The Vatican has done more to counter the Islamic threat than people think.
If we in the West now know that Syrian "rebels" are in their majority bloody jihadists and not innocent victims of Assad, it is due to the Vatican news-gathering agencies in the region. At first the Western media were totally biased and were unquestioningly transmitting the propaganda they received from local reporters on the rebels' side as bona fide news. It was the Vatican agencies that eventually managed to correct this bias.
And the Syrian case is just an example. The Vatican is one of the major sources of information about the persecution of Christians all over the world, by Muslims - which represents the overwhelming majority of cases - and non-Muslims like communists. It is also the force that helps these Christians most in practical ways.
We have to understand how the Vatican works, there are things that it cannot do because of its special role. For example, the Pope cannot openly condemn Muslim violence because that would only result in an increase in retaliatory violence against Christians: that is intrinsically connected to his role as the highest Christian authority on earth.
Photo by Sebastian Bergmann (Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0).
Very well put, Linda.
ReplyDeleteI also don't believe that the Pope cannot directly criticize persecution. He may have been convinced of that I am not.
ReplyDeleteWould it be his interfaith partners that have propagated this pleasant fiction?
The media by and large is not carrying the story, why are they not mobilizing the message?
Pope Francis has been pontiff for a very short time, but he has already started making waves:
Deletehttp://www.ansamed.info/ansamed/en/news/sections/politics/2013/11/21/Pope-Francis-says-worried-about-Middle-Eastern-Christians_9658166.html