From Challenge of Faith
1. The issue of salvation is faith in God — Incarnate. The Church must reach the Moslems with this message, even if it has to pay the price it paid to convert the Roman world.
2. Ever since the rise of Islam the religious strategy of the world remains unchanged: Christianity is contained within the Islamic Zone which prevents the evangelization of the rest of the world.
3. Missionaries at different times, but especially since the time of St. Francis Xavier, have gone around the Islamic wall, but have not yet succeeded in establishing permanent Christian societies. The growth of the Church must be continuous, and therefore we cannot ignore the Moslem world.
4. Before the Incarnation, infidelity meant, on the whole, idolatry; after the Incarnation, it is iconoclasm.
5. Islam cannot be dismissed as a military conquest: where are the conquerors before and after? It cannot be dismissed as a philosophy: what philosopher dominates the lives of so many people in so many countries and for such a duration of time? Only the Semitic genius for religious intensity, and the tradition and prestige of Abraham could begin to explain the fact of Islam.
6. The non-Jewish sons of Abraham, who continue to form the core of Islam, have indeed much of Abraham’s faith and spirit, but not the central object of his devotion; for Abraham saw (in prophecy) the days of Jesus and rejoiced.
7. Islam cannot be converted by Inter-faith; nor can it be won by hypocrisy.
(This was originally published in From the Housetops as a sidebar of an article called “Venerable Charles de Foucauld“)
