ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (LifeSiteNews) — The radically pro-LGBT Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, issued a statement defending the building of a mosque within the archdiocese on Monday in response to concerns from the faithful.
In the July 27 statement, Archbishop Wester, who has a long history of pro-LGBT heterodoxy, responded to the faithful’s concerns about a proposal to build a mosque and community center in the North Valley of Albuquerque by falsely asserting that Muslims have a “God-given” right to worship freely. The archbishop also erroneously claimed that defending that so-called “right” is a “core element of Catholic teaching.”
“As Archbishop of Santa Fe and a resident of Albuquerque, I feel compelled to speak clearly and pastorally: our Muslim neighbors have the same God-given and constitutionally protected right to worship freely as every other faith community, including our own,” the archbishop wrote. “Defending that right is not only a civic duty but a core element of Catholic teaching.”
“The Catholic Church has long affirmed religious liberty as essential to human dignity. In Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council taught that every person ‘must be free from coercion’ in matters of faith,” he added. “This principle applies universally. It is not limited to Catholics or Christians; it extends fully to Muslims, Jews, and all people who seek to worship according to their conscience. Supporting the construction of a mosque is therefore entirely consistent with our own tradition and moral commitments.”
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While it’s true that the Church teaches that the faithful should never coerce Muslims or members of any faith from converting to Catholicism, the Church has always held that Islam is a false religion and those who hold to it are in danger of eternal damnation.
Therefore, while Muslims may have the right to worship freely, the faithful should strive to convert their Muslim brethren and never support the building of a mosque, as Wester suggests. Or is supporting the building of a mosque a “core element of Catholic teaching,” as the archbishop suggests.
Blessed Pius IX, in his Syllabus of Errors, condemned the idea of false religions such as Islam having the right to “corrupt the morals and minds of the people” and warned of the “pest of indifferentism” that Wester seems to be promoting.
The pontiff denounced as an error the claim that “it is false that the civil liberty of every form of worship, and the full power, given to all, of overtly and publicly manifesting any opinions whatsoever and thoughts, conduce more easily to corrupt the morals and minds of the people, and to propagate the pest of indifferentism.”
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Wester has a long record of contradicting the Church’s teaching on homosexuality and gender ideology.
Recently, in a June article for the Jesuit-run America magazine, Wester called for gender-confused children’s “gender identities” to be respected and even suggested that these are “biological.”