Father Miceli’s Muslim Mirage

Late Catholic priest Vincent P. Miceli wrote in his 1981 book, The Antichrist: The Final Campaign Against the Savior, that “religious Muslims are revolting in disgust against Western—and especially American—commercialism and moral decadence.” Over 40 years later, Sophia Institute Press’ republishing of his work, which contains insightful comments on leftist evils such as the cult leader Jim Jones and LGBT agendas, allows opportunity to reflect on his sometimes mistaken views of Islam.

In writing about the future coming of an antichrist, Miceli was no feel-good relativist on Islam or any other matter. He thereby analyzed the 1632 book De Antichristo (Concerning the Antichrist) by the Dominican friar and philosopher from Calabria, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639). As Miceli wrote, “Campanella states that all godless tyrants and all sophistical heretics are antichrists, for they are types of and participators in the evil that the greatest Antichrist will one day bring to culmination.

Among other frauds, Miceli noted, Campanella had examined Islam’s “false prophet Mohammed,” who had “multiplied and scattered his militant sect everywhere like a plague.” “Certainly Mohammed has to be counted as a precursor of the Antichrist for he denies the Father and the Son, and empties out Jesus by denying His divinity,” Miceli concurred. He also noted how John Henry Newman (1801-1890), the great Anglican convert to Rome who became a Catholic cardinal, also considered in his sermons the “false prophet Mohammed” as a “historical shadow of the Antichrist.”

Yet like many Catholics and other Christians since, Miceli apparently advocated what Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft later called an “ecumenical jihad” of Christians and Muslims against modern decadence. Expressing revulsion against Western licentiousness, Miceli commented uncritically on arson against movie theaters and other symbols of Iran’s westernizing, dictatorial monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. A common occurrence in the months leading up to the 1979 Islamic revolution, such attacks by Muslim zealots turned particularly deadly on August 19, 1978. Four men burnt down in Abadan a theater and killed over 400 people these terrorists had locked inside.  

Without naming any particular incident, Miceli wrote:

Recently an American theatre in Iran was burned to the ground by angry Iranian youths because it was showing filthy American movies, movies calculated to destroy the sacrosanct family structure through their advocacy of easy divorce, pleasurable infidelity, the flight from parental responsibility by means of abortion, and the enticement of all viewers to sexual promiscuity.

“Purse-pride over the highest standard of living has rendered the West insensitive to the moral ideals of the Muslim world,” Miceli wrote without citing any evidence. He presumably never got a chance to learn from the Egyptian-American convert from Islam to Christianity, Nonie Darwish, who has noted the abusive nature of historic Islamic law towards women, among others. She would have scoffed at Miceli’s assertation of Islamic family families: “Not that the Muslims are perfect, far from it, but they do still maintain high moral values for women and the family,” he wrote.

Muslims “disdain Western values so dominated by greed and the lust for pleasure and power,” Miceli asserted, as if Muslim Gulf states did not often use their oil wealth for nefarious purposes. He also left unexplained why corruption and dictatorships are so prevalent among Muslim populations such as the Palestinians. Precisely the long-term disaster that is Iran’s post-1979 Islamic Republic has effectively eradicated over the decades popular Islamic faith in this theocracy.

“What the Islamic East resents about the Christian West is that the West has abandoned its Christian way of life, its faith in Christ the Redeemer,” Miceli wrote, as if Muslims appreciated Christian piety. In reality, Christians throughout the Middle East and beyond know too well the harsh struggle to survive under Muslim rule that began with Islamic conquests after the faith’s origins in the seventh-century.   

Possibly Miceli’s worst bad take was on the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Experienced Afghanistan observers such as the CIA Osama bin Laden analyst, Michael Scheuer, noted that the American-supported “freedom fighters” in the anti-Soviet Afghan resistance were hardcore jihadists. With the support of the longtime jihadist-sponsor Pakistan, many who had served America’s wider anticommunist Cold War strategy by defeating the Soviets, such as Al Qaeda members, would turn their guns on the West.  

Yet Miceli speculated about a common Christian-Muslim front developing in response to Soviet aggression:

No doubt the attack of the Russian red dragon with his godless armies of mini-antichrists against the Muslim world is being used by God to bring Muslims and Christians willy-nilly together against the combined forces of Satan.

Perhaps aided by hindsight, Catholic and other Christian observers of Islam after Miceli have had more critical outlooks, and not just concerning Islam’s many theologically radical differences with Christianity. Muslim groups in the West have often formed their own tactical alliances with precisely the leftist groups feared by Miceli, even as Islamic doctrine contains its own threats to Judeo-Christian Western society. While subsequent events have dashed Miceli’s unfounded hopes for Christian relations with Muslims, his views on Israel were likewise overly critical, as the final article in this series will examine.