Can Muslims Turn to Mary for Comfort?

In this regular feature Dave and Tom respond to questions from listeners and readers of The Berean Call.  Here is this week’s question:  Dear Mr. Hunt and Mr. McMahon, While many Americans are having anxious moments related to the terrorist attack on September 11^th, I was fascinated by a Roman Catholic lady who had no such fears because she was confident that Mary, Queen of Peace, was going to resolve the conflict between Christians and Muslims.  She said not only was Pope John Paul II looking to Mary, but Muslims will turn to her as well.  However, she didn’t back up her firm convictions with reason, but then I thought I remembered you saying something to that effect, did you?

Tom:

Dave, I think in, A Woman Rides the Beast, you have a quote in there from—

Dave:

Fulton Sheen.

Tom:

Yeah, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.

Dave:

Yeah, that was a book he wrote in 1952 and he has an entire chapter on how our Lady of Fatima, Fatima being a city in Northern Portugal that was named that, this was Muhammad’s favorite daughter that was named that when Islam and the Muslims were in control.  They had taken over that part of the world and were moving on up into France.  Now he says, “Isn’t it remarkable, or remarkable foresight, or insight, or understanding that would cause our Lady to appear in Fatima?”  She has appeared in a lot of other places—

Tom:

So called or allegedly.

Dave:

Right, yes, thank you.  These are apparitions and, in fact, again, and I shouldn’t say it because we don’t have time to support it, but we give the evidence in the book and we have on this radio program that these are demonic apparitions.  This is not Mary, we know that because of the things that she says and does.  There’s Our Lady of this, Our Lady of that, there’s Our Lady of Guadeloupe, she comes as an Indian.  We even have Our Lady in Japan, we have Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Fatima, there are almost a thousand shrines in France, and some of the most popular ones are black—the black virgin.  But anyway, he said, “When you bring…”—you see, Fatima was Muhammad’s favorite daughter and in the Qur’an he says, “Thou O Fatima are the chief of all the women in heaven after Our Lady the Virgin…” because the Qur’an says that Mary was a virgin and she gave birth to Jesus.

Tom:

Well, there is an entire chapter dedicated to Miriam, or Mary, the mother of Jesus in the Qur’an.

Dave:

Right.  So now he says, “When you bring images of Our Lady of Fatima into Muslim areas, like in Indonesia, or Africa, or India, the Muslims turn out by the hundreds of thousands.”

Tom:

Well, let me quote, this is Cairo, Egypt:  “Several nights each week thousands of Muslims fell to their knees on prayer rugs spread wherever space permitted and wept before the magnificent, wondrous, glorious form of Our Lady from Heaven.”  Dave, this is from Islamic scholar, Aliah Schleifer.  She writes in her book, Mary the Blessed Virgin of Islam, that Mary is esteemed above the most revered women of the Muslim faith.  Let me give you a quote from her book.  She says, “From the perspective of the classical Muslim scholars, Mary in the Qur’an and Sunna is a symbol that brings together all revelation as a descendent of the great Israelite prophets, the bearer of the word, the mother of Jesus and as traditional Sunni Islam’s chosen woman of the world, Mary is symbolic of the Qur’anic message that revelation has not been confined to one particular people.”

Dave:

Yeah.  Mary is the great ecumenist out there and this is what Archbishop Fulton Sheen said, that the Muslims would not be converted by conventional means, but through Mary.  Well, the Catholics really have something.  This is the day of the ascendancy of the woman.  The woman is in charge in the Western world, not yet in the Muslim world, women’s lib and so forth, and the Catholics have a woman and she is—well, right up there with God.  Actually, as you could verify, Tom, as a former Catholic, thousands of times more prayers are offered to Mary than to God and to Jesus.

Tom:

Just take the Rosary, it’s your best example.

Dave:

But over and over and over they are crying out to Mary and I have had Catholics say to me, well, Mary is more sympathetic—and well we could give you many quotes about that from the great saints, so-called, of the Catholic Church.  And so, this is really an image that draws Catholics, it draws Muslims, it draws everyone. The goddess, this is the age of goddess worship.  So, Mary may play, or these apparitions may play a very important role.  I don’t know, I don’t speculate about it, but it looks as though that could be in uniting the world under the world religion and after all, it is a woman who rides the beast in Revelation 17.

Tom:

Certainly, the woman who rides the beast, deals with more than just a particular individual.  But it is interesting, Dave, people wonder how there are more than a billion Muslims, there are more than a billion, little over a billion,  Roman Catholics, at least for those two entities, what could possibly reconcile them?  Well, a lot of things are going to go into it and I think you are right.

Dave:

Well Tom, I didn’t mean to imply that Mary is the woman, who rides the beast, but the Catholic Church is represented by this woman, and that is Mary.