Posted on 06/02/2024 6:06:24 PM PDT by ebb tide
Catholics may be surprised to learn that the Vatican is exaggerating the similarities between the Blessed Virgin Mary and the figure of Mary, Mother of Jesus, as she appears in the Koran and Muslim hadiths (traditions about Muhammad, the founder of Islam).
On May 18 this year, Pope Francis paid a visit to detainees at Verona’s Montorio Prison, and upon bestowing an icon of the Madonna and Child upon the apparently multi-faith jail, he stated to applause that “the figure of Mary is a figure common to both Christianity and Islam. She is a common figure; she unites us all.”
If this seems innocuous, it also falls in line with the Vatican’s many attempts to convince Catholics that Islam is somehow a “sister faith,” when, in fact, Islam appropriates the names and sacred auras of biblical figures, but then recasts them with completely different, anti-biblical attributes.
In early 2021, for example, the Marian academy in Rome launched a 10-week webinar series titled “Mary, a model for faith and life for Christianity and Islam” in collaboration with the Grand Mosque of Rome and the Islamic Cultural Center of Italy.
Based on his belief that Mary is “a Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman,” Catholic priest, Fr. Gian Matteo Roggio, organizer of the Muslim-Catholic initiative, said he hoped to use “Our Lady” as a model of “open borders” between religious and multicultural worlds.
Easier said than done — at least for those still interested in facts.
For starters, the claim that Mary was a “Jewish, Christian and Muslim woman” is only two-thirds true: yes, she was a Jew by race and background; and yes, she was a Christian in that she literally birthed Christ (ianity); but she was most certainly not a Muslim — a term and religion that came into being 600 years after Mary’s life on earth.
Worse, far from being the Eternal Virgin, as she is revered by the 1.5 billion Christians of the Catholic and Orthodox variety, Islam presents Mary, the Mother of Christ, as “married” to Muhammad in paradise — a claim that would seem to sever rather than build “bridges.”
READ: Spanish priest faces three years in prison for alleged ‘hate crime’ of criticizing Islam
In a hadith that was deemed reliable enough to be included in the corpus of the renowned Ibn Kathir (1300 – 1373), Muhammad declared that “Allah will wed me in paradise to Mary, Daughter of Imran,” whom Muslims identify with Jesus’s mother.
Nor is this just some random, obscure hadith. Dr. Salem Abdul Galil — previously deputy minister of Egypt’s religious endowments for preaching — affirmed its canonicity in 2017 during a live televised Arabic-language program. Among other biblical women (Moses’s sister and Pharaoh’s wife), “our prophet Muhammad — prayers and be upon him — will be married to Mary in paradise,” Galil said.
If few Christians today know about this Islamic claim, medieval Christians living in Muslim-occupied nations were certainly aware of it. There, spiteful Muslims regularly threw it in the face of Catholic and Orthodox Christians who venerated Mary as the “Eternal Virgin.” Thus, Eulogius of Cordoba, an indigenous Christian of Muslim-occupied Spain, once wrote, “I will not repeat the sacrilege which that impure dog [Muhammad] dared proffer about the Blessed Virgin, Queen of the World, holy mother of our venerable Lord and Savior. He claimed that in the next world he would deflower her.”
As usual, it was Eulogius’s offensive words about Muhammad — and not the latter’s obscene words about Mary — that had dire consequences: Eulogius, along with many other Spanish Christians vociferously critical of Muhammad, were found guilty of speaking against Islam and publicly tortured and executed in “Golden Age” Cordoba in 859 AD.
One expects that all of these inconvenient facts will be quietly passed over during the Vatican and Pontifical International Marian Academy’s “outreach” to Muslims. And if raised, no doubt Christians will somehow take the blame, as almost always happens in academic settings.
As one example, after quoting Eulogius’s aforementioned lament against Muhammad’s claim of being married to Mary, John V. Tolan, a professor and member of Academia Europaea, denounced it as an “outrageous claim” of Eulogius’s own “invention.” He then railed against the martyr — not against his murderers or their prophet:
Eulogius fabricates lies designed to shock his Christian reader. This way, even those elements of Islam that resemble Christianity (such as reverence of Jesus and his virgin mother) are deformed and blackened, so as to prevent the Christian from admiring anything about the Muslim other. The goal is to inspire hatred for the “oppressors”…. Eulogius sets out to show that the Muslim is not a friend but a potential rapist of Christ’s virgins. (Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination, p.93)
As already seen, however, it is Muhammad himself (or, to be strictly accurate, the hadith) — not any “Christian polemicist” — who “fabricates lies designed to shock,” namely that Mary will be his eternal concubine.
This, incidentally, is the main problem the purveyors of “Abrahamism” fail to acknowledge: Islam does not treat biblical characters the way Christianity does.
Christians accept the text of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, as it is. They do not add, take away, or distort the accounts of the patriarchs that Jews also rely on.
Conversely, while also relying on the figures of the Old and New Testaments — for the weight of antiquity and authority attached to their names — Islam completely recasts them with different attributes that reaffirm Muhammad’s religion as the one true and final “revelation,” as opposed to Judaism and Christianity, whose original biblical accounts on these figures are then seen as “distorted” because they are different from Islam’s later revisions.
READ: Cardinal Dolan equates Easter with Ramadan, Passover, says all are about ‘triumph of light and life’
Far from creating “commonalities,” it should be clear that such appropriation creates conflict. By way of analogy, imagine that you have a grandfather whom you are particularly fond of, and out of the blue, a stranger who never even met your grandfather says: “Hey, that’s my grandfather!” Then — lest you think this stranger is somehow trying to ingratiate himself to you — he adds, “And everything you think grandpa said and did is wrong! Only I have his true life story.”
Would that create—or rather burn—“bridges” between you and this insolent stranger?
Raymond Ibrahim is the author of Defenders of the West: The Christian Heroes Who Stood Against Islam (2022), Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West (2018), Crucified Again: Exposing Islam’s New War on Christians (2013), and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007).
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Where was Mary’s second-born son at the foot of the Cross, delchiante?
....
No clue. Joseph wasn’t recorded as being there either.
Maybe that’s why Christ told his mother to live with one of His mighty ones at the cross who followed Him.
Perpetual vs not perpetual.
Flip a coin..
50/50 chance
Bingo! It's just you and I don't give a flip about your opinions.
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Bingo! It’s just you and I don’t give a flip about your opinions.
.....
I didn’t come up with that all myself..
It’s the warning to flee Babylon within the scriptures..
I just have a different opinion of what Babylon is than you..
And yup, that’s the product of testing and proving All things with the scriptures.
Eyes and ears can be quite a thing. They can look open yet unable to see and hear what others may be able to see and hear.
And that’s all for His Glory. Not mine..
Exactly! You haven't a clue as to what you are talking about.
*****
Pope Boniface VIII in his Papal Bull Unam Sanctam (A.D. 1302): "We declare, say, define, and pronounce that it is absolutely necessary for the salvation of every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff."
“ Where was Mary’s second-born son at the foot of the Cross, delchiante?”
Are you referring to James, the brother of Jesus who later became the head of the church at Jerusalem? Or perhaps you are thinking of Joses or Jude or Simon, all of whom the Bible mentions as His brothers (Adelphoi , Greek for “of the same womb”)? Of course, there are also His sisters mentioned as well.
Our Lord, Jesus Christ, had no siblings.
But if you want to believe what the muslims believe; that's on you.
Even if what you say is true(it’s not), what is so heretical to call Mary perpetual virgin? It was almost universally held in the early Church. The original Reformers believed it. Why the obsession of so many non Catholics(and non-Orthodox) over this issue?
I’m believing what the Bible says. And it says He had brothers and sisters.
Do you believe:
23 Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven them; and whose sins you shall retain, they are retained [John 20:23]
What Catholic would take advice from one who attacks the Catholic Church?
Yes, I believe that was given to the Apostles. However, I find nothing in any of the subsequent books to support the idea that this was to be passed down to others. Even Peter, on the day of Pentecost, did not say “come confess your sins to one of us and receive absolution”; he said “repent and be baptized every one of you for the remission of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Ghost”.
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I guess you're not Roman Catholic....considering the daily anti-pope articles you put up.
I guess OMCET is its own denomination.
No, that's not quite right.
The earliest writers of the NT affirmed Joseph and Mary did have children of their own after the birth of Jesus. Which was not a sin in any way. In fact, it was very natural for that to happen.
And please....don't try to play the brothers can mean something other than biological sibling card. It'd be repeating a failed apologetic from Catholic Answers.
Oh, and not the, "show me in the Bible where it says Joseph and Mary had sexual relations" card either. It's really a futile argument for the RC to try that as it's so easily dismissed with a couple of questions.
Ask me if I care about what an anti-Catholic thinks.
That’s why you’re OMCET....one member church of ebb tide. You only care about you and your anti-pope tirade.
I find it amusing that one who can’t even spell “eagle” is so dead-set on defending Jorge the Heretic. He must also be a pro-homo, pro-tree hugging, pro-illegal and pro-death vax like his hero, Jorge.
When will this Bergoglio fanatic again pull out the old scapular personal attack?
The guilt of wearing that idol called the scapular must be getting to you.
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