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Robert Spencer: Juan Cole is as ignorant of Catholicism as he is of Islam

Apr 9, 2012 7:13 am By Robert Spencer

In “Juan Cole and Ivory Tower Anti-Catholicism” in Crisis Magazine today, I discuss the Leftist propagandist and pseudo-scholar Juan Cole’s howling ignorance of Catholicism, and his similar abysmal willful blindness regarding Islam:

Hand-in-hand
with the Hollywood portrayals of Catholic priests and devout believers
as evil, stupid, cruel, or unhinged is the academic Left’s
long-established hostility to the Church. But the academic setting of
its critiques doesn’t make them any less false and cartoonish.

The recent controversy over public funding of contraception, as well
as Rick Santorum’s presidential candidacy, have given rise recently to a
good deal of tendentious and ill-informed comment on the Catholic
Church. Ironically, one of the most outstanding examples of this faulty
and false commentary appeared in “Informed Comment,” a blog written by
Juan Cole, a Leftist history professor at the University of Michigan.
Cole clearly intended his piece, which he entitled, “Top Ten Catholic Teachings Santorum Ignores,”
to be revealing of Santorum’s supposed hypocrisy; all it actually
reveals, however, is Cole’s ignorance, and that of the Leftist academic
establishment of which he is a part….

Exhibit A for Cole is this: “So for instance, Pope John Paul II was against anyone going to war against Iraq I think you”ll find that Rick Santorum managed to ignore that Catholic teaching.”

In this Cole commits the basic error of assuming that everything a pope says about any
topic binds the consciences of Catholics. In reality, of course, it’s
essential to distinguish between prudential advice of a pope and the
actual teachings of the Church. Cole could have consulted the Catechism
of the Catholic Church to discover the tenets of the faith, and he
wouldn’t have found a single article of faith pertaining to the war in
Iraq….

Cole assumes that American Catholics are bound by every position that
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops takes. He is obviously
unfamiliar with the words of Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, the future Pope
Benedict XVI, as recounted by Italian journalist Vittorio Messori: “The
future Benedict XVI told me that among the unforeseen and contradictory
effects of Vatican-II was the diminution in the importance of bishops,
which on the contrary, the Council wished to re-emphasize. In fact,
however, the autonomy and the freedom itself of a bishop over his own
diocese were caged in and co-opted by the establishment of national
bishops” conferences. These conferences, Ratzinger pointed out, have no
theological basis; they are not part of the Church structure as are
parishes, dioceses and the papacy. They are simply institutions, of
recent origin, which were created for practical reasons but which have
gradually created a weighty structure of their own, becoming in effect
“˜little Vaticans.–

The point here is not the merits of the various positions that Cole
thinks Santorum should endorse but is not doing so. Nor is it Santorum’s
positions in general. The point is that Cole, a respected university
professor, is basing the bulk of his case for Santorum’s hypocrisy on
institutions of recent origin that have no theological basis and no
actual authority. Cole’s abysmal ignorance of the nature of authority in
Catholicism is analogous to his ignorance of Islam. In both cases, Cole
manifests a surprising misapprehension of what constitutes
authoritative teaching and what doesn’t. In the case of Islam, he
downplays or outright denies the texts and teachings of Islam that
exhort believers to violence and supremacism, and presents as reliable
Western Muslim scholars who dissemble about those teachings and their
authoritative character.

It is an indication of the highly politicized state of academia in
America today that a scholar as sloppy and careless with the facts as
Juan Cole could hold a professorship in an American university. It is
apparently less important to his superiors at the University of Michigan
that Cole’s analyses are accurate than that he hold the acceptable
politically correct opinions: a warmly positive stance toward Islam,
despite its institutionalized violence and oppression of women and
non-Muslims, and a hostility toward Catholicism, even as dimly as Cole
understands it….

There is more.

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