Hilaire Belloc on Islam

Hilaire Belloc on Islam
Truth and Righteousness - cinops be gone - Friday, Dec. 21, 2012

Excerpts from The Essential Belloc, A Prophet for Our Times - Rev. C. John Mcloskey etc… 2010

Belloc has come to be seen as the only voice predicting the resurgence of Islam, and the only voice connecting the Protestant Reformation with the twin harbinger of economic malaise” monopoly and materialism…. Belloc wanted so much for modernity to turn from its ways, in matters spiritual, cultural, political, and architectural, and historical…

On Islam as a Heresy of Catholicism: by Hilaire Belloc
Mohammedanism was a heresy: that is the essential point to grasp before going any further. It began as a heresy, not as a new religion. It was not a pagan contrast with the Church; it was not an alien enemy. It was a perversion of Christian doctrine.

How did Islam arise? It was not, as our popular historical textbooks would have it, a “new religion.” It was a direct derivative from the Catholic Church. It was essentially, in its origin, a heresy: like Arianism or Albigensianism….

Mohammedanism planted itself firmly not only throughout Syria but all along North Africa and even into Spain, and overflowed vigorously into Asia eastward. Mahomet simplified much than did, say Pelagious or even Arius. He turned our Lord into a mere prophet, though the greatest of the prophets; Our Lady - whom we greatly revered, and whom his followers still revere … he cut out the Eucharist altogether, and was mostg difficult to follow in the matter of the Resurrection. He abolished all idea of priesthood: most important of all, he declared for social equality among all those who should be “true believers” after his fashion….

He advanced a clear affirmation, full and complete, against the whole doctrine of an incarnate God. He taught that Our Lord was the greatest of all the prophets, but still only a prophet: a man like other men. He eliminated the Trinity altogether….

The slave who admitted that Mohammed was the prophet of God and that the new teaching had, therefore, divine authority, ceased to be a slave …. Above all, justice could be had without buying it from lawyers … All this in theory…. But the central point where this new heresy struck home with a mortal blow against Catholic tradition was a full denial of the Incarnation….

Islam advances in herd or mob fashion. It does not proceed, as the Catholic religion does, by individual conversions, but by colonization and group movement. Islam is apparently unconvertible. The missionary efforts made by great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed…

The chief heresiarch, Mohammed himself, was not, like most heresiarchs, a man of Catholic birth and doctrine to begin with. He sprang from pagans. But that which he taught was in the main Catholic doctrine, oversimplified. It was the great Catholic world on the frontiers of which he lived, whose influence was all around him and whose territories he had know by travel which inspired his convictions.

Like all heresies, Mohammedanism lived by the Catholic truths which it had retained. Its insistence on personal immortality, on the Unity and Infinite Majesty of God, on His Justice and Mercy, its insistence on the equality of human souls in the sight of their Creator - these are its strength….

Islam has differed from all the other heresies … 1) It did not rise within the Church… He was an outsider born a pagan, living among pagans, and never baptized. 2) This body of Islam attacking Christendom from beyond its frontiers and not breaking it up from within, happened to be continually recruited with fighting material of the strongest kind and drafted in from the pagan outer darkness….

George H. Kubeck- Islam we love you. The Blessed Virgin loves you. We pray for your conversion!