With Burning Concern

                                                     
Pope Pius XI                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

I hope any Catholic readers are not offended by what I write, but I am going to say it anyway. Jihad Watch has an article running this week by Hugh Fitzgerald about Pope Francis scolding Christians for all the wars and bloodshed they have brought to the world. At the same time, Francis seems to be blind to the horrors brought to the same world by Islam. He also seems to be blind to the sufferings of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Muslims, to say nothing about the suffering of European Jews at the hands of Muslim immigrants. He reminds me of a Episcopalian pastor in Pasadena named Ed Bacon, a far-left activist, who in 2012 invited the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Muslim Public Affairs Council to hold their annual conference at his church and compounded the error by telling the audience (including Yours Truly) that the history of Christianity was littered with evil.

Full disclosure: I am a Protestant who has been married to a Catholic for 43 years. As I pledged on my wedding day, we raised our children as Catholics. My own church attendance has been sporadic at best for the past decade or so, largely due to the pedophile priest scandal.

Now that I am advanced in years, I have become more spiritual and am starting to accompany my wife to church. As it happens, her church’s chief priest is a young man from the Philippines. I won’t embarrass him by naming him, but I can tell you he is adored by the people in the church, who are  mostly a mixture of whites, Mexicans and Filipinos. I have to tell you how much this priest inspires me with his sheer joy exhibited during his sermons. Last Sunday, after church, I remarked to my wife and friends that I hope one day the Vatican will make him pope.

That brings me back to Francis.

I respect the fact that Francis has a deep concern for the poor. I respect the fact that he has worked to reduce the extravagance under which Vatican officials live. I do not respect the fact that this pope, who is not even from Europe, is telling the Europeans that they must welcome millions of uninvited people from the Middle East and Africa, most of whom are Muslims and few of whom will contribute anything positive to European society. Currently, the only thing they are contributing is crime, terrorism, and welfare costs. What Francis fails to realize is that if this continues, Europe, already proudly secular, will cease to have any connection to Christianity within a couple of generations. Instead, it will become Muslim.

Mit brennender Sorge

In 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, he concluded the infamous Conkordat with the Vatican, specifying the rights of the Catholic church in Germany in exchange for the Vatican’s recognition of Hitler’s government-a sort of modus vivendi, if you will. The agreement was brokered on the church’s side by Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII on behalf of then-Pope Pius XI. Sadly for the Catholics, Hitler began harassing the Catholic church in Germany before the ink was even dry. That led to Pius XI’s Mit brennender Sorge (With burning concern), lamenting the violations of the Conkordat on the part of Hitler.

So I would like to ask Pope Francis:

Where is your burning concern for Christians in the Middle East?

Where is your burning concern for the Jews of Europe?

Where is your burning concern for Europeans who are losing their very identity to hordes of people who come to Europe and who rape, murder and commit acts of hate and terror against the native populations?

Where is your burning concern for the future of Christianity, not only in the Middle East or Europe, but all over the world?

Instead of bashing Christians, Francis needs to start defending them.