After having announced “urbi et orbi” his decision to leave the Catholic Church after five years as a convert from Islam to Catholicism, prominent Italian journalist Magdi Allam elaborated on the issue in an open letter to His Holiness Pope Francis, which appeared in the Italian daily Il Giornale March 31.
“Shortly after your debut as Pope, I was puzzled by your central message [of promoting] a poor Church close to the poor,” Allam writes. This celebration of poverty, he goes on, “is likely to be misunderstood when in Italy, in Europe, and elsewhere affluent populations are reduced to poverty by a financial dictatorship promoted by globalized speculation, by the overwhelming power of the banks, and a Eurocracy sentencing businesses to death, multiplying the unemployed, causing families to suffer and robbing the youth of their hope.”
Allam then outlines six main motivations for his decision, which more specifically relate to what he calls the “discrepancy between the dimension of the faith and the behavior of the Church.”
His first reason is based on the “dictatorship of relativism” as masterfully decried by Benedict XVI, the first and foremost consequence of which is, according to Allam, “religious relativism, and specifically [equating] Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, conceived as the ‘the three great monotheistic, revealed, Abrahamic religions of the book,’ resulting in the legitimization of Islam and consequently the de-legitimization of Christianity.”
The second reason is what Allam calls “the ideology of globalism which results in promoting a substantially centralized and authoritarian new world order, which overpowers up to the point of erasing national identities and autonomous communities.”
The third is the “ideology of ‘do-goodism’ that compels us to give priority to the claims of others rather than the legitimate protection of one’s own good, resulting, in particular, in immigrationism, which forces us to welcome immigrants regardless of the consequences in our lives.”
The fourth is a “moralism that ignores and suppresses the natural function and the positive value of sex as an integral part of our humanity, culminating in the collapse of vocations to the priesthood and the pedophilia deviation in the Church, in the decline of both religious and civil marriages and the economic, social, and human cost caused by annulment or divorce and, therefore, the decline of the institution of the family as a pillar of society and the collapse in the birth rate in European countries with a Catholic majority.”
The fifth is “the prevalence of the raison d’État that governs the Vatican, rather than the universal Magisterium of the Church, with what involves the conditioning of the financial and political powers.”
The sixth is “the political option to side with those in power, as has recently happened with the public and direct support for the Monti-led government, despite the fact that it has nothing to do with the Church’s social doctrine.”
For having manifested these considerations, Allam concludes, “I found myself violently attacked by those who consider themselves as staunchest followers of the Church and the Pope, reduced to an object of media lynching comparable to a virtual version of the tribunals of the Inquisition, irrevocably condemned as Satan, Judas, apostate, traitor, possessed, perfidious, fake-Catholic after being a fake-Muslim.”
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