Month: December 2014

We’ve been following the case of Egyptian human rights dissident and alum of the Center for Civil and Human Rights Yara Sallam.  She had her sentence reduced to two years — but still, alas, faces two years in prison.  She remains in our thoughts and prayers.

An encouraging story comes from Kaduna, Nigeria, where Muslim youths stood guard to protect Christians celebrating Christmas.  Such stories are not merely heartwarming but are critical to understanding the global profile of Islam and its capabilities for peacebuilding.  The story evokes memories of similar recent episodes around the world, including ones in Egypt, where Muslims encircled Coptic Churches, also at Christmas — and where Christians encircled Muslims in prayer during popular protests in Cairo.

Kaduna is in northern Nigeria, where strife between Christians and Muslims has been intense over the past decade-and-a-half, particularly since sharia law was established in Kaduna State in 2001.  As a result of riots and other violence, Muslims and Christians have migrated to different parts of the city, where they live separately.

Christmas is a good time to remember persecuted Christians and indeed all who suffer the denial of their religious freedom.  Jesus was born into persecution under a king who sought his life for his being who He is.  Christian Caryl of Foreign Policy writes of a black Christmas for Christians of the Middle East.  Meanwhile, India’s aggressive Hindu nationalist group, the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, is threatening to move ahead with forced the conversions of Christians and Muslims on Christmas.  In China, the demolition of churches continues.

Here at the Center for Civil and Human Rights, we have spent the fall launching our three-year project on how Christians respond to persecution, Under Caesar’s Sword.  We look forward to a major conference in Rome on the subject in December 2015.  This Christmas provides no shortage of reminders of the relevance of the issue.

One of my favorite writers on religious freedom is Turkish journalist Mustafa Akyol.  Check out his courageous and innovative book, Islam Without Extremes.  Today, his analysis appears in the New York Times in a column taking to task Turkey’s powerful president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, for the increasingly harsh, closed, and authoritarian Islam that he is imposing on Turkey, especially in education.  The policy of unfreedom is inimical to the economic and political dynamism through which Turkey has prospered as of late.  Secularism, though, is not Akyol’s answer.  For most of the Republic of Turkey’s modern history, it was under the equally closed, authoritarian — and stifling — secular dogmas of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.  Erdogan’s recent direction is sad, for from 2002 to 2010, he led Turkey in the direction of political and economic openness — a prying open of Ataturk’s rigid secularism towards a religiously vibrant liberal democracy.

One of the most colorful dimensions of the new U.S.-Cuba deal to emerge is the role of Pope Francis in brokering it.  His intervention recalls previous ones like Pope John Paul II’s intervention in the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile in December 1978.

More commentary has emerged on Pope Francis’s role over the weekend.  John Allen of Crux sees it as manifesting a longstanding papal policy of detente.   Here is a skeptical perspective from Nicholas Hahn.

 

When I mention religious tolerance in contemporary India to people, I still get startled reactions: Isn’t this the land of Gandhi, peace and pluralism?  Yet the latest news is another reminder of a very different picture.  Hindu nationalist forces, whose political party now governs India, have been planning mass “reconversion” ceremonies, including one for Christmas Day intended to “reconvert” thousands of Christians “back” to Hinduism.  Fraud, bribery, and deceit typically accompany the conversions.  Now the government has decided to ban the Christmas conversions for the sake of public order.  See a BBC story here.

Across India’s northern border, religious repression and accompanying violence continues.  See the latest piece of Knox Thames, who is always good on Pakistan.

 

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture brings back with renewed force the debates of the previous decade about the use of torture in fighting terrorism.  The three main conclusions I draw from the report are that first, the CIA’s use of torture in fighting terrorism was far more widespread than previously known; second, that torture was never effective in eliciting information for capturing active terrorists; and third, that the CIA deceived many, including the public and even the president, about both of these facts.  Defenders of the techniques even now say that they kept us secure.

Insofar as the debate deals with the morality of torture, it proceeds on consequentialist grounds: was torture really effective in stopping terrorism?  Obscured is the position that torture is intrinsece malum — always, everywhere, inherently wrong.  This is the position of the Catholic Church, articulated in the Second Vatican Council document, Gaudium et Spes, the Catechism (1994), and Pope Saint John Paul II’s great encyclical on morality of 1993, Veritatis Splendor.

The Church acknowledges its own complex past on the matter, having sanctioned torture in the Middle Ages.  The contemporary Catechism says this:

In times past, cruel practices were commonly used by legitimate governments to maintain law and order, often without protest from the Pastors of the Church, who themselves adopted in their own tribunals the prescriptions of Roman law concerning torture.  Regrettable as these facts are, the Church always taught the duty of clemency and mercy.  She forbade clerics to shed blood.  In recent times it has become evident that these cruel practices were neither necessary for public order, nor in conformity with the legitimate rights of the human person.  On the contrary, these practices led to ones even more degrading.  It is necessary to work for their abolition.  We must pray for the victims and their tormentors.

Let us pray indeed.

For an excellent explication of the Church’s views, including a historical perspective, see this article in 2010 by Steve Colecchi in America.  For an excellent natural law argument against torture, see this piece by Chris Tollefsen.

 

 

Previous posts here have covered the religious dimension of the protests in Hong Kong.  Now the police have arrested Cardinal Zen, one of the great Catholic dissidents in China.  See here.