Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Cardinal Archbishop of New York and President of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, has made statements that suggest apostasy. Visiting a mosque in New York, he said the following:

“You love God, we love God and he is the same God,” the cardinal said of the Muslim and Roman Catholic faiths.

He likened Muslims to earlier waves of Roman Catholic immigrants who some 150 years ago faced the same challenge of “how to become loyal, responsible, patriotic Americans without losing their faith.”

The most obvious problem with His Eminence visiting a mosque and saying these things is that it causes confusion among the faithful. In order to cut through this confusion, I am going to tackle different aspects of this problem in a Question & Answer format.

Why do the Cardinal’s statements indicate apostasy and not heresy?

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia entry on apostasy,

The heretic differs from the apostate in that he only denies one or more of the doctrines of revealed religion, whereas the apostate denies the religion itself, a sin which has always been looked upon as one of the most grievous.

Arians are Christians who believe that Jesus is not divine. Docetists are Christians who believe that Jesus did not become man; instead, His body was an illusion. Manicheists are Christians who believe that evil is as powerful as good, and the material world is evil.

The common thread of these heresies is that they are Christian, but they deny one or two major doctrines of the Christian faith.

Apostasy does not deny a doctrine, but the Catholic religion.

But Cardinal Dolan is a cardinal! How could he deny the whole Catholic religion?

Cardinal Dolan apostasized by claiming that the god of the Muslim religion is the same God as the God of the Roman Catholic Church.

If God founded two religions, one Muslim, the other Catholic, then they must be equally good in His eyes. It must make no difference whether you choose Islam or Catholicism.

To say that Islam is equivalent to Christianity is to deny the Catholic faith. When one denies the Catholic faith in toto (in its entirety), one commits apostasy.

How do we know that the god of Islam is not the God of Catholicism?

The Christian God is a Triune God. He is three Divine Persons (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) in one Divine Nature.

The Muslim God is only one person. The religion of Islam denies the Triune nature of God.

These two conceptions of God’s nature are so different that they cannot possibly be compatible. Thus, we must conclude that Christians and Muslims worship two different Gods.

If Muslims worship a different God, who do they worship?

If St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:20 is to be believed, Muslims worship a devil:

But the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God. And I would not that you should be made partakers with devils.

Say that Cardinal Dolan did not apostasize. How else did he scandalize?

Let’s return to the Cardinal’s second quote above:

He likened Muslims to earlier waves of Roman Catholic immigrants who some 150 years ago faced the same challenge of “how to become loyal, responsible, patriotic Americans without losing their faith.”

Saying that Muslims struggle to become Americans without losing their faith around the dinner table is discussing a political reality. Saying that in a group of Muslims is a tacit acknowledgement of their faith, and a missed opportunity to evangelize.

What should Cardinal Dolan have said instead?

While I cannot say for sure, it would likely have been better if he had admonished Muslims to abandon their false religion and join the true Church, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Roman Catholic Church. Saying so would have accomplished two things:

1. Catholics would be strengthened in the knowledge that Catholicism is the only true religion.
2. Muslims would have heard the truth and been given knowledge needed to repent.

Cardinal Dolan did a great job of highlighting the similarities between Muslims and Catholics. Is there anything wrong with that?

That he did. In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with pointing those similarities out. But he completely neglected the very real differences between the two religions. And by very real differences I mean life and death differences. And by life and death I mean the life and death of the soul, not just this life. The differences are so large that to ignore them is to distort the truth of the situation.

Cardinal Dolan espoused religious indifferentism.

What on earth is “religious indifferentism”?

The Catholic Encyclopedia has a solid definition of religious indifferentism:

The term given, in general, to all those theories, which, for one reason or another, deny that it is the duty of man to worship God by believing and practicing the one true religion.

Conflating Islam with Catholicism is a textbook example of denying the one true religion. Favorably comparing Muslim immigrants to the Catholic immigrants of yore cheapens the Catholicism of those immigrants.

But Cardinal Dolan is Catholic! He didn’t outright deny the faith.

Cardinal Dolan did not make a clear statement denouncing the Catholic faith. He made several unclear statements that can only be understood as pushing religious indifferentism, which tacitly denies the faith.

How should a Catholic react when a prelate preaches religious indifferentism?

Pray. Fast. Evangelize. Hold fast to the truth of the Holy Roman Catholic Church. Christ will never abandon her, even if one of her princes does.

• apostasy
• Timothy Cardinal Dolan
• ecumenism
• religious indifferentism