Christ is Risen (in the West)!

Thanks, Rod. Y'know, it'll be interesting to watch the coverage of this, and I bet all sorts of commentators will want to read all sorts of 'politics' into it. Now I don't doubt that B16 and the Curia are well aware of the significance and ramifications of everything they do. And yet what we have here is a baptism, the meaning of which is not (1) B16 is a crusader who (2) wants to tweak Islam and (3) has no interreligious, ecumenical sensitivity. No, what we have here is a baptism, first and foremost, and the political chips fall where they may.

And I think it'll be important to point out, again and again, that every baptism is a political act, for the Church, in many ways is a polis, and alternative polis to any other polities in which Christians happen to find themselves living. In baptism, we are crucified with Christ, and his identity becomes ours. Having Christ as Lord, any other Caesars must take a most distant second.

Good for the Pope. I hope the musslemans choke on it.

And may all the Christians receive the blessings they desire today. It is, after all, your holiest time.

Unless I'm mistaken, Charles Cosimano is not a Christian. In any case, I don't share his sentiment. Allam's conversion is an occasion of joy for Christians, but triumphalism is inappropriate.

He is risen indeed!

Of course....what did you expect? If this is true God and true man, did anyone imagine that you could "kill" him and then he'd stay dead?

.....God raised him on high
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every other name.
So that at the name of Jesus
every knee shall bend -
in heaven, on earth, and under the earth
and every tongue proclaim
that Jesus Christ is Lord
to the glory of God the Father.

Today I am grinning all over. May everyone who reads this be filled with joy.

He is Risen!

Anyone read Italian? His conversion narrative is here:

http://www.magdiallam.it/node/4144

Via Babelfish, I can more or less divine that he sees this as a sign from Benedict that there should be a more assertive approach to evangelising Muslims.

Of course, getting a secular Muslim pundit onboard is small-time compared to 1945, when the Chief Rabbi of Rome converted.

Allam is married but has two children from a "previous relationship" - is he a divorcee?

Amen. I am glad Benedict did this in public, not to rub the Muslims' collective nose in it, but for precisely the reason Andrea cited.

Y'know this is a little off topic. But the headline reminds me of a very powerful and quiet witness I saw this morning on the local news.

A church in Gardner, Mass. had been vandalized -lots of hate graffitied onto the outside walls and church doors. "Christ didn't rise from the dead", etc. And there on tv was a solid, blue collar, regular good guy with a pierced ear, a power washer and a paint brush being asked Why by the local news reporter. "I know I wouldn't want my kids to see this." he said. So got in his car and he drove up to Gardner and he cleaned up the Church for Easter Sunday.

The elderly church janitor was interviewed too. "You know it warms my heart that he travelled all this way to help clean this up." [The local KofC is offering a $1,000 reward to catch the vandals.]

Y'know, that contractor's simple act of kindness made my Easter Sunday too. His mother must be proud.

So yes, Christ is Risen! And in the big and small ways, we're here and we won't let anyone stop us from celebrating that Truth.

"And the Light shines on in the darkness and the darkness will never overcome."

And here's the link
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/15677367/detail.html

Andrea writes "There's a major problem when people are saying Allam should have had a low-key baptism to avoid offending Muslims who might decide to start killing because of it. There's a problem with a religion that is more like the old Mafia: "Once you're in, you can never get out." There's a problem when countries as well as the imams refuse to let official Muslims change their identity cards to reflect their new status as Catholics."

Regrettably the life expectancy of Magdi Allam is not another 35 years as typical for most men his age (circa 40) but maybe closer to another 35 days. This is not bull. However he is very well aware of this and he made this choice anyway.

Cat Stevens made a different choice but he can expect to live to see his 75th birthday.

Islam takes one of ours by killing an Archbishop. Christianity takes one of theirs by baptising a soul.

The parallelism is rich.

"We no longer stand alongside or in opposition to one another," Benedict said in a homily reflecting on the meaning of baptism. "Thus faith is a force for peace and reconciliation in the world: distances between people are overcome, in the Lord we have become close."

This is good advice. I hope we all take it. Easter and Christmas are good times to bring every one together. I felt a lot of harmony this easter among the denominations.

Perhaps the original idea to do the baptism in public came from Magdi Allam rather than Benedict. Perhaps Magdi Allam wanted to make a statement to Italians and Europeans that they should stand up to Islam and not cower in the shadows.

Richard,

The distinction that you make is dead on although I would modify it a bit just to hone the argument for greater effectiveness.

In Islam, a martyr can be anyone who dies because they are Muslims ie they died for the cause. This included all those who killed involuntarily in a holy war, those who are martyred by an oppressor for reason of some kind of passive, peaceful resistence or faithfulness (and yes, the first thing a muslim will point out to you are the numbers of these types in Islamic history) and then also those who die in battle to defend the faith.

In Christianity, only the first two categories qualify. Someone who dies in battle, killing and being killed, have never been and never will be considered martyrs. Any type of killing act, while it may be considered at times to be necessary and the doer considered heroic, violence is nevertheless always seen as entirely incompatible with the example of Christ. Therefore the highest honorific bestowed by the Church is reserved only for those who died for Him as he dies for us.

There is no such clear and bright line in Islam. One has only to look at life of the model for every Muslim, Mohammed. Hence, Islam's ever confused, ever conditional relationship with violence.

As I was taught it Islam's view is that "your blood is forefeit" if you go apostate. Meaning you can be killed without any reprecussions to your killer, but it's not required you be killed. If it were otherwise many leaders in West Africa would've been killed and for that matter so would a few poets in the Mideast.

Thomas R., what distinguishes the Muslim practice regarding apostasy from that of Medieval Christendom is the absence in Islam of clear authority and of even the concept of separation of the religious and secular spheres.

St. Thomas, for example, wrote about what legitimate secular authority was entitled to do about heretics or apostates, who at that time were regarded as a threat to the social order. No Christians today -- anywhere in the world, as far as I know -- accept the medieval approach, and obviously the Catholic Church today is emphatic in its advocacy of religious freedom.

But the Muslim doctrine has a far more repressive practical effect than anything in medieval Christendom, because it means that ANY individual Muslim can take matters into his own hands and kill an apostate. The apostate-killer will, of course, want a fatwa to ensure that his action is religiously justified. But since Islam has neither clergy nor hierarchy, any self-appointed Islamic scholar can issue such a fatwa. As a result, even in Muslim states with relatively tolerant governments, the apostate from Islam is always at risk of being murdered by someone who is convinced, with the backing of religious authority, that the murder is God's will.

In other words, ideas do not arise out of a vaccum. They arise out of cultures. In this case, these ideas arose out of a profoundly Christian culture.

Precisely. And what gives these ideas salience is that they are coherent within a Christian theological context. If toleration represented some sort of reluctant Christian accommodation to the "Enlightenment" it would never have taken hold in society, much less in the churches themselves. That's more or less the experience of Islam under Turkish secularism, which is rapidly falling apart and never offered a very plausible model for the rest of Islam.

Of course, the unpleasant experience of the French Revolution suggests that respect for religious freedom wasn't exactly one of the Englightenment's strong suits, but that's another story....