Spain is home to Cathedrals that were once mosques, and European Muslims are asking for their houses of worship back. I'm sympathetic to their cause. After all, the Christians aren't using them, except as musty museums that attract tourist dollars.
American Christians are unusual in that their churches rarely occupy sites sacred to other faiths. But throughout history new religions often appropriated older sacred places for their own purposes. London's St. Paul's Cathedral stands over the remains of a pagan temple, and the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City is within the sacred precinct of Aztec Tenochtitlán. Invaders normally assumed that dominant religions should by right occupy the greatest buildings, and they grabbed sites accordingly.
Such displacements are much in evidence across Europe and the Middle East, where Christians and Muslims often battled each other and where frontiers shifted frequently. (Whose Holy Ground)The non-practicing Europeans who won't cede ground to Muslim worshipers remind me of an older child stubbornly clinging to a toy even though he has outgrown it. Here's an idea. Hold a contest to see who can get more people to show up to the building, Catholics or Muslims. Whoever produces the bigger crowd wins the property.
The author of the article just wants to let sleeping dogs lie, and ends with a question...
And what would happen if Christians tried to recover the many former churches in the Middle East that are now Islamicized?What would happen? The Islamists would cut their heads off.
And that’s the difference between us and them. It is telling that while Christians cower in fear all over the Muslim world, prey to burnings, bombings and murder, Muslims in the west freely exercise their religion and bring their cultural and religious practices to the public square without fear of violence.Meanwhile, here's a cool story about a brave Muslim Voice for European Christianity.
