A global organization monitoring Islamism has reprimanded the Vatican for embracing the disputed term “Islamophobia” while turning a blind eye to the threat of Islamic ideology, Sharia, and the persecution of Christians in Muslim nations.
The Center for the Study of Political Islam International (CSPII) issued a strongly worded statement on April 23 after the Vatican condemned the “persistence of Islamophobia” in an intervention at the United Nations marking the International Day to Combat Islamophobia.
Is there no end to their appeasement of Islam?
“While framed as a defense of universal liberty, the Vatican’s intervention adopts a highly contested political term—‘Islamophobia’—without addressing the ideological and legal dimensions of Islam that generate legitimate public concern,” CSPII warned.
Citing Pope Leo XIV, Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the pope’s ambassador and Permanent Observer to the UN, slammed the “discrimination and violence against Muslims” in his March address to the UN General Assembly, highlighting the spread of online “hostile narratives.”
Rome Legitimizes Islamic Nations Who Discriminate Against Christians
“Islamophobia” is not a “neutral descriptor” of anti-Muslim prejudice, CSPII noted. It was promoted by global actors linked to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), whose “long-standing agenda includes limiting criticism of Islamic doctrine under the rubric of ‘defamation of religions.’”
By thanking the OIC for organizing the event, Rome has “effectively legitimized” a bloc that upholds beliefs rooted in the Koran and Sunna, which prescribe imprisonment and capital punishment for conversion to Christianity, blasphemy, or criticism of Mohammed, CSPII stated.
The watchdog criticized the Vatican’s portrayal of Islam primarily as a belief, noting that this characterization obscures the “civilizational scope” of the religion, which governs not only worship but also politics, criminal law, warfare, social hierarchy, and the legal status of non-Muslims.
Collapsing debates in non-Islamic countries about Sharia-based norms, parallel legal structures, or Islamic political movements into “Islamophobia” risks “pathologizing policy discussion itself,” it emphasized, also warning that labeling “Islamophobia” as racism is “conceptually incorrect.”
“By endorsing this framework and praising the OIC, the Vatican risks reinforcing a narrative that equates critique of ideas with hatred of people—an equation that undermines the very freedom of thought and belief it seeks to defend,” CSPII concluded.
Catholic Intellectuals Object to Rome’s Championing of Islamophobia
Leading Catholics echoed CSPII’s concerns about the Holy See’s advocacy of Islamophobia, noting the expanding validation of the controversial concept by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church and the Vatican’s alliance with Islamist leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his wife, Emine Erdoğan, in championing the term.
“The Vatican’s anodyne platitudes about ‘religious liberty’ concerning Islam are part of a long tradition of happy talk about Islam dating back to Vatican II’s Nostra Aetate,” John Zmirak, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
Zmirak, a leading Catholic scholar, traced the source of the Vatican’s embrace of “Islamophobia” to “getting anti-Zionist Arab bishops to agree to Nostra Aetate’s charitable statements about Judaism,” in exchange for “inserting flattering language about Islam—the very faith that had persecuted and oppressed their ancestors.”
“This flowed from their Ba’athist strategy of positioning themselves as ‘good Arab nationalists’ in the hope of gaining toleration from local secular despots,” he added. “Today, the Vatican is trying to prove it’s a ‘good European globalist,’ in the hope of gaining toleration from local secular despots—the European Union.”
“The Vatican now endorses the term popularized by the militant Islamist Muslim Brotherhood to shut down any criticism of Islam,” Rev. Nick Donnelly, a well-known Catholic deacon from England, told FWI. “No doubt the Islamophilic Vatican would now condemn Charles Martel, Don John of Austria, and Pope St. Pius V as Islamophobes. Is there no end to their appeasement of Islam?” he asked.
Christian Campaigners Against UK Definition of Islamophobia Warn Vatican
Islamic scholar Tim Dieppe, one of the leading public intellectuals in the fight against the British government’s attempts to impose a state-sanctioned definition of Islamophobia, noted the problematic assumptions behind Rome’s championing of the controversial nomenclature.
“The Pope should not be endorsing the concept of ‘Islamophobia.’ Even the British government has now abandoned the use of that term because of its ambiguities and instead opted to use ‘anti-Muslim hostility,’” Dieppe, head of public policy at Christian Concern, told FWI. “The term ‘Islamophobia’ implies that criticism of the religion of Islam is unacceptable.”
“In any free society, we must be able to have free and open discussion about religious beliefs and practices of all kinds,” Dieppe stressed. “It is ironic that the Pope chose to discuss freedom of religion in the context of discussing ‘Islamophobia’ when actually it is in the Islamic world where Christians are most persecuted and where freedom of religion is virtually non-existent.”
Muslims Oppose Use of “Islamophobia” As U.S. Bishops Endorse Terminology
Radical Islamists have condemned other Muslims for refusing to use the term “Islamophobia.” In March 2025, the Islamist outfit Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND) attacked Fiyaz Mughal OBE, founder of the Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks) watchdog.
MEND complained that Tell MAMA, which was wholly funded by taxpayer money to the tune of £6 million since its founding in 2012, “often avoided the widely accepted term ‘Islamophobia’ in its work, thus refusing to accept that Islamophobia is much more than a narrow definition of anti-Muslim hatred.”
Mughal has opposed the UK government’s Islamophobia definition as “at best misguided and, at worst, counterproductive” because “defining Islamophobia is not a solution: it’s a distraction when existing laws have robustly brought perpetrators of anti-Muslim hate to justice.”
In September 2025, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) published a 15-page resource titled Islamophobia: A Guide for U.S. Catholics on Anti-Muslim Bigotry. The document noted that a definition of Islamophobia would include both how people “think and feel about Muslims” as well as “how Muslims are actually treated.”
The USCCB explained that Islamophobia can be overt, subtle, even unintentional, and “often functions like a form of racism.” It warned that “criticism of Muslims and Islam (even when well-intentioned)” constitutes Islamophobia if “based on untrue generalizations or stereotypes.”
FWI contacted Archbishop Caccia to ask why the Holy See promotes a term that is being used by ideological forces across the world to stifle legitimate criticism of Islam, but did not receive a response.
