APOSTATE HYPOCRITICAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS BEMOANING THE SCOURGE OF JIHADISTS & THE INACTION OF CHRISTIANS UNAFFECTED

CARDINAL ANGELO BAGNASCO

PATRIARCH SAKO

The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III 

Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Younan 

 Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts

RELIGIOUS LEADERS BEMOANING THE SCOURGE OF JIHADISTS & THE INACTION OF CHRISTIANS UNAFFECTED

"Iraqi Christian leader on Muslim persecution of Christians: “Is this not a crime against humanity?”"

BY ROBERT SPENCER

SEE: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2016/01/iraqi-christian-leader-on-muslim-persecution-of-christians-is-this-not-a-crime-against-humanity;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational, and research purposes

Of course it is. And others have asked similar questions before: “Why, we ask the western world, why not raise one’s voice over so much ferocity and injustice?” asked Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, the head of the Italian Bishops Conference (CEI). The Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch Gregory III has also said: “I do not understand why the world does not raise its voice against such acts of brutality.” Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Ephrem Joseph III Younan appealed to the West “not to forget the Christians in the Middle East.”

But why are they forgotten? Why does Sako have to ask his question? Why does Bagnasco have to ask his? Here is why: “Talk about extreme, militant Islamists and the atrocities that they have perpetrated globally might undercut the positive achievements that we Catholics have attained in our inter-religious dialogue with devout Muslims.” — Robert McManus, Roman Catholic Bishop of Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 2013

That’s right, it’s all for the sake of the spurious and self-defeating “dialogue.” For all too many of Patriarch Sako’s colleagues, especially those in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, to speak out about this persecution renders one outside the realm of acceptable discourse. Sako should ask his colleagues in the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He should ask bishops like McManus, Kevin Farrell, Jaime Soto and others why they move actively to silence and demonize voices that tell the truth about this persecution. He should ask them why they are so convinced that Islam, at its core, teaches peace, despite the superabundance of evidence to the contrary in Islamic texts and the actions of Muslims who read them. He should ask why the U.S. Catholic bishops tolerated dissent from so many core Catholic dogmas for decades, but move as ruthlessly as any Grand Inquisitor to suppress dissent from the idea that Islam is a Religion of Peace, which isn’t even a dogma of the Church. He should ask them why they are abandoning their Middle Eastern brethren and keeping their own people ignorant and complacent about the jihad threat. He should ask himself why he speaks of this persecution as a problem involving the Islamic State alone, when he must know from his personal experience that it is a much larger issue than that.

Cowards, time-servers, trimmers and self-deluded wishful thinkers dominate the Church hierarchy today, and all too many Catholics believe that to say so makes one disloyal to the Church. Nonsense. Calling these people to account for the damage they have done and are doing is the highest form of loyalty to the Church.



“Patriarch Sako on Christian Persecution: ‘Is This Not a Crime Against Humanity?,’” by Edward Pentin, National Catholic Register, December 30, 2015:


ROME — “In one night, 120,000 Christians left their homes just with their clothes and have been living in camps for one and a half years. Is this not a crime against humanity?”

His Beatitude, Louis Raphael I Sako, Patriarch of Baghdad of the Chaldeans, spoke of this and other serious hardships and persecutions against Christians, at a recent Rome conference on religious freedom….

So extensive and brutal has the persecution become that calls have been increasing in the U.S., the European Union and the U.K. to classify the atrocities taking place there as genocide.

As well as the humanitarian emergency and forced displacement caused primarily by the brutality of the jihadist group Islamic State (ISIS), Patriarch Sako also mentioned other facts regarding persecution in Iraq not widely known.

These included the approval in October of a law in the Iraqi parliament to forcibly convert to Islam children who are Christian, Yazidi and Sabean if one of the parents proclaims to be Muslim, and the advance of political Islam in which sharia (Islamic law) doesn’t allow non-Muslims to participate in politics and have equal constitutional rights as Muslims in administration.

ISIS leaders, he said, have established three “rules of trade” with non-Muslims: “forcing people to convert to Islam, to pay a tax (jizya) or leave their house, or be beheaded.”


“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the last day, nor forbid what has been forbidden by Allah and his Apostle, nor acknowledge the religion of truth, of the People of the Book, until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” — Qur’an 9:29


He further pointed out that the numbers of Christians in Iraq has collapsed, falling from 1.4 million before the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime to currently 500,000.

“Today, everything in Iraq has become sectarian,” said Archbishop Sako. “Daesh/ISIS and extremists attack Christians, Yazidis and Sabeans because of their belief. They destroy anything that does not fit into their vision of Islam.”

Moral Responsibility

At the same Dec. 10-12 conference, called “Under Caesar’s Sword” and hosted by the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Civil and Human Rights, Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Holy See’s secretary for relations with states (commonly referred to as the Vatican’s “foreign minister”), said a number of studies have suggested that Christians are the victims of 80% of all acts of religious discrimination in the world. “What’s more, for various reasons, it seems to go largely unreported.”


Why does it go largely unreported, even in the Church? Because of the prevailing attitude that McManus enunciated, quoted above. Gallagher and his colleagues should have addressed that.


But the archbishop noted “a much more important reason” why the Church should focus on Christian persecution: As Christians, he said, “we have a special duty in charity to our fellow Christians” to show them “solidarity” and come to their aid.

It’s true, said Bishop Anba Angaelos, general bishop of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and head of the Coptic Orthodox Church in the U.K., that as Christians we are called to “embrace and accept out persecution thankfully,” but all Christians also have a “moral responsibility to be advocates, speaking for those who cannot speak, to be a voice in the wilderness.”

Noting a gradual “pushing of boundaries” leading to what now amounts ethnic cleansing of Christians in the region, he warned that “our silence is a contributing factor” that “must be changed.”

“There is a growing disregard for the sanctity of life, and that must be what offends us,” he told the conference. “It is not about Christians or Muslims being killed, but about life and humanity as God’s creation, and that disregard is a violation that we cannot be silent about. In response we must realize that we have to respond together, collaboratively.”

Bishop Angaelos warned against Christians becoming “desensitized” to the suffering. “It’s not enough to empathize with them,” he said. “We must act. [We] should never let our conscience say: ‘It’s okay, they’re not dying.’ The sanctity of life is not a statistic but reality for each and every person.”

Remembering the ransacking of dozens of churches in Egypt in August 2013, which he believes was a coordinated attack, he resented the fact that in response Christians around the world “did absolutely nothing.” He recalled someone commenting at the time: “There was no memo from head office to say ‘don’t react.’”


Really? Are you sure there wasn’t?


What to Do?

So what should be done? Patriarch Sako listed several concrete proposals which included first of all destroying ISIS militarily with “troops on the ground.” ISIS must also be destroyed ideologically, he said, “drying up the funding, weaponry” of the jihadists and “condemning and eliminating” sectarianism and “all other forms of hatred and violence.”

He also advocated political reform underpinned by the principle of “citizenship and equality” that allows Christians and other religious minorities to be full citizens rather than “protected minority status”. He called for a separation of religion from the state, and the criminalizing and punishing contempt for religion and the spread “hatred and division.” Islamic religious authorities, he said, must dismantle jihadist ideology and replace it with promoting “a culture of harmonious social existence,” and the international community should “issue decrees” through the U.N. against those committing injustices against religious minorities….


Who and what is going to compel Islamic religious authorities to “dismantle jihadist ideology”?