Auster: Bishop calls God "Allah"--and what basis does the post-Vatican II Church have to say no?

AMSTERDAM--A Roman Catholic Bishop in the Netherlands has proposed people of all faiths refer to God as Allah to foster understanding, stoking an already heated debate on religious tolerance in a country with one million Muslims.

... the Pope would appeal to the highest authority on the subject, which is the Catholic Catechism and the 1965 document Nostra Aetate, both of which describe Muslims as "fellow adorers" with Catholics of "the one God." So really, doesn't it make sense to call God by his Islamic name, as an act of love and charity to our fellow adorers of the one God?

There is no solution to our mortal civilizational crisis so long as liberalism--including the Catholic Church's own version of liberalism, which is Vatican II--remains in the saddle ...

It's pure liberalism. And it makes central the concept that I have repeatedly said is the defining concept of modern liberalism: non-discrimination.

Now, people may say this is only about equality of "rights" and "dignity," or right-liberalism, not about equality of behavior and culture, or left-liberalism. In reality, once right-liberalism has to be followed in all circumstances, as is made clear in this passage, then any line between right-liberalism and left-liberalism becomes vanishingly thin. If we believe that there can be no discrimination between people as far as their human dignity is concerned, is it possible to make any discrimination between them at all? For example, if we say that the followers of religion X are incompatible with our society and we don't want them to come here, are we not lessening their dignity? Therefore we must simply admit everyone into our society who wants to come. Therefore, once right-liberalism, the belief in the equality of individual rights and dignity, is made the ruling principle, it automatically morphs into left-liberalism, the belief in substantive group equality and total openness.