Sort of like what happens when you let all them Popish Romans flood a country, eh? How could you ever trust a practitioner of a faith that started the crusades, the inquisition, or even more recently had a child sex abuse scandal!?
This next section consists of several fallacies and falsehoods strung together. I shall expose them one by one. First, there is a false analogy: if an unspecified group of people, though presumably Protestants in the United States and other Anglophone countries, predicted adverse consequences resulting from Catholic immigration and those adverse consequences have not come to pass, then those who predict adverse consequences resulting from Muslim immigration are wrong as well. This, of course, assumes that believing in Catholicism is equivalent to believing in Islam, and if anything in the world is false it is the proposition that Catholicism and Islam are in any way, shape, or form comparable. If you wish to argue that point, first be honest enough to change your stated religion to something like “undefined”, “dubious”, “wishy-washy”, “my own thing”. The second false assumption is that modern-day Europe is equally capable of assimilating immigrant populations from whatever source as the United States, Canada, and Australia were a century ago, which is equally false for a variety of cultural, demographic, historic, geographic, social, technological, and not least, religious reasons. Indeed, it is far too late to consider this a matter of speculation; it is one of observation. First and second-generation American-born Catholics were infinitely better integrated than their Muslim counterparts in present-day Europe. Besides, the Church founded hospitals, universities, etc. that benefited not only the Catholic community but the larger population as well. There is not a shadow of something similar occurring in Europe. The sole Muslim institutions there are mosques, many funded by Saudi Arabia and dedicated to the dissemination of Wahhabism, the most noxious form of a noxious belief system.
As to the reasons why someone might hesitate to trust a Catholic:
The Holy Crusades were a necessary and heroic response to centuries of Muslim aggression, including the invasion and forced Islamicization of the entire Middle East, which had been the heart of Christendom, and to unrelenting attempts to conquer what remained, namely Europe. There were isolated instances of innocent blood being shed, foremost among which was that of the Jewish community in Jerusalem during the First Crusade. However, the regrettable events associated with the Crusades that did occur are singled out and exaggerated by Muslim propagandists and their politically correct allies, while those committed by Muslims are ignored. Have you personally heard of the genocidal conquest of Sindh starting in 664? Or of Aurangzeb’s equally genocidal massacres throughout India a thousand years later? How about the Otranto Massacre in 1480, when 800 faithful Catholic men chose death at the hands of the Turkish invaders to conversion to Islam? If you go to the cathedral at the Italian town of the same name you can still see their bones. How about the Turkish Abductions from Iceland (Yes, Iceland!) in 1627 when whole villages were depopulated, their inhabitants enslaved or murdered? Incidentally, the only thing that was unusual about this was the location. Historians estimate that more Europeans were abducted and enslaved by the Turks and their North African allies than West Africans by all nationalities combined (which included North African Moors). As happened in Iceland, the usual Muslim practice was not to leave children, the elderly, and the infirm behind but to cut them down while still ashore or take them to sea and then throw them overboard, as these acts were deemed praiseworthy by Islamic authorities of the time. (Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World [Paperback], by Roger Crowley, p. 70) How about the genocide of Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians in 1915? Turks and their Kurdish collaborators murdered 2.5 million of the Ottoman Empire’s Christian subjects. Ever heard of that? I think the take-no-prisoners stance of the Crusaders kind of pales in comparison.
The Inquisition? The great number of purported victims was Protestant propaganda, or more recently, Muslim propaganda. Unfortunately, it did make some innocent victims. Every human judicial system does, including, to be sure, the American criminal justice system. Note, however, that it was instigated largely by the presence of crypto-Muslims in Spain. In my opinion, which I have expressed clearly, ridding one’s country of every last vestige of Islam is a necessary and worthy endeavor, so to that extent the Inquisition was justified. Note also that the Inquisition had jurisdiction only over persons who claimed to be Catholic. Today in Muslim countries, Sharia courts exercise jurisdiction over all people, regardless of religion, and routinely sentence Christians to death for such “crimes” as “blasphemy” against the “Prophet” Muhammad. In Egypt, seven people have just been tried
in absentia and sentenced to death for helping to produce the film “The Innocence of Muslims”, including Pastor Terry Jones who is neither a Muslim nor has ever set foot in Egypt.
