The daily unfolding of current history invites us to state unequivocally the fundamental choice upon which Catholics and Moslems will be judged at the terminus of their earthly sojourn, namely, the Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. Putting it thus, we find ourselves before the insuperable abyss that separates Islam from the Catholic Faith; and no ecumenical intention, no matter how well-meaning, can efface or fill this chasm. The two "revelations" clash on this point and with such opposition about the essential that necessarily one must be entirely true and the other entirely false.
Incoherence or Imposture?
Let us leave aside considerations of lesser importance to recall that only a revelation coming from God has the right to speak of God with authority and certitude. Now, in the aforementioned antagonism, what precisely do we see? In Jesus Christ all is divine: His birth, His life, His doctrine, His death, His resurrection, His ascension, His permanent assistance to the Church. His Apostles and the Evangelists have forcefully asserted it: no one can know and love God save by His only begotten Son "in whom He is well pleased."
Contrariwise, everything is human, all too human, in the person of the founders of Islam. We find in them many of the traits of the heretic [Luther] who arose in the Church in the 16th century: exaltation of spirit and senses, will to power, unscrupulousness in action; in short, the same initial presence of sin skewing from the start the spiritual adventure thus launched.
Because God is infinite Sanctity, His revelation does not tolerate combination with sin. In these conditions, to consider Mohammed and Luther as genuine prophets or reformers proceeds from total incoherence if not pure imposture. For lack of edifying examples of holiness, which they are incapable of providing, such men only succeed in imposing their imaginary doctrines by applying permanent pressure, playing upon the complicity of the disordered desires by which each of us tries to arrange for himself a life wherein the pleasures of earth and the desire for heaven can be reconciled without too much trouble.
Heaven Closed
Let us get back to the specific sin of Islam.
Someone who maintains, contrary to the life and miracles of Jesus Christ, that the Son is not God commits the greatest offense possible with regard to God, consubstantial with the One sent by Him; someone who pushes men to profess this negation commits towards them the greatest offense, depriving them thus of the only access to eternal life. For, ultimately, redemptive grace does not exist in Islam because [according to them] God did not stoop to us; access to holiness is impossible in it, and man remains in his original misery. After his death, the presence of God will be inaccessible to him, and the "Prophet" is reduced to imagine an Elysian paradise on the model of earthly pleasures. In such a climate of spiritual darkness, how could the five pillars of Islam–profession of faith, prayer, alms deeds, fasting, and pilgrimage–be pleasing to God?
The knowledge of God being perverted from the outset and heaven closed, it is not surprising that Moslem thought absorbs and annexes the things of the temporal order by transferring to it man's thirst for the absolute. But beneath this stifling blanket, there exists neither sacraments, nor liturgy, nor priesthood capable of aiding humanity to go out from itself and to merit to see God in eternity.
A Dizzying Regression
of Revealed Truth
The alleged "revelation" made by the Archangel Gabriel [to Mohammed] expressly falls under St. Paul's condemnation (Gal. 1:8): "But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach a gospel to you besides that which we have preached to you, let him be anathema." It is necessary to draw the conclusion: far from being, as is pretended, the culmination and conclusion of all preceding revelations, Islam constitutes a dizzying regression in regard to the truth revealed by the living God and His works. Conversely, the considerable influence of Jewish thought and Christian heresies in the formation of Islamic thought has often been pointed out. The favor from which Islam benefits today from some Catholic quarters also proceeds from their loss of the essentials of their faith.
With our Lord Jesus Christ, not only did Revelation come from God, but it was taught by the Word of God Himself; one can even say that it is one with Him from the moment that He became incarnate in the womb of the blessed Virgin Mary. Only this Revelation is at once divine, holy, and certain, for God cannot deceive mankind. The same requirement of holiness is found in the human intermediaries willed by the Most High for this great work: the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the sublime holiness of His Precursor and of His foster father, and the conversion demanded of all of us.
By contrast, it is necessary to have the frankness to say that error is inseparable from the founders of Islam, for by denying the divinity of Jesus, they have abusively arrayed themselves against God; by rejecting Trinitarian monotheism, they have falsified faith at its essential level, that of divine reality; by refusing the Incarnation, they have cut themselves off from the sources of grace and have reduced them to a formalism "ex voluntate viri–of the will of man" substituted for the authentic supernatural.
The Responsibility of Catholics
The survival of this immense world closed to the revelation of the Son of God has implications for our responsibility as Catholics as well as that of clergymen.
Great souls have announced the evangelization of the Moslems after tribulations that will undoubtedly be in proportion to the greatness of the intention in question. In the perspective of this hour of grace, it behooves us to renounce the too frequently adopted presupposition that Islam cannot be open to receive the Christian message. Undoubtedly, this is difficult for its adherents in the measure that they are impeded from access to the Good News; but it must not be forgotten that the Almighty speaks to every man in his inmost conscience and that He can make everyone benefit from His grace as He wills. In this sense, it would undoubtedly be more exact to say that the Moslem can be converted because he must and because Someone calls upon him to do so.
This is where our prayers for the obtaining of such a signal grace come in. It is very surprising that the hierarchy never solicits prayers for this intention even though its principal mission is to announce to all men salvation in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Met with this omission, the Islamic world thrusts itself upon the sword of blinding contradictions, frets itself in unending violence, and becomes enmired in its spiritual unhappiness. "We do not want the Christian message to be diffused in Islamic countries," one of their diplomats bluntly declared.
Since we find ourselves in the presence of the same constant, millennial opposition, the same missionary duty continues to be incumbent upon the Catholic Church.
A Desire
For the Lord, who has confided the means of salvation to His Mystical Body, a thousand years are as a day. Thus, at the conclusion of these reflections, let us form the wish that the Church give a special luster to the celebration of the descent of the Word Incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. One might well think that the glorification of this great mystery would merit an exceptional grace of visitation for the whole world and particularly for the Moslems of good will, until now cut off from the sole saving Word.
The hour is grave for us all: by seeking to embrace the successive movements of a paganized civilization and by unduly favoring the demands for a deviated liberty to the detriment of the message of Jesus Christ, we are but advancing the moment of the redoubtable failures that, in extreme suffering, will lead Catholics and Moslems to their essential duties, namely, perfect fidelity for the former and a necessary conversion for the latter.
Blessed will they be who live to see the men of Islam take the road to the holy Crib and hear them exclaim, contrite of heart but rejoicing in spirit: "Who would not love Him who loved us so much?... "We are come to adore Him" (Mt. 2:2).
Pyrenaicus
Translated exclusively by Angelus Press from the April 2006 issue of Courrier de Rome (pp.5-6), the French edition of the Italian SiSiNoNo.
Among the peoples inhabiting Mexico's high central plateau centuries ago were the Toltecs. They spoke different dialects of the Nahuatl language. Four centuries before Columbus opened the route to the New World, the warlike tribes of the Aztecs arrived, having migrated from California, and subjugated the various indigenous peoples, in particular the Toltecs, whose dominant Nahuatl dialect they adopted for their own. Soon the Aztec domination reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
Who has not heard sung the high praises of the Aztec civilization? Who has not heard the condemnation of the perfidious Spanish colonists who destroyed it? And to convince you, the proponents of this historical interpretation point to the numerous massive monuments that remain to bear witness to the glory of that civilization. But look closely at the sculptures adorning them; observe them attentively, and you will become convinced that only the devil could have inspired them. You will not find one, not a one, that represents a worthy human face–gracious, gentle, smiling, or even weeping, but in a human manner. Would this be from lack of skill? Not at all. Those sculptors knew their art. The reason is much more profound.
Psychedelic Drugs
Among the Aztecs, hallucinogens were in use. There was the teonanacatl, or "flesh of god," a "sacred mushroom" that was eaten during a ceremony and that, according to their belief, enabled its user to enter into communion with God, though in reality it was with demons surrounded by frightening phantoms. There was also peyotl, or peyote, a cactus causing intoxication and driving its users to dance all night and all day. The ingestion of such drugs regularly took place at the conclusion of the human sacrifices, during which the Aztecs drenched with blood the steps of their pyramids. Under the influence of such hallucinogens, they began to converse with the demons, which pushed them to commit suicide with such urgency that many really killed themselves.
Some of these practices continue today: some sorcerers are able to mix potions for their clients capable of causing persistent mental traumas and even forms of incurable insanity. The basis of such potions is constituted by the little mushrooms of the genus Stropharia and of the genus Psilocybe, which surely some devil suggested they call angelitos: little angels. Everything leads us to believe that today's shamans inherited their baneful formulas from the Aztecs. But we conclude with a remark about their sculptural art: hallucinating on drugs, the Aztec artists sculpted in stone the horrifying phantoms of their cruel polytheism.
Human Sacrifices
I have mentioned their human sacrifices in passing, but let me take up the subject again. In 1486, while Montezuma Xocojotin II the Young was emperor, a new temple to the war god Huitzilopochtli was inaugurated. It was bathed by the blood of 70,000 people, liturgically slaughtered for the solemn occasion. When I hear prelates exhort missionaries–are there any more?–to adapt Catholic worship to indigenous cultures, I wonder how many of the faithful in some of these countries will have their throats slit at Easter and at Pentecost for the sake of authentic inculturation.
The legal system in force in the Aztec empire is exalted, as if the level of taxation were not really exorbitant; as if the non-taxpaying individual, because he was indigent, did not automatically become a slave of the State to be sold as such to the highest bidder. The goodness–which was not goodness, but only fear–of the last Aztec emperors is praised without mentioning that no Aztec ruler could be crowned without having personally captured a certain number of enemies to be sacrificed to one god or other during the coronation celebrations. I pass over other sacrifices in the Aztec liturgical calendar too cruel and obscene to mention.
The prosperity of Aztec agriculture is exalted, without mentioning that the land was cultivated almost exclusively by serfs attached to the land, by slaves subject to the will of their masters. Prisoners of war without exception became slaves. The Aztecs needed to maintain a state of perpetual war with the neighboring populations in order to be able to dispose of a sufficient number of slaves whose services they could employ, whatever these might be, including that of being fattened up for the feasts and then roasted to perfection and served up at table as a specially prized dish.
Naturally the populations that had been subjugated and tormented by the Aztecs were restless under the yoke, but they were not yet capable of shaking it off or breaking it without some extraordinary help from outside. It was the year of grace 1519 when such help came in the form of a young man of the lower ranks of Spanish nobility: Hernando Cortez, commanding an "immense army"–600 men, a few horses, and even fewer canons. How could such a paltry force prevail against the Aztecs, who could muster on the battlefield thousands and thousands of warriors? Because right away the Spaniards had on their side the populations that had been tyrannized by the Aztecs.
Cruelty Customary
It must be said, though, that the civilization or culture of the populations liberated by the Spanish was hardly better than that of the Aztecs. Cortez wrote to the Emperor Charles:
We were ever afterwards more occupied with keeping our allies from killing and using atrocious forms of cruelty than with fighting against the Aztecs: we have never seen such inhuman cruelty, so contrary to the natural order and yet so customary to the native peoples.
Why should so much credit be given to the Brevissima Relacion de la Distruycion de las Indias by the Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas? In the Catholic Encyclopedia, the Dominican Abele Redigonda himself had to admit that while Las Casas as an apostle is a personage of the first order, he is "questionable" as an historian. In his work, in fact, besides accusing his compatriots of injustice and cruelty towards the natives, he also formulates–completely forgetting Original Sin–the theory of the naturally good savage, the theory which subsequently would give rise to Jean Jacques Rousseau's political theories advocating a return to the innocence of nature. Las Casas wrote:
There is no other people in the world more calm, more peaceful, more gentle, more benevolent....These natives are, moreover, extraordinarily intelligent thanks to their good and praiseworthy nature, exempt from the passions of the soul that cause troubles and are an obstacle to the intellect, such as joy, sorrow, fear, sadness, anger, rancor, and the like.
Naturally, in the writings of Las Casas you will not find any mention of the experiment of peaceful colonization that resulted in the extermination of the peasants influenced by Las Casas and sent by him into the midst of the indigenous populations without the usual military protection.
An illustrious Italian historian, not suspected of any sympathies for Hispanic Catholics, Corrado Barbagallo, in his magisterial Storia Universale, did not hesitate to write:
The destiny of the Aztec empire was well merited. It was not the few horses of Cortez that was able to surprise the Aztecs, who did not know them; nor his weak and rudimentary artillery up against the immense work it would have to do; nor the divine prestige of the Spanish, for the Mexicans were not slow to grasp that they were fragile, mortal men like themselves. None of that was responsible for the catastrophe. It was their own ferocious politics in dealing with the vanquished. The presence of these few determined adventurers was enough to bring the action of the Aztecs over the subject peoples to a halt, and for these peoples and their neighbors to see prosperity return to their own lands; and for them to be able once again to enjoy the use of cotton fabrics, gold, and even salt, which they had not tasted for a long time; and for the vanquished to rise up, and in their hatred choke and submerge their ferocious oppressors.
Heaven's Hand
And now listen to the account of a Quiché Indian [Mayan Indians of Guatemala–Ed.]:
Someone from the village of Ah Xepach, Indian-Eagle, went with 3,000 Indians to fight the Spanish. The Indians left at midnight, and the captain, Indian-Eagle, was ready to kill the Adelantado Tunadiu [that is to say, the Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado, who conquered the Quich– Indians in 1524], but he did not succeed in killing him because he was defended by a girl all white; everyone wanted to enter, but as soon as they saw this girl, they suddenly fell to the ground and could not get back up, and suddenly many footless birds arrived, and these birds hovered all round the girl. And the Indians wanted to kill the girl, and the footless birds defended her and blinded them. The Indians who tried to kill both Tunadiu and the girl left, and sent in their place another Indian, a captain who makes thunder, named Ixquin Ahpalotz Utzakibalha, and his name was Nehaib. This Nehaib the Thundermaker went where the Spanish were in order to kill the Adelantado. Scarcely had he arrived, when he saw hovering above all the Spanish a very white dove that defended them, and when he attacked, his sight was blurred, he fell to the ground and could not get up. Three more times this Captain Thundermaker sallied forth against the Spanish, and in the same way he was blinded and fell to the ground. And when the captain realized that it was impossible for him to fight the Spanish, he left and they [the two captains] had the caciques of Chi Gumarcaah warned, telling them that both of them had gone to see if they could kill Tunadiu and that there had been a girl and footless birds and a dove who defended the Spanish.
Now, no one with a grain of common sense could hesitate to admit the historicity of the supernatural intervention in favor of the Conquistadores, who opened these lands to the gospel and especially to devotion towards the Immaculate Mother of God. It is in fact impossible that a Quiché Indian could have imagined as defenders of the soldiers of the Catholic emperor birds without feet, a girl all white, and a dove also white; that is to say, angels, the Immaculate, and the Holy Spirit. That is why the first load of American gold to arrive in Spain was sent right away to Rome, and is still in Rome, covering the great coffered ceiling of St. Mary Major on the Esquiline Hill. "To serve God and His Majesty, and to give the light of faith to those who were in the darkness of polytheism," wrote the common soldier Bernal Diaz del Castillo [see his book The Conquest of New Spain, advertised on the last page of this article–Ed.], and with a great frankness he added, "but equally to acquire riches, as every mortal so desires and so seeks."
Supernatural Ambition
As for Christopher Columbus, here is what the great Pope Pius IX said of him:
Christopher Columbus undertook the most audacious of sea voyages to discover the New World, not for the sake of adding other lands to those over which Spain exercised her authority, but because he was inflamed with a genuine zeal for the Catholic Faith, and for the sake of extending over the new populations the reign of our Lord Jesus Christ, that is, the Catholic Church.
And this was not his only ambition. With the resources he hoped to gain from his discoveries, Christopher Columbus had pledged himself to delivering the Holy Sepulcher from the hands of the Moslems, peacefully if possible by using the leverage the gold would afford him; and if not, by hiring at his own expense 50,000 foot soldiers and 5,000 horsemen.
And blessed be Alexander VI, for if indeed he was the miserable man he is known to be, as Sovereign Pontiff he fostered the conversion of the Amerindians; which is why our present prelates should blush for shame, preoccupied as they are with global humanitarian activity when instead they should be devoted to missionary activity for the conversion of the world, according to the formal commandment of God.
But, you may ask, how did the "Black Legend" come about? It was created thanks to the ill will of our brothers, brothers in everything save the Faith: the Calvinists who colonized North America. By spreading the Black Legend, their goal was not only to defame Catholics, but also to turn people's attention away from the misdeeds they perpetrated against the Indians. How many Indians survived the programmed, systematic extermination by the colonists? Whereas the millions and millions of men peopling the America colonized by the Catholics–the Spanish and the Portuguese, not to include the immigrants who arrived subsequently–descend almost exclusively from marriages contracted between the colonists and natives, and for me it is not a small point of pride to be one of them.
W. M.
Translated exclusively by Angelus Press from the February 1992 issue of SiSiNoNo.