"Vatican News recently announced Pope Francis’ upcoming “Apostolic Journey to Morocco, whose theme is hope.” Before spending March 30-31 in Morocco, Francis is also scheduled to visit the United Arab Emirates. “Pope Francis will meet the leader of Moroccan Muslims,” Vatican News continues, “800 years after the meeting between St. Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil of Egypt.”
Francis has been even more vocal in drawing continuity between himself and his namesake, Francis of Assisi.
In a recent address, he said that his visits to the two Muslim nations “represent two important opportunities to advance interreligious dialogue and mutual understanding between the followers of both religions, in this year that marks the eight-hundredth anniversary of the historic meeting between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil.”
What exactly was “historic” about this meeting? And how does it relate to Pope Francis’ efforts “to advance interreligious dialogue and mutual understanding”? Exploring these questions offers useful lessons, including on past and present approaches to Islam.
As for what the pope is characterizing as a “historic meeting between Saint Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Malik al-Kāmil,” here is the story: After centuries of Islamic invasions that saw the conquest of at least two-thirds of Christian territory -- as documented in my recent Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West -- Europeans finally began to push back via the Crusades in the late 11th Century.
In 1219, during the Fifth Crusade, Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and a fellow companion sought to do their part by traveling to the Middle East, where they sought audience with Sultan al-Kāmil. They went despite al-Kāmil’s vow that “anyone who brought him the head of a Christian should be awarded with a Byzantine gold piece,” to quote from St. Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims, a good primer on the topic by Frank M. Rega (a Franciscan).
What motivated Francis to this dangerous mission? Was he, as Pope Francis regularly implies, trying “to advance interreligious dialogue and mutual understanding”? Yes and no. He certainly relied on the word, not the sword. But the word he offered was as sharp as any sword.
Eventually brought before Sultan al-Kāmil, the monks sought to “demonstrate to the Sultan’s wisest counselors the truth of Christianity, before which Mohammed’s law [Sharia] counted for nothing.” For “if you die while holding to your law,” warned Francis, “you will be lost; God will not accept your soul. For this reason we have come to you.”
Intrigued by the cheeky friars, “the Sultan called in his religious advisers, the imams.” However, and as often happens today when Muslim debaters are at a loss for words, “they refused to dispute with the Christians and instead insisted that they be killed [by beheading], in accordance with Islamic law.”
The sultan refused: “I am going counter to what my religious advisers demand and will not cut off your heads … you have risked your own lives in order to save my soul.”
Another crusade scholar, Christoph Maier, underscores this point: “Francis thus accepted the crusade as both legitimate and ordained by God, and he was quite obviously not opposed to the use of violence when it came to the struggle between Christians and Muslims.”
Indeed, Francis once remarked that “paladins and valiant knights who were mighty in battle pursued the infidels [Muslims] even to death.” As such, they were “holy martyrs [who] died fighting for the Faith of Christ.”
Such is the man whose footsteps Pope Francis claims to be following by meeting with Muslim potentates “to advance interreligious dialogue and mutual understanding.” Little wonder those who know St. Francis’ true biography deplore his modern day transformation into some sort of Medieval “hippy” -- or, in Pope Francis’ words, “the man of peace, the man who loves and protects creation.”
In the context of confronting Islam, Rega similarly laments that, “for the revisionists, the ‘real’ Francis was not a bold Evangelist, but a timid man, whose goal was to have the friars live passively among the Saracens [Muslims] and ‘to be subject to them.’”
And these are precisely the differences between St. Francis and Pope Francis: While both are willing to dialogue peacefully with Muslims,
---the medieval saint was not willing to
compromise Christian truths or apologize for Islam’s violent reality.
---The postmodern pope is."
PJMedia
....and all the world wondered after the beast. Revelation 13:3