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Vatican Islam Conspiracy Theory Refuted
by Arkansas Native Author
The Sentinal-Record
(Hot Springs, Arkansas)
Sunday, December 2, 2007
By John Lovette
In “Thou Shall Not Bear False Witness:
The Truth Behind the Vatican and Islam”, Arkansas native Gary Dale Cearley has
taken on a monstrous notion that makes
“The DaVinci Code” seem like a fancy
footnote.
Cearley uses history as his guide
instead of one man’s opinion in
discrediting a conspiracy theory,
propagated by well-known cartoonist
evangelist Jack Chick, that the Roman
Catholic Church hatched a plan in the
third century to create Islam to rid the
holy land of other Christian
denominations.
Chick, whose publications are
distributed worldwide, takes his
material from a man by the name of
Alberto Magno Romero Rivera, who claims
to have obtained this guarded
information from the Jesuit Cardinal
Augustine Bea.
Cearley points out the spelling
difference in Augustine and a man by the
name of Augustin (no “e”) Bea SJ, who
was the first president of the
Pontifical Council for Promoting
Christian Unity.
First in the long list of retorts is
Cearley’s observation that the Roman
Catholic Church was not as powerful as
Rivera and Chick give it credit for in
the third century, when it is theorized
the pope and cardinals planned to
“create” Islam.
Ralph Williams, a former missionary in
the Ukraine who studied early Christian
history at Harding University and
attended graduate school at the
University of Memphis, backs up Cearley
by saying the church was still very
“embryonic” in the third century and it
wasn’t until the fourth century that the
emperor Constantine, in modern-day
Turkey, converted to Christianity and
made it the official religion of the
Roman empire.
“All this conspiracy stuff sounds
exciting, but it hardly fits with the
facts”, Williams says in the book.
“Christians in the third century were
far more concerned with surviving and
with defeating heresies like Gnosticism
and Arianism that they encountered
daily. Besides that, if you read the
things they were writing, possession of
Jerusalem, or any other city, was far
from their minds. Even the heretics
would have been horrified at the
suggestion.”
Plus, Cearley adds, the Eastern
Christian Church was stronger in many
ways compared with that of Rome and
would continue to be so until the
schism.
Considering Chick also says the
Catholics started the American Civil
War, killed Abraham Lincoln, started the
Ku Klux Klan, and keeps a list of every
Protestant in the world for future
persecution, one of less paranoia would
likely consider him on the fringe and
simply go on about their business. But,
in reality, thousands of people around
the world read his tracts and not all as
level headed.
Plus, the possibility of a small group
of church leaders in Rome wishing to
take control of Jerusalem in the third
century is not entirely impossible. It
simply seems premature, considering the
history books show the First Crusade
would not occur for another eight
centuries, launched in 1095 by Pope
Urban II.
Cearley, a Prescott native who lives in
Vietnam running a large freight forward
business, says the danger with stories
like “The Prophet” is not so much that
people believe everything that Chick and
Rivera say, but how the information has
been misconstrued.
“The danger is that it alters
perceptions within the general
population,” Cearley wrote by e-mail
from Egypt, where he is doing research
for another book. “It’s like Chinese
whispers, but more convoluted. They
don’t start at the beginning telling the
truth and a lie comes out at the end.
They actually start with the lie and let
the monster grow.”
Other bits of “The Prophet” that Cearley
writes to clear up: Use of pagan statues
and holidays to convert unbelievers to
Christianity; the history of Islam and
Catholicism in general; and the role of
the prophet Mohammed’s first wife,
Kadijah, (the first follower of Islam)
and her Christian cousin Waraqah ibn
Nawful.
As Cearley points out, it is not
impossible that Khadijah might have been
a Christian or had Christian relatives,
but we do know that she did not die a
Christian, which calls into question
Alberto Rivera’s assertion.
“If Khadijah has been such a devoted
follower of Christianity and was ‘on
assignment from the pope’ to create a
false religion, why would she give up
Christianity for a religion she knew to
be false? I can only suppose Alberto and
his apologists would answer that it was
all an act. But it would be an act that
makes no sense at all to a rational
person who was at the same time a person
of a faith that tells her that she would
be risking eternal damnation for such
acts.”
The informative and entertaining self-published
book may be obtained from Cearley at his
Web site, http://garydalecearley.com.
The writer is doing research on al-Qaida
leader Ayman al Zawahiri, and expects to
release his book on abolitionist
Lysander Spooner in early 2008. |
