The case for proselytism

Pope Benedict's recent controversial outreach towards the Anglican Church urging them to join the Roman Catholic fold may reek of naked proselytism. The very same proselytizing attitude the Roman Catholic Church had shown hundreds of years back with a lot of success in the Philippines, Coastal Africa and Latin America. The only difference this time around might be that welcoming errant Christians (more and more of them are starting to believe in assertive faiths like Mormonism, Pentecostalism and Islam) into the Roman Catholic fold may be our only bulwark against a rising Muslim fundamentalist attitude which in turn fosters a virulent sense of conservative Muslim identity that in my honest view may not be what the world really needs.

From here: But in making the opening to Anglicanism, Benedict also may have a deeper conflict in mind — not the parochial Western struggle between conservative and liberal believers, but Christianity’s global encounter with a resurgent Islam. Here Catholicism and Anglicanism share two fronts. In Europe, both are weakened players, caught between a secular majority and an expanding Muslim population. In Africa, increasingly the real heart of the Anglican Communion, both are facing an entrenched Islamic presence across a fault line running from Nigeria to Sudan. Where the European encounter is concerned, Pope Benedict has opted for public confrontation. In a controversial 2006 address in Regensburg, Germany, he explicitly challenged Islam’s compatibility with the Western way of reason — and sparked, as if in vindication of his point, a wave of Muslim riots around the world.