Soul Searching Islam's Global Gains Pressure Catholics To Rethink Strategy Next Pope Could Lead Vatican To Adopt Tougher Stance; Mosque Returns to Granada Church's Lost 'Missionary Zeal'
By GABRIEL KAHN in Vatican City, KEITH JOHNSON in Granada, Spain, and ANDRÉS CALA in Paris April 19, 2005
In 1492, Christian armies drove the last Muslim rulers out of the ancient hilltop city of Granada in a victory still celebrated as the birth of modern Spain. Now, Islam is back, this time making more peaceful inroads by adding adherents among the local immigrant population and also some Spaniards. Two years ago, a mosque, the first to stand in Granada in five centuries, was built on the site of a former Catholic church.
"It's clear that Islam is eating into Catholic turf," says Malik Abderraman, the president of the foundation that runs the mosque and himself a Spanish convert to Islam.
For more than 40 years, the Roman Catholic Church has embraced a seductive theory: By extending an olive branch, Christianity could lay to rest its 1,400-year history of conflict with Islam. The church created a new curial office dedicated to fostering a robust dialogue with Islam, as well as other world religions, with the goal of achieving mutual understanding and peace. It welcomed the building of mosques in Europe and spoke out against religious discrimination of Muslims.
Now, as Catholic cardinals meet in the Vatican to choose the next pope, there is a growing feeling that these efforts to reach out to Islam have backfired. While some Muslims have embraced the call for dialogue, many Catholics now fret that the conciliatory approach has tied the church's hands, preventing it from keeping up with Islam's rapid growth, particularly in parts of the world once dominated by Catholicism. Some critics also believe the softer stance should be more contingent on a reciprocal tolerance of Catholics in the Muslim world.
"Dialogue is not sufficient on its own. What effect does it have?" asks Cardinal Achille Silvestrini, who was once in charge of overseeing the well-being of Catholic communities from Turkey to Iraq, in an interview in February. "Finding common ground with Islam, in a way that includes mutual respect, is not easy."
The concerns underscore how Islam is looming as one of the defining issues for Catholicism in the 21st century, in much the same way that communism was in the last century. Islam offers a new type of challenge, one to which the church is still struggling to find a way to respond. The former Soviet empire was easier to paint as an enemy, with its armies spread across Eastern Europe, repressive political system and atheist ideology. Islam's rise is more difficult to counter because it is a religious faith with many things in common with Christianity, including shared roots that both religions, along with Judaism, trace back to the prophet Abraham in the ancient Middle East.
That makes the rivalry subtler, and more complex. Often, religious differences get tangled up with other divisions, like ethnicity. In Nigeria, which has one of the fastest-growing Catholic populations in the world, Christian communities in parts of the country are forced to live under the strict Islamic code of sharia law. Violent clashes between Christians and Muslims, often sparked by deep-seated ethnic tensions, are frequent.
Meanwhile, Islam has grown rapidly, replacing Catholicism as the world's biggest faith. Islam has seen particular success in areas like Africa and Asia that were once considered the future cradle of Catholicism. In 1970, there were 20% more Catholics in the world than Muslims, according to the World Christian Encyclopedia. But since then, Islam has expanded at nearly double the rate of Catholicism. By 2000, the number of Muslims world-wide had surpassed Catholics, swelling to nearly 1.2 billion, compared with 1.06 billion Catholics, the World Christian Encyclopedia says.
At the same time, many Catholics see the church's conciliatory gestures as being increasingly one-sided. The lot of Christian communities in the Muslim world appears to have grown tougher, not easier. The largest mosque in Europe opened 10 years ago just a mile from the Vatican. But in Saudi Arabia, a million Catholic guest workers, many from the Philippines, still can't attend church services because the kingdom doesn't allow any religion but Islam. In some parts of the Middle East, the cradle of Christianity, some Catholic communities are in danger of vanishing altogether. In Syria, for instance, priests say Mass in nearly empty churches as Catholic communities that thrived for centuries have fled regional violence and a resurgent Islam.
Drifting Away
Perhaps nowhere is the challenge greater than in the church's traditional heartland of Western Europe, now home to as many as 15 million Muslims. The Vatican has seen a slow decline in Europe as part of a century-long drift away from Christianity by white Europeans. But Islam has been increasing its followers, mainly among immigrant populations from the Middle East and Africa. In France, Muslims currently number around 5.5 million, a figure that could double over the next 20 years. Meanwhile, some estimates say the percentage of French Catholics attending Mass on a regular basis has fallen into the single digits.
In the diocese of Seine Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, Father Jacques Gueddi feels he has been losing ground to Islam in an area that was once considered a bastion of Catholicism. The area's population has swelled over the past 30 years as immigrants moved in. Father Gueddi, himself the son of Muslim Moroccan immigrants, converted to Catholicism when he was 24 and became a priest at 39. Now 72, he spends much of his time traversing the rows of drab, cinderblock apartment buildings to counsel youths from Catholic families who might be flirting with converting to Islam.
Rome's approach of reaching out to Islam "might be good in theory," he says, but falls short in practice. "The church doesn't want to throw oil on the fire, but it needs to be more combative, more militant and organized." Catholic priests, he says, have been poorly prepared to confront Islam's growing influence. "Muslims are missionaries, while we lost our missionary spirit," he says.
On the other side of Paris, in the suburb of Evry, Khalil Merroun presides over a mosque that is now one of the best attended in France. "The advice I give my Catholic colleagues is to insist on asking themselves why their faithful don't live their spirituality," he says. The steady expansion of Islam in places like Evry, he adds, means that "the Catholic Church should not feel Europe belongs to it." He says that he converted 80 people at his mosque last year, most of them former Christians.
Islam's expansion in Catholicism's own backyard is prompting renewed reflection and worry about how Rome should respond. In a possible sign of discontent within the church with the olive-branch approach, the Vatican last year issued a document warning Christian women about the "bitter experience" that could arise when marrying Muslim men.
Finding ways to appear friendly to Islam while countering its gains and re-energizing the church will be one of the first issues the next pope must confront, and one of the thorniest. Within the church hierarchy, no clear consensus exists. "We're at a crossroads," says Andrea Riccardi, the founder of an influential, left-leaning Catholic group, the community of Sant'Egidio, in Rome.
Before this death earlier this month, Pope John Paul II made numerous efforts to reach out to other faiths, especially Islam. He visited many majority Muslim countries, such as Azerbaijan and Egypt, and was the first pope to ever set foot in a mosque, during a 2001 visit to the Syrian capital of Damascus. He approached many Muslim leaders as well, and even held a feisty exchange of letters with the leader of Iran's Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
This earned him respect across the Muslim world, where some have welcomed the church's call for dialogue. Ahmet al-Rawi, head of the Federation of Islamic Organizations in Europe, an umbrella group based in Marksfield, England, that represents conservative Muslim groups, says he has visited the Vatican many times to meet with church officials. He said there are dozens of areas of agreement between the two faiths, such as the family, peace, justice and many moral issues.
"I wouldn't say that we could be allies, but we do have some common points of view," Mr. Rawi says.
But such dialogue hasn't succeed in turning the tide against the Muslim world. That has left many in the church wondering whether to adopt some sort of tougher approach to Islam. "The real question is, what kind of dialogue? Dialogue at all costs? Has it brought results?" asks Father Andrea Pacini, a professor specializing in the Islamic world at the Edoardo Agnelli Center for the Study of Comparative Religions in Turin, Italy. Some influential Catholics hope the next pope will make the church's conciliatory gestures toward Islam conditional on Christians receiving greater freedoms in the Muslim world.
The Vatican's current policy started with high hopes. In 1965, the church drafted a document called "Nostra Aetate," or "Our Age," which set a new policy of openness to the rest of the world. The Vatican created the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, an office to reach out to Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and other religions.
Red Faces
The openness initiative got off to a bumpy start. In 1976, several senior Vatican officials traveled to Libya for one of the first official dialogues with Muslims. The conference ended with the Vatican officials signing a lengthy document that they didn't have sufficient time to review, which, among other things, contained a harsh repudiation of Zionism. When the officials returned to Rome, a red-faced Vatican was forced to distance itself from the entire affair.
Since then, the council has fared better, though its initiatives have never gone very far. It has established relationships with organizations such as Al-Azhar University in Cairo. Its most recent session with Al-Azhar, in February, concluded with a request from the Muslim side that the Vatican issue an official apology for the Crusades, Christian invasions of the Middle East more than 800 years ago that still stir strong emotions among Muslims. The Vatican agreed to appoint a joint panel of experts to study the Crusades.
The Vatican's outreach office is currently run by a 67-year-old English archbishop named Michael Fitzgerald, who studied at a Christian seminary in Tunisia that was later closed by the Tunisian government. Monsignor Fitzgerald, who works out of a drafty office a few meters from St. Peter's square, has so far resisted calls for a tougher approach.
"A strict understanding of reciprocity as tit-for-tat cannot be the attitude of the church," he says. "You can't impose the Christian message on anyone. And if they are not interested in the message, does that mean you stop dialoguing with them? No."
The church's attitude wasn't always so conciliatory. In 1095, Pope Urban II launched the first Crusade with a call to Christians to deliver Jerusalem from Muslim domination. Successive Crusades followed for the next two centuries, as armies waged war in the name of Christ for control of the Holy Land.
Granada, too, was the scene of violent rivalry. In 711, Moorish troops, who were Muslims from North Africa, swept north across a Spain that was divided into tiny kingdoms. Spanish kings spent the next eight centuries pushing the Muslims out, unifying Spain as they advanced. Finally, in 1492, Spanish troops surrounded Granada, ending the Moorish occupation.
Since then, Granada has carried a stigma in the Muslim world as a rare setback for a faith that has expanded for most of its history. This made construction of Granada's new Grand Mosque so poignant for some in the city's growing Muslim population, now estimated to number 15,000 in a city of 250,000. "The powers that be didn't want the mosque built because Granada was a symbol of the reconquest" of Spain by Christians, says Abdelkarim Carrasco, head of the Spanish Federation of Islamic Religious Entities.
The city of Granada still celebrates the holiday of La Toma, or The Taking, which commemorates the Christian victory five centuries ago. Father Jose Luis Nogales Sanchez, a professor at the Catholic University of Granada, says Catholics are split in their reaction to the mosque.
One group, he says, "sees Islam as a challenge and even as a threat." Another sees Muslim immigration in Spain as inevitable and motivated by a search for economic opportunity, not religious conquest. "Between the two sides, there is a big gap," Father Sanchez says. "One side is arguably too hysterical, too alarmist, and the other could be said to be too naive."
