... and the right of a culture to defend itself. Brave words from Mgr. Walter Brandmüller, president of the Pontifical Commitee for Historical Sciences, in a lecture published by Sandro Magister's Chiesa website:Today in many intellectual circles there is a lot of talk about the religious tolerance shown over many centuries by the Islamic authorities, because – while in terms of the pagan populations the saying “embrace Islam and your life will be spared” held true, and the pagans who did not convert were killed – the “people of the book,” the Jews and Christians, were able to continue practicing their religion.
In reality, the situation was much less idyllic: the Christians and Jews could survive only if they accepted Muslim political dominion and a situation of humiliation, which was aggravated by the obligation to pay increasingly burdensome taxes. So it’s no wonder that most of the Christians, even though they were not constrained by force, converted to Islam on account of the constant economic and social pressure. This led to the total disappearance of a form of Christianity that had flourished for more than half a millennium, as in the part of Africa ruled by the Roman empire, the land of Tertullian, saint Cyprian, Tyconius, and above all saint Augustine.
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on account of this all-embracing conception of religion and political authority, the Muslim will have great difficulty in adapting to the civil laws in non-Islamic countries, seeing them as something foreign to his upbringing and to the dictates of his religion. Perhaps one should ask oneself if the well-attested difficulties persons coming from the Islamic world have with integrating into the social and cultural life of the West are not explained in part by this problematic situation.We must also recognize the natural right of every society to defend its own cultural, religious, and political identity. It seems to me that this is precisely what Pius V did.
