Christianity is not succumbing to outside attacks; it is being eroded from within.

A few weeks ago The Malta Independent reported that the Islamic Call Society approached the Prime Minister, asking him to help them find land for a mosque and a school. Of the 156 online comments to this news item, all were opposed to the idea, and one or two were timidly less opposed.

In a way this is understandable. Some of the points raised are very valid. Muslims ask for tolerance while they are not tolerant towards Christianity and other religions. Personally I’m not bothered with women wearing a burka or a niqab. What irks me is that most, especially those living in Europe, don’t do it freely but are pressured into it.

Islamic schools are also worrying. I imagine they argue that if Catholics have Catholic schools why shouldn’t Muslims have Islamic schools? It looks logical but we know that the issue is more complex than that. As some readers who left online comments remarked, some of these schools are becoming schools of hate and teaching intolerance.

Although I do sympathise with these fears, in my opinion Christianity has an even stronger and more powerful enemy, those of us Christians who are so only in name.

Christianity is losing ground independently of Islam. The number of believers is dwindling; long-standing Christian values are questioned, Church-going is decreasing, the sensation is growing that our life in this world is all there is. We call this secularism. Nobody can blame Islam for this.

I think that if Islam might one day succeed in destroying Christianity the main culprits would be the Christians themselves. Persecutions are not new to Christianity; in the past they used to strengthen rather than weaken it. The saying that the blood of martyrs was the seed of Christians was not wishful hoping.

Christianity is not succumbing to outside attacks; it is being eroded from within, by the fact that Christians are less enthusiastic about the Gospel values and, instead, are adopting the dictates of secularism as their way of life.

The attacks of secularism on Christianity are much fiercer than those of Islam

The attacks of secularism on Christianity are much fiercer than those of Islam. Secularists accuse Christians of wanting to impose Christian values on civil society. The separation between Church and State has become absolute.

There has been a leap from secularisation – a process began by the Biblical account of the creation of the world, which affirmed that the world is good but not sacred – to secularism, or the total elimination of religion from public life, or at most tolerating it on the personal level.

Being members of this culture, many Christians are absorbing these ideas. They don’t realise that Christian values are not values of a religion but values of genuinely human living. Thus contaminated, Christians begin to distance themselves from Christianity and its values.

Rather than being excessively paranoid about Islam I think there is a lesson we would do well to learn from Muslims. Many had thought that their insertion in secular Europe would soon lead to their secularisation. This has not materialised because they are deeply religious.

Some may attribute this to their integralism – and to a certain degree this is so – but there is more to it. We cannot share their pretension of having everybody adopting their religion and be judged by its laws, but Muslims’ faith in God is genuine, even if their concept of God who is coercive is strange; most values of Islam are praiseworthy, even if they don’t always distinguish between values and other elements that have their origin in culture, not in faith.

It is said that when Pope St John XXIII was still a diplomat in Turkey he was once invited to a dinner and he happened to be sitting next to a Muslim who half-jokingly told him that Islam would soon destroy the Church. Pope John retorted that if priests had failed to do that there was no way Muslims could succeed.

If we extend this a little we could say that if Christians fail to destroy Christianity nobody will destroy it, but I am afraid, we Christians can still do it.

ajsmicallef@gmail.com

Fr Alfred Micallef is a member of the Society of Jesus.