibition on discrimination goes beyond dignity and becomes comprehensive and unqualified. What is “foreign to the mind of Christ”, and thus forbidden, is “any discrimination against men [emphasis added] … because of their race, color, condition of life, or religion.” This is as radical and antinomian as the Leveler tracts of 17th century England! No people, no nation, no religion, no culture, no form of government, no family organization, no human society of any kind could maintain its existence under this rule. Which of course is what I’ve been saying about liberalism all along.

* * *

Mary B. writes:

This bishop needs a cardinal to straighten him out. According to an article in Radio Netherlands about Bishop Muskens’ statement:

Apart from Allah, the term ar-Rabb (the Lord) is also widely used, although this appears far more often in the Arabic version of the Bible than in the Qur’an. In the Islamic context, references to ar-Rabb are normally found in the possessive form, such as Rabbi (My Lord). Interestingly, the word Allah was already in use by Christians in the pre-Islamic period.

Bishop Muskens proposal will undoubtedly receive a warm welcome from the Islamic community in the Netherlands. Particularly as it follows last week’s remarks by Geert Wilders about banning the Qur’an and, shortly before that, former Muslim Ehsan Jami’s comparison of Muhammad with Osama bin Laden.

Ortelio writes:

Reporting the bad news that a Dutch bishop recommends we call God “Allah,” you ask “and what basis does the post-Vatican II Church have to say no?” The answer is clear and is given again and again in the most important and heavyweight of all the documents issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith under Cardinal Ratzinger’s long presidency over it, the document “Dominus Iesus,” Declaration on the unicity and salvific universality of Jesus Christ and the Church” of August 2000. Ratzinger took special personal responsibility for it. From end to end it refers to God as “One and Triune.” The God projected by Islamic faith, Allah, is One, but in no way three persons, in no way Triune. “Allah” does not refer properly to the true God.

You give your reply: “the Catholic Catechism and the 1965 document Nostra Aetate, both … describe Muslims as ‘fellow adorers’ with Catholics of “the one God.” But the most authoritative versions of those documents don’t say that. The bishops who voted for Nostra Aetate voted for a Latin text that is accurately translated by the Italian version of the revised and corrected Catechism: Muslims “professing to hold the faith of Abraham, adore with us a God who is one, merciful, and will judge men on the last day.” True, this is ambiguous. But like the Latin it falls well short of saying that we are fellow adorers of one and the same God. Its more obvious meaning is that Muslims like us adore a God who is one, merciful, a judge—a statement which is compatible with adding immediately that their holy book, the Koran, not only names him Allah but flatly denies that Allah is what God truly is, triune.

English translations issued by the Vatican quite often give arguable interpretations, and not infrequently mistranslations, of the authoritative texts, almost invariably in a liberal direction. This is deplorable, of course, but that’s different from saying that the Church now has no basis for saying no to the foolish bishop. It has ample basis. Nothing in Nostra Aetate needs to be denied, not even the lamentably ambiguous and unguarded sayings about discrimination. It just needs to be supplemented with clarifications and disambiguations. These can be readily supplied from elsewhere in Catholic teaching, indeed from elsewhere in Vatican II, though the present bishops, even at the top, have too little appetite for this important task.

LA replies:

The Vatican produces its own English translation of Nostra Aetate. I assume the Vatican has fully competent multilingual writers, editors, bishops, Cardinals and other people of high degree. Here is the Vatican’s own official rendition of the brief section of N.A. dealing with Moslems:

3. The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all- powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth,(5) who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

Apparently when I wrote, “fellow adorers of the one God” in quotes, that was a mistake on my part. In Nov 2006 I had written:

when we remember the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate which embraces Muslims as fellow “adorers of the one God,”

The word “fellow” was my own, not part of the quote. Then in this recent writing, writing from memory, I included “fellow,” which was previously outside the quote, in the quote, turning it into “fellow adorers of the one God.” So that was my mistake.

However, while that correction softens the meaning it does not materially change it. It’s still the case that Nostra Aetate says that Moslems “adore the one God,” which sure sounds to me like the same God adored by Christians.

Further, according to Ortelio, the correct wording in the Italian translation of N.A. is:

Muslims “adore with us a God who is one, merciful, and will judge men on the last day…”

So the Italian includes the phrase “with us”, which is not in the official English version. “They adore with us the one God” conveys the same meaning as “fellow adorers of the one God.”

Now Dan M. is about to take me to the woodshed. I apologize to readers for the extreme length of Dan’s comment, but he insisted that I post it all, and if I don’t someone will surely accuse me of censoring people who disagree with me. So here goes.

Dan M. writes:

Regarding your interpretation of Nostra Aetate: you continue to make the same mistakes as though you had never been told how to approach these docs. First, to interpret them apart from the Church’s own self-understanding and apart from historical context will always leave you puzzling. They are every bit as challenging as the scriptures themselves, perhaps more so. As a Protestant, you may hold to the principle of individual interpretation, but at the same time, if you are honest, you must admit that the principle of individual interpretation has given us thousands of irreconcilable interpretations. It is the same with the U.S. constitution. When interpreting a document one turns to other supporting documents in the same tradition. For the constitution, for example, we turn to the federalist papers, the writings of the founders, and to tradition previously agreed by all to be sound. It is no different with Vatican II and its documents. You may not treat council documents as Protestants treat the bible, and insist that the plain meaning is obvious on the face of the text—at least not if you want to be taken seriously by your educated Catholic readers. If you do this, you will have nothing but your own personal interpretation tradition, bearing no relevance to anything that the Church actually believes, and no one is thereby bound to take your pronouncements seriously.

That said, what is the hermeneutic by which one is bound? For amateur purposes, it’s easy enough. (1) Bear in mind that Vatican II was a battle for the soul of the Church between theological liberals and traditionalists. Taken as a whole, there is not one “side” or other that “won.” Although the liberals undoubtedly outnumbered the traditionalists, we believe, as Catholics, that God’s hand was guiding this process. The battle resulted in 16 documents, some of them rather vaguely worded. Traditionalists have lamented this vagueness because it allowed an overwhelmingly liberal hierarchy to do the same thing that liberal Supreme Court justices do to the constitution, and what Protestants do to the bible—interpret it in their own way, which is inevitably a liberal way, which can be done because of the vague language. Do you reject the constitution of the U.S. or the bible because of liberal interpretations of them? No.

2) It is simply bogus to interpret any Church document as mandating heresy, stupidity, or the elimination of the distinctions necessary to live and survive. This means, among other things, that if any council document seems to be contradicting all the others, and long-standing tradition and practice, then evidently you have misunderstood something. It simply cannot be the case that, as you put it, some passage really “explicitly denies the basis for the existence of distinct nations, cultures, civilizations, and religions.” This is a sure sign that you have gone off the rails. Even the liberal framers of this language would not have agreed with you that this passage means what you say.

In this context you ask the following question, “For example, if we say that the followers of religion X are incompatible with our society and we don’t want them to come here, are we not lessening their dignity?” In what follows, you seem to be saying that it would “lessen” their dignity, and therefore, making any such distinctions at all is disallowed under NA. But this is ridiculous. Evidently we have very different ideas about what does and does not “lessen dignity.” I don’t think, for example, that women not having the franchise in the early days of this country in any way lessened their dignity. Evidently many liberals do. I also don’t think that recognizing the incompatibility of Muslims with our society, and restricting Muslim immigration lessens their dignity—it’s just an empirical observation. Am I to be forced to understand this passage of NA in the way a liberal would, when it flies in the face of reality, and the Church’s own experience of an 800-year war to expel Muslims from Christian lands? What you are doing when you suggest the answer is yes, is exactly what theological liberals do with any Church document, including the bible, when they interpret them. Legitimate theologians have their hands full combating this idiot tendency. It doesn’t help at all to have people like you insisting that the liberal interpretation is the only legitimate one, when it plainly is not.

Finally, all this is not to say that I don’t think there are real problems with some of the Vatican II documents. One of them is undoubtedly the language, “adorers of the one God.” But you have shown with your consistently hostile and amateurish approach to the documents that you will not be offering anything constructive. It is simply not the case that left or right liberalism “has to be followed in all circumstances.” Nor is it even possible that any Church document has a rule that runs contrary to the existence of nations, races, and cultures. It never has in the past, such a rule would be evil on the face of it, such a rule is incompatible with too may other teachings to even count, therefore … what? Either the Church is an idiot, or someone has misunderstood. Discrimination, dignity, harassment, etc. have certain meanings to liberals, and then they also have legitimate meanings. If the legitimate meaning produces something not contrary to the teaching of the Church across millennia, then there is your proper understanding, see?

No one seems to know why God would have allowed a council like Vatican II, with its vaguely worded documents and all the trouble they have caused. But it often takes hundreds of years for these things to become clear. Traditionalist Catholics are convinced, though, that there is a good reason that will one day become clear. In the meantime, I can say that my own conversion was probably made possible only by Vatican II. I was not sufficiently rightist or conservative to appreciate the Latin Mass at the time I first investigated the Church, and probably would have rejected her, perhaps never to return. I hope this discussion at least shows that a traditionalist interpretation is at least possible much of the time, and that, being traditional, such an understanding is much more the legitimate hermeneutic as such, insofar as it is not contradictory of what has always been taught.

LA replies:

Dan M. reproves me for my amateurish, clumsy, and hostile interpretation of Nostra Aetate. I am unimpressed by his criticisms. What I do when I read a political document is try to identify its real tendency in logic and in practice, not just its surface, formal meaning. The modern world is filled with documents and statements and proposals that are presented as moderate, sensible, and unthreatening but that in fact contain extremely radical principles. Getting at the heart of liberalism means getting at the real principles and tendencies of liberal statements, because these are what are actually operative in men’s’ minds and in politics.

Dan M. writes: “It simply cannot be the case that, as you put it, some passage really ‘explicitly denies the basis for the existence of distinct nations, cultures, civilizations, and religions.’ This is a sure sign that you have gone off the rails. Even the liberal framers of this language would not have agreed with you that this passage means what you say.”

How ridiculous. Of course the liberal framers would not agree with my interpretation of it. Does he seriously mean to suggest that the proof of my interpretation of N.A. is that its authors would agree with me? Did the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act admit that it would lead to the imposition on private businesses of racial quotas for minorities? No—in fact they insisted that it said just the opposite. Yet the regulatory agency created by the Act immediately imposed racial quotas, and Congress did nothing about it. Did the liberal framers of the 1965 Immigration Act admit that they were passing a law that would turn America into a non-white country? No. They insisted that was an alarmist lie put out by bigots. Yet America, which was 89 percent white in 1965, is 67 percent white today. When the authors of Nostra Aetate in 1965 wrote that “any” discrimination against people on the basis of religion was wrong, did they consciously intend that this would mean the opening of the borders of Europe to Muslims, the empowerment of Muslim in Europe? No, but the words meant what the words meant, and the words have had consequences in putting the Church on the side of the opening of Europe to Islam. It is the very nature of liberalism that liberals never admit the nature of what they are doing. Yet their words are there, and the words have the effect that they have.

To reply to another of Dan’s arguments, to say that there shall be no discrimination between people and people certainly is an explicit denial of the very basis of the existence of distinct nations and cultures. A fundamental attribute of any existing thing is that is distinct from other existing things. A society is a particular kind of thing which divides humanity into those who belong to it and those who don’t. Its identity depends on discrimination between its members and its non-members, a discrimination that goes on constantly in the ordinary course of life. For example, we care more about what happens in our own country than about what happens in other countries. To say there shall be no discrimination between peoples is to say that all peoples are one, which in practical terms means open borders and the attempted merging of all peoples.

A further weak argument by Dan is that he doesn’t feel that discrimination against Muslim immigration would lessen Muslims’ dignity, and therefore N.A. does not bar discrimination against Muslim immigrants. Sorry, Dan, but YOUR views aren’t dispositive here. The issue here is the actual meaning and tendency of those words in the real world. Other people do feel that to bar Muslims from immigration lessens their dignity, not only lessens their dignity, but is a crime against life and against God! Dan seems to have forgotten that a for more authoritative interpreter than himself of Nostra Aetate, Pope John Paul II, called for open borders and said that any rejection of any immigration was part of the “culture of death.” Of course, Dan will deny that JPII called for open borders and will say that I am reading fantastic meanings into JPII’s statements. But this issue has been resolved definitively at VFR, in Jim Kalb’s response on an earlier occasion, The proof that Pope John Paul II was calling for open borders.

Furthermore, as I’ve already pointed out, in the paragraph of N.A. immediately following the paragraph about discrimination in relation to people’s dignity, the next paragraph leaves aside the “dignity” language and disapproves of ALL discrimination against any group on the basis of race, religion, conditions of life, etc. Is Dan now going to tell us that closing the borders to Muslims as Muslims is not going to be seen as prohibited discrimination against them under the terms of Nostra Aetate, especially in light of N.A.’s commandment to Christians to FORGET 1,000 years of Muslim jihad against Europe?

Conservative defenders of the Catholic Church are in a tight spot. They are honestly unhappy with the liberal trends of the Church, but as good Catholics they cannot let their criticisms go too deep. They must defend the ultimate rightness of what the Church does. I am under no such compunction when analyzing the documents of an institution that has been taken over by liberalism. My aim is not to attack the Church; my aim is to expose and oppose its liberalism.

Bruce B. writes:

I have to say that I support your assertion that words have real world consequences. The Roman traditionalists are, by and large, highly educated, intelligent, and thoughtful people. So maybe they interpret the documents and the spoken words of the Church hierarchy correctly. Christianity isn’t a religion for the intellectually indolent, but it isn’t just a religion for the intellectually elite either. My Great Grandmother was a very devout Roman Catholic, but she wasn’t (so I’m told) the most thoughtful person in the world. If she were alive, she’d likely be a liberal Roman Catholic, not because she has a liberal soul, but because of the plain meaning of the words that would be conveyed to her via the Church hierarchy.

I appreciate the difficult situation that the traditionalists are in but I don’t think your criticisms of the Roman Church are out of line. You don’t seem to be trying to prove that Rome isn’t what it claims to be based on Nostra Aetate or Vatican II . I don’t remember you writing that its words “mandate” anything. You’re arguing that the implications of its words are extremely troubling for our societies. I agree.

LA replies:

What Bruce says about his grandmather gets to the heart of the issue. We only need to imagine how she would understand the words, “There shall be no discrimination between people and people,” “There shall be no discrimination on the basis of religion.”

However, I think I have used words like “mandate,” “command,” and so on, if not in this entry then in others on the same subject. Above I refer to N.A.’s “command” to forget past Islamic-Christian wars.

George R. writes:

Ortelio writes: “English translations issued by the Vatican quite often give arguable interpretations, and not infrequently mistranslations, of the authoritative texts, almost invariably in a liberal direction.”

The original Latin version of Nostra Aetate is available online. Since I know some Latin, I can say that he translation we were using is fine. For example, here is the sentence that I was commenting on in English and the original Latin:

No foundation therefore remains for any theory or practice that leads to discrimination between man and man or people and people, so far as their human dignity and the rights flowing from it are concerned.

Fundamentum ergo tollitur omni theoriae vel praxi quae inter hominem et hominem, inter gentem et gentem, discrimen quoad humanam dignitatem et iura exinde dimanantia inducit.

Now if I were to translate the Latin word for word it would be:

Therefore, the foundation is removed for every theory or practice that introduces distinction between man and man, between nation and nation, as far as concerns human dignity and the rights emanating from it.

Hardly less liberal than the translation.

If anything, the original Latin is even more radical because it does not qualify “human dignity” with the word “their”. It simply forbids all thoughts and actions that make distinctions concerning human dignity.

I agree with you. I do not believe that Vatican documents are consistently mistranslated.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 15, 2007 04:12 PM | Send