WE SHOULD NOT LET OTHERS CORNER US
WITOLD GADOWSKI
People who do not care about the Church at all, and perceive its teaching as a burden, are very willing to quote pope Francis speaking about the necessity of showing mercy to refugees from the Near East.
Also a lot of us knew how the Muslim enclaves function in the West of Europe. These observations do not give us any comforting reflections.
So, how to keep the common sense between love to our neighbor and prudence telling us to care for our families and counteract dangers which may be brought by foreigners?
Certainly, our readiness to bring help to those in need cannot undergo any limits. However, it is important for us to realize a few basic facts about Islam.
Firstly, it is impossible to match Islam with Catholicism. Islam does not consider Jesus Christ as God and in this moment all kinds of discussions with this religion end.
We can support people and be in solidarity with their suffering but we cannot accept their beliefs – they are in such a contradiction with our look at the world that here there is no possibility to make any compromise about it.
We should not believe in a possibility of matching with Islam. There is no such possibility.
Secondly, our look at the world assumes that people are brothers and neighbours for one another. We do not divide people into the better and the worse ones. Whereas Islam clearly differentiates between believers in Allah and kuffar (‘non-believers’); the latter ones are, certainly, worse and have definitely less rights than ‘believers’.
In Islam marriage is not sacrament, so there is no sanctification of the relation between a woman and a man or doctrinal guarantee of the equality between a woman and a man. It raises a high tension between our worldviews.
Briefly speaking: settling of the Muslims in Poland, who do not intend to change their worldview or their theodicy, is creating a group in our society which opposes to values on which today’s Polishness is built.
If we are to help reasonably we should help where people are really suffering the most. Such help is participating in charity actions and all kinds of church initiatives expressing our solidarity with the war victims.
We should accept the Christians in Poland who were thrown out of their homes and churches. This is our main duty resulting from the doctrine ‘ordo caritatis’.
Before atheistic propagators of the ‘though of pope Francis’ begin to teach us and before we feel confused towards their convoluted arguments, we should realize the great teaching achievement of the Catholic Church and we should try to understand the teaching of Francis which is brought to us by tradition of the Church and faith. Only then will it turn out that the statements of Pope are perfectly explicable in the light of philosophy built by the Catholic Church and arguments of atheistic manipulators will appear in their whole shallowness and immediacy.
We should not lose our hope. We should take an active part in discussions on faith and the society. The spirit works.
AA
„Niedziela” 09/2017