Roman Catholics and Shi'i Muslims

Prayer, Passion, and Politics

James A. Bill, John Alden Williams

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780807854990, 9780807826898
• eBook ISBN: 9780807874929
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Politics

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ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND TWELVER SHI‘ISM

In this study, we seek to compare one tradition of Christianity with one tradition of Islam. We begin in this chapter by “mapping” or locating each of these traditions in relation to the other branches of its faith. Within the larger Christian tradition, we sketch what it means to be “Catholic” and within Catholicism what it means to be Roman Catholic. Within the larger Muslim community of faith, we indicate what it means to be “Shi‘i” and within Shi‘ism what it means to be Twelver Shi‘i.

THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH

Less than 400 years after the life of Jesus Christ, the Christian faith had spread around the Mediterranean and beyond it. Christianity had achieved a regional organization of dioceses, each under the leadership of a bishop (from Greek episcopos, “supervisor”). Particularly respected were the bishops of important cities of the Roman Empire: Rome, in the Latin-speaking West; Alexandria and Antioch, important Greek-speaking centers; and Jerusalem, holy to both Jews and Christians. When Emperor Constantine shifted the state position from persecution to patronage early in the fourth century, he made Byzantium, renamed Constantinople, the “New Rome.” This added a fifth city to the major episcopal jurisdictions. The result was the Pentarchy, “the five senses of the Empire,” as Emperor Justinian the Great called the jurisdictions in the mid-sixth century.

Outside the empire, the king of Armenia had been baptized a Christian in 301, well before Constantine’s first pro-Christian gestures. Roman or otherwise, after three centuries as the faith of a minority, Christianity was a state religion and the church a well-defined institution. Membership in it was marked by baptism (a ritual bath going back to Jewish religious ablution) and anointing, followed by participation in communion with the local Christians. This followed a course of instruction, or catechesis (hence catechism), and profession of faith. Christians were defining the content of their faith in doctrinal terms, developing propositions of faith that required assent.¹

The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed is a Christian creedal formulation dating from the fourth century. Among other articles, one article states: “We believe in One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church,” a unique, sanctifying, universal assembly founded by Jesus and faithful to the teachings of his apostles and their successors to this day.

Christians, like Muslims and Jews, worship the God of Abraham, who is transcendent, beyond normal knowing, except insofar as He has chosen to reveal Himself. For Christians, the perfect revelation of God’s holy and inaccessible mystery is in His Word or Logos. This doctrine emerges primarily from the Wisdom literature of the Bible. There Hokhmah (Sophia in the Greek Septuagint) or Wisdom is represented as a distinct principle, firstborn of God, active with Him in the creation, proceeding from the mouth of God, with Him in the highest heaven and then sent to Israel, the image of His perfection.² The Fourth Gospel states that the divine Logos/ Word/Sophia became incarnated in Jesus and that “all that came to be had life in him, life that was the light of Humankind . . . which enlightens all people.”³ It is then entirely comprehensible for Christians that Jesus said, “No-one comes to the Father except through me,”⁴ because all have life itself through the Logos and can only return to God by His agency. In short, Jesus discloses the heart of God to Christians.

The Western branch of the Catholic communion recognizes the bishop of Rome as the successor of St. Peter, chief of the apostles of Jesus,⁵ and acknowledges this chief bishop’s direct control as patriarch, or “father governor.” It is the largest church of Christendom and by far the largest of the sister churches of the Catholic communion. A number of the Catholic churches of the Eastern world have historically separate patriarchs⁶ who govern their own churches but acknowledge the pope’s jurisdiction in matters of faith and morals. A Catholic follows a bishop who is in communion with the pope and who accepts the Petrine supremacy. The histories and traditions, liturgical usages and languages of other Catholic communities may lead to the formation of separate ecclesial cultures from that of the Latin Western Church of Rome.

The Catholic Church is a “sacrament” (Latin) or “mystery” (Greek), in which God is united with the assembly and conveys divine assistance through visible signs (also called sacraments): baptism, communion, confirmation, penance, holy orders, matrimony, and unction (anointing of the sick). In this book, “Roman Catholic” will refer to the church directly governed by the patriarch of the West, the pope,⁷ rather than the Catholic Church of the creed, which, as its name states, is neither Latin nor Roman but universal. In Catholic social thought, society is a set of relationships ideally governed by love. It is therefore redeemable, indeed already redeemed (in the church). Catholics agree that the church is infallible and that the majority of its bishops in council together will be protected from error in matters of faith and morals. This is especially the position of the Eastern “Orthodox” Churches, for example, Greek, Russian, Bulgarian, Romanian, Serbian, and Georgian. For over a millennium, these churches were in communion with the Church of Rome. In the eleventh century, they came to believe that Rome had separated itself from the universal church of the creed by accepting words inserted in the creed by a pope acting without a council.⁸ They felt this represented a monarchical universal jurisdiction never contemplated in the original church. There was a widening breach between the Western and the Eastern patriarchates. Roman Catholics on their side have come to hold that in the absence of a council, the pope of Rome may authentically speak for the entire church.

THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN THE WEST

In the fifth century, the West was faced with the invasions of Germanic tribes, who came as pagans or heretics and had no friendship with the universal church of the empire. Outside peoples continued to migrate to the West for 600 years. The Roman state in the West collapsed and was replaced by barbarian rulers who over time came to accept the faith of their Catholic subjects. Conversion offered political advantages for such rulers: the cooperation of the bishops and their literate clerics, the sacralizing of royal authority through “anointing,” and the powerful blessing of the Christian God.

Gregory I (pope, 590-604) was the first missionary pope of Rome and the first monk to become pope. At the time, Western society was torn by violence, anarchy, and incoherence. Gregory himself described the Church of Rome as “an old ship woefully shattered; for the waters are entering on all sides, and the joints, buffeted by the daily stress of the storm, are growing rotten and herald shipwreck.”⁹

Gregory’s admiration for St. Benedict of Nursia insured that the Benedictine form of monasticism would become dominant in the West. Unable to obtain help from the faraway emperor in Constantinople, Gregory used funds from the estates of the papacy in Italy, Sicily, and North Africa to feed the hungry people of Rome and to aid monks in Egypt. He also sent forty monks from his own monastery in Rome to convert the remote Anglo-Saxons of Britain. As Pius X wrote, Gregory “liberally succored the impoverished people, Christian society, and individual churches according to the necessities of each . . . and stood up in public as the defender of social justice.” ¹⁰

When Gregory died in 604, the future still looked bleak for Christians in northwest Europe, but the results of his initiatives were impressive. By 700, all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms had adopted Roman Christianity. The Christian Celts of Wales, Ireland, and North Britain, long cut off from the Continent, were now accepting Roman leadership, and Anglo-Saxon monks and nuns loyal to Rome were creating disciplined religious houses in Germany. Roman Christianity came to be the established church of a Frankish empire with a ruler anointed as emperor of the Romans by the successor of Peter.

The Carolingian emperors¹¹ furthered the Roman form of Christianity, made the popes independent rulers of central Italy, actively converted the peoples on their eastern borders, and used Catholic bishops as administrators. The Germanic emperors also expected to appoint their bishops and to intervene in church affairs. Importantly, the Carolingians and their Ottonian successors in their own domains used the filioque¹² in the creed, but the popes resisted the formula until 1014. The laity’s instruction in Christianity was meager: men, women, and children were taught the Our Father and the Apostle’s Creed.¹³

The Frankish state was a far cry from the opulent empire of Byzantium and was built on a fragile economic and political base. By 900, it had collapsed due to internal strife and external invasions. North African Muslims conquered Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, and in 846 they looted the Basilica of St. Peter in Rome. Much more destructive were the invasions of the Norsemen. Western Christianity in England, Ireland, and Western Frankish lands was intellectually decapitated. Although Irish monks had once studied Greek, increasingly the Latin West could not read the language in which the New Testament had been written and first preached.

In the Eastern Frankish empire of Germany, Switzerland, and north Italy, the passing of the Carolingians led to the election in 919 of a strong man to lead the war against invading Magyars from Hungary. A victory against the “Huns” in 955 resulted in the crowning of a German emperor, Otto I. The Hungarians, led by King Stephen (d. 1038), finally accepted Roman Catholicism. Nonetheless, the tenth century was a miserable, disordered period in the West and the low point of the papacy as brawling noble families made and unmade popes of their relatives in the ruins of Rome and emperors intervened as it suited them.

Change in the state of the church began in the monasteries north of the Alps, particularly through the reform of the rule of St. Benedict in the monastery of Cluny in Burgundy. By the end of the eleventh century, some 600 monasteries cultivated a dignified, liturgical, and well-ordered monastic life, with an estimated 10,000 monks answerable to the abbot of Cluny.¹⁴ The monks also favored a celibate clergy and the revival of lapsed canon law. The monasteries fostered Latin learning, and increasingly the cathedral schools where some nonmonastic clergy received training did so as well. Pope Urban II, who preached the first crusade in 1095, was a monk of Cluny. By 1076, a pope, Gregory VII, had ended the struggle for control of the Latin church by excommunicating an emperor, Henry IV. This punishment did not prevent the emperor from later besieging Rome for three years and forcing the pope to flee.

THE PROTESTANT MOVEMENT

Protestant Christians recite the same creed as Catholics but historically have rebelled against Rome’s interpretations. They tend to see church unity as guaranteed by faithfulness to the Christian scriptures written by the apostles of Jesus and their immediate successors, certainly not by the successor of Peter. Protestants insist on their right to interpret these scriptures in the light of conscience, not by tradition. They see the sacred character of their churches as provisional on faith in the sanctifying work of Jesus, and they generally limit the sacraments to baptism and communion. Society is commonly seen as an oppressive order, forsaken by God, in constant need of re-formation.

Western Christians, Protestant and Catholic, have been profoundly influenced by the thought of St. Augustine of Hippo (d. 430), a doctor of the early church who wrote in Latin and was little read among Eastern Catholics. Augustine’s view of the sin of Adam was radical by Eastern terms: humankind was fatally damaged by the fall of its first parents and unable to attain the good it desired, except by divine grace.¹⁵ After Augustine, this doctrine became part of the religious culture of all Western Christianity. A total dependence on grace in turn led many Protestants, followers of early reformers such as Martin Luther, Huldrych Zwingli, and John Calvin, as well as supporters of the Jansenist movement among Roman Catholics,¹⁶ to a belief that one’s eternal happiness depends on divine predestination. Although Jansenism attracted many Roman Catholics, its characteristic doctrines were eventually condemned by the church, whereas many of the leading Protestant bodies are still heavily Calvinistic in theology.

Right doctrine, orthodoxy, for Catholics is to believe what the church teaches. Protestants have insisted that the leadership of the majority does not guarantee freedom from error: the majority has in fact often been wrong, and the minority has been the “saving remnant.”

Indeed, sectarian Protestantism of the sort that has flourished in North America has tended to see acceptance of Jesus Christ as personal lord and savior as almost the whole of religion. In such a persuasion, any “church” can easily be dispensed with, for one can always found another church closer to one’s preferences or one can do without a church altogether. The individual human conscience alone is sacred in matters of faith, and one may well be right if one feels that one is right. Haeresis, believing as one chooses, is right doctrine. Such a view necessarily fosters individualism and the conviction that one is entitled to whatever worldly goods one can obtain.¹⁷

ISLAM AND ITS BEGINNINGS

Muslims hold that God reveals Himself in His Word, given to prophets ever since Adam. After many revelations, this Word, as complete as it would ever be, was given to the last of the prophets, Muhammad, and is the divine Recitation, the Arabic Qur’an. If you want to know what God is like and hear His authentic speech, Muslims say, look to that book. Jesus was the promised Messiah, the “Word of God and Spirit from Him,” son of the sinless Virgin Mary, but his true message was distorted by his followers, and Muhammad was sent not only to bring the eternal message in its definitive form but also to create a community that would protect it from misconstruction. To do this, the Prophet performed a great miracle with God’s aid: he united the Arab tribes, the most quarrelsome and divided people in Muhammad’s seventh-century world. This community, or umma, now embracing many peoples, is not permitted to “turn the other cheek” when it is threatened; it is commanded to deter assailants if it can. Such a struggle has the same name as the struggle to overcome one’s own selfishness: jihad.

The Muslim calendar begins numbering its years at the beginning of the community, when the Prophet Muhammad, with some early followers, moved in 622 from the trading city of Mecca to the agricultural oasis later renamed Madina. There he became the arbiter of interclan conflicts and inaugurated the governance of the society according to revealed principles. To become a Muslim, one “bears witness” in an affirmation that is repeated in the call to prayer and is more universal than the creeds of Christianity since all Muslim groups affirm it and there is no difference of opinion about it. One affirms that there is no god but the God of Abraham and that Muhammad is His messenger, implying that his position is the culmination or “seal” of the prophets the world has known and that his words and acts are spiritual and institutional norms.

During the ten years he lived after being driven from his home city, only the last two of which were after he brought it to his side, Muhammad ruled the community of Muslims as lawgiver, teacher, exemplar, magistrate, and religious and political head. He continued to recite new revelations given to him, Muslims believe, by the Archangel Gabriel. His sudden death from an illness after leading a pilgrimage from Madina to Mecca in March 632 came as a great shock to his followers. What happened next resulted in the division of the community into Sunnis and Shi‘is. Muhammad made no provision for a successor. It is tenaciously held by all Shi‘is and conceded by many Sunni scholars that on his way home from the pilgrimage, Muhammad had halted the caravan before it began to split up ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
• Introduction
• 1 - ROMAN CATHOLICISM AND TWELVER SHI‘ISM
• 2 - THE STORY OF THE PEOPLE OF THE HOUSE
• 3 - SACRED ACTORS AND INTERCESSORS
• 4 - REDEMPTIVE SUFFERING AND MARTYRDOM
• 5 - CATHOLIC MYSTICS AND ISLAMIC SUFIS: THE CONFLUENCE OF EXPERIENCE
• 6 - LAW AND THE STATE
• 7 - AUTHORITY, JUSTICE, AND THE MODERN POLITY
• CONCLUSION: THE COMPARATIVE POLITICS OF RELIGION
• NOTES
• GLOSSARY OF SHI‘I TERMS
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY