Pope Leo has spoken out against President Trump indirectly by implication much to the delight of liberal Democrats and disgust of conservative Republicans. This political divide in America is going to cause future problems in the Catholic Church in America. Some will rally around the Pope, while others will look for a new church.
The areas the Pope spoke to were related to immigration and war.
“When people have lived good lives—many of them for 10, 15, 20 years—treating them in a way that is, to say the least, extremely disrespectful, and with instances of violence, is troubling.”
On Easter weekend he said things such as God rejects the prayers of leaders who start wars and have “hands full of blood”. The pontiff strongly condemned the Iran conflict, calling it “atrocious” and emphasizing that the name of Jesus must not be invoked to justify war. He has also said “Christians and Muslims can ‘live together in peace’.”
Pope Leo also spoke blasphemously when he said, “Jesus said. ‘Woe to those who manipulate religion and the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.” Nowhere in the Bible is this written.
But to Christians who know the history, Islam is a religion that came 600 years after the death of Christ and the Bible. Islam is, and always has been, an unrepentant politico-expansionist movement clothed in a religion bent on universal conquest by whatever means it can: deception (taqiyya), social and cultural infiltration, bloody violence, as its millennial history and authoritative scriptures have proven. (See Koran 13:41, “Do they not see that We are advancing in the land, diminishing it by its borders on all sides?”)
There are several known ways Islam differs from other religions.
- It sanctions militant propagandizing, mandating forcible imposition on other peoples by coercion, threat and overt violence (Koran 8:39, 9:29, etc.), a practice unique among religions.
- It punishes those who leave Islam with death (Koran 4:89; Hadith, Bukhari 9.84.57), also a practice unique among religions.
- It allows no separation between church and state. The scope of its ambition is khilafil, which is, to establish a Caliphate, a universal state, ruled by Islamic sharia law.
Muslim scholar Jaafar Sheikh Idris explains, “Secularism cannot be a solution for countries with a Muslim majority or even a sizeable minority, for it requires people to replace their God-given beliefs with an entirely different set of man-made beliefs. Separation of religion and state is not an option for Muslims because it requires us to abandon Allah’s decree for that of man.”
Islam itself is said to strive to attain: the flourishing of the individual soul, the love of God’s Creation, the grace and miracle of life, the conversation with the Divine, freedom of conscience and the inviolability of personal choice in determining one’s redemption.
But instead, it establishes conformity to a set of stringent rules as a prerequisite to salvation to perpetuate the faith itself at the expense of the individual. This is a practice common to most restrictive minor orthodoxies. And with Islam and its predisposition to violence and the overthrow of other faiths and peoples to its control, we are now seeing a radically greater scale and the havoc it can wreak.
Something not often addressed in discussions of Islam is the double standard between men and women. Under Sharia law, women are considered to be worth “half a man.” Sharia subordinates women to men in a multitude of ways: the requirement of guardianship by men, the right of men to beat their wives, the right of men to have multiple wives, the requirement women have to cover themselves… the list goes on. To say the culture is sexist and/or chauvinistic would be an understatement. Western culture finds this practice particularly unacceptable across all major faiths as well as in the secular world.
“The Rise of Islam: How It Spread Across the World (Animated Map)” – ICEZZ
As Howard Kainz, professor emeritus at Marquette University, Milwaukee, pointed out in an illuminating essay Islam and the Decalogue, “As I suggested in a previous column, Islam may be best understood as a worldwide cult. It enforces honesty and loyalty and fairness among believers, but entails no obligation to respect the ethical canons of ‘unbelievers,’ which include the Golden Rule and the Decalogue.”
Islam reverses the Golden Rule, which is central to Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism (Koran 48:29, 2:191, 3:28, etc.). For this reason, Kainz concludes, “Islam may best be understood,” not as a religion, but “as a world-wide cult.”
Most major religions have reformed themselves reducing or eliminating the all-too-human tendency towards sanctimonious oppression and none of these faiths endorse oppression as a universal creedal or divine imperative. Such is not the case with Islam, a unity that since its inception in the 7th century has seldom strayed from its bloodied path of carnage and subdual perpetual and mandatory feeding what essayist Bill Kassel calls “religious-themed barbarism”!
CONCLUSION:
Many years ago when I began to study Islam after 9-22-2001. I watched a most interesting video presentation that helped me understand the Koran and the prophet Muhammad from a historical perspective.
“Brigitte Gabriel: Values Voter Summit 2015” – FRC Action
Brigitte Gabriel exposed that the prophet Muhammad rewrote the Koran after the Jews refused to recognize him as the Messiah. Originally his Koran was about a spiritual movement, but became a political movement cloaked in religion. His movement condemned women and non-members, and forced there subservience to Islam using taxes or death to control the people.
Does Pope Leo know about the history of Islam?
Many, like Mother Miriam, are critical of the Pope’s recent comments. Mother Miriam of the Lamb of God (formerly Rosalind Moss) is a Catholic nun who converted from Judaism, and founder of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Israel’s Hope. She hosts the Mother Miriam Live podcast.
“The Embracing of Islam is NOT of God | Mother Miriam Live”
© 2026 by Mark S. Schwendau
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Thinking Conservative.
