Douthat is making too much of the Muslim angle

Ross Douthat has an interesting op ed over at The New York Times that is certainly better than the average Dowdian bashing of the Holy See's offer to Anglicans to allow them to become Catholic yet still keep some of their distinctives.

He writes:

Along the way, he’s courting both ends of the theological spectrum. In his encyclicals, Benedict has addressed a range of issues — social justice, environmental protection, even erotic love — that are close to the hearts of secular liberals and lukewarm, progressive-minded Christians. But instead of stopping at a place of broad agreement, he has pushed further, trying to persuade his more liberal readers that many of their beliefs actually depend on the West’s Catholic heritage, and make sense only when grounded in a serious religious faith.

At the same time, the pope has systematically lowered the barriers for conservative Christians hovering on the threshold of the church, unsure whether to slip inside. This was the purpose behind his controversial outreach to schismatic Latin Mass Catholics, and it explains the current opening to Anglicans.

Many Anglicans will never become Catholic; their theology is too evangelical, their suspicion of papal authority too ingrained, their objections to the veneration of the Virgin Mary too deeply felt. But for those who could, Benedict is trying to make reunion with Rome a flesh-and-blood possibility, rather than a matter for academic conversation.

The news media have portrayed this rightward outreach largely through the lens of culture-war politics — as an attempt to consolidate, inside the Catholic tent, anyone who joins the Vatican in rejecting female priests and gay marriage.

But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam.

I think he's making too much of the Islam angle. The culture war angle is more accurate, I think, but not along the line of the smears against Pope Benedict XVI as a nazi-loving, misogynist homophobe as in Maureen Dowd's view.

I'm with Mark Steyn on his analysis of the problem the west faces from Islam. If our culture were healthy, if we were firmly emplanted on and nourished by and flourishing through our Judeo-Christian foundations, Islam--in either its benign or virulent forms-- would not be a threat at all. Instead in the West we have what Pope John Paul II called "the culture of death" and what Benedict, when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, called the "dictatorship of relativism."

It's the new relativist secularist fundamentalism that is the threat and as liberal religions allow it to water down their theology and relavitize and spiritualize all content from their theology, Benedict is creating a safe haven for those who want to be true to the Apostolic faith as handed down from generation to generation, faithfully, from those first eye witness accounts of Jesus our Lord.

I heard David Warren speak recently and one thing he said struck me---he mentioned how the cathedrals of Europe are filling again, this time with converts from Islam.

This is not something we hear much about is it? We're also not hearing about the massive conversions happening in places like Egypt, either.

No Islam is not a threat to the Catholic Church. We in the west, especially in Europe, are our own worst enemies. If we were not imploding, if our civilization wasn't in rampant decay, we would be able to be warm, generous and firm with our Muslim brothers and sisters insofar as necessary to make sure that fundamental freedoms are respected here.