Year: 2016

This past November 20th, the Catholic bishops of Rwanda issued an apology for the Church’s complicity in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. The apology and reactions to it are covered in this nice piece in the online Catholic journal, Millennial.

A Church apologizing?  The phenomenon joins a global trend of the last quarter century, namely a sharp historical spike in apologies issued by heads of corporate entities – sovereign states, churches, business corporations – for misdeeds committed in the name of their organization. In the Catholic Church, it was John Paul II who practiced apology most famously, offering over 100 apologies concerning some 21 different historical episodes and people groups.  This excellent book by journalist Luigi Accattoli covers it well.

As the Millennial piece suggests, political apologies are complex and not always well received.  The Rwandan Church’s apology met with sharp criticism from the Rwandan government. One might suspect, though, that this government has narrow political reasons for its stance. Rwanda’s President Kagame can be credited for keeping the peace and promoting development in Rwanda since the genocide but has done so through favoring an elite of the Tutsi minority, repressing political opposition, promoting and enforcing a narrative that blames the genocide exclusively on the majority Hutus and almost entirely avoids acknowledgment of Tutsi crimes, and links the Catholic Church to a narrative of complicity in this genocide. There is much truth to this complicity, of course, as the apology attests and the article explains. Far from the heroic role that the Catholic Church played in standing up to dictatorship and violence in countries like Poland, the Philippines, Chile, and Malawi, the Rwandan Church, including priests and members of the hierarchy, associated themselves closely with leaders who carried out the genocide and in some cases participated in carrying it out. It is also probable, though, that Kagame wishes to maintain the Catholic Church in a position of weakness so that it will not become an alternative center of authority that can challenge the government (as the Church has become in many African countries). By continually insisting on the Church’s guilt and its constant need to atone, Kagame keeps the Church on the defensive and thus crippled in its moral authority.

Political apologies can be strong or weak. Do those articulating them take responsibility for the full range of deeds done? Do they acknowledge the role of powerful members of their hierarchies in the misdeeds and speak for their institutions? Prior to the apology, did those voicing it make efforts to listen to members of the victims’ community and to discover what was desired? How well was the apology received by victims?  Was it answered with forgiveness and reconciliation?

By the first set of criteria – governing performance – the Rwandan Church’s apology seems like a good one. Whether it meets the latter criteria – being well received – is still an open question. The Rwandan government has criticized the apology, but this does not mean that others will not welcome it. We can pray that they do and that it will bring healing, which is ever critical even over 22 years after the genocide.

Six days ago Congress passed a bill strengthening the International Religious Freedom Act, which it passed in 1998.  Three days ago, President Obama signed the bill into law.

Here is a piece detailing the good news.

From the piece, here are three features of the law that enhance the religious freedom capacities of the U.S. government:

• Requiring the ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom to report directly to the secretary of State;
• Establishing an “entities of particular concern” category—a companion to the “countries of particular concern” classification used for nearly 20 years by the State Department—for non-government actors, such as the Islamic State (IS) and the Nigerian terrorist organization Boko Haram.
• Instituting a “designated persons list” for individuals who violate religious freedom and authorizing the president to issue sanctions against those who participate in persecution.

Let us now urge President-Elect Trump to appoint a strong Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom — though it would be hard to improve upon the present one, Rabbi David Saperstein.

A piece in the Boston Globe today by Jeff Jacoby floored me.   He reports an atrocity in China — the government is killing more than ten thousand  prisoners every year by harvesting their organs while they are alive and then selling the organs.  The story, Jacoby reports, is being aired through two new films.

Here is how he describes that is happening:

The evidence, assembled by human-rights researchers and investigative journalists, added up to something unimaginable: China was killing enormous numbers of imprisoned men and women by strapping them down to operating tables, still conscious, and forcibly extracting their organs — and then delivering those organs to the hospital transplant centers that have become a major source of revenue.

To boot, those being killed are people being persecuted for their religious beliefs:

Chinese officials claim that organs come from violent criminals on death row. But “Human Harvest” makes it clear that most of those killed are peaceful citizens persecuted for their beliefs: Tibetans, Uighurs, Christians — and, above all, practitioners of Falun Gong, a Buddhist-style spiritual movement of peaceful meditation and ethical commitment.

Here is what he says about the two new films:

This week, two extraordinary Canadian films — one a chilling documentary, the other a riveting drama based on its findings — were released for sale on iTunes. Directed by Leon Lee, the films illuminate what may be the most depraved of all systematic human-rights atrocities in the world today: China’s industrial-scale harvesting of vital organs from prisoners of conscience, to be transplanted into patients paying exorbitant fees for a heart, kidney, or liver made available on demand.

The documentary, “Human Harvest,” won the coveted Peabody Award for its exposé of an unspeakable crime against humanity.

And more on the drama:

Hence Lee’s newest movie: a feature-length thriller, “The Bleeding Edge.”

The film stars Anastasia Lin, a gifted Chinese-Canadian actress who also happens to be the reigning Miss World Canada. She plays Chen Jing, a young Falun Gong practitioner who is jailed and brutally tortured for her refusal to “transform.” A simultaneous plot line follows James Branton (played by Jay Clift), a hard-charging tech entrepreneur whose heart collapses while on a business trip to China to close a major deal with the government. Branton receives an emergency transplant that saves his life — and motivates him to find out how a suitable organ could have been located so quickly.

Lin drew international headlines last year when she was forbidden to enter China, where the 2015 Miss World pageant was being held. For Lin, who was born and lived in China until she was 13, beauty pageants are a means of calling attention to human-rights abuses in her native land, and Beijing was intent on denying her a Chinese platform from which to speak.

This deserves attention!

This essay first appeared in the Irish Rover at the University of Notre Dame, December 1, 2016.

Donald Trump’s victory on November 8^th has elicited deeper divisions than perhaps any U.S. election result since 1860, when the Civil War loomed.  Furious demonstrations, calls for violence from both sides, and a surge of assaults on minorities ignited by Trump’s campaign rhetoric make clear that if the Republic is going to function civilly as a democracy for the next four years, Americans who are bitterly divided must find a basis on which to live and deliberate together.  No mere truce will do.  We are divided by principles, so only a principle that we can all endorse can help us contest our positions peacefully.

One principle, kneaded into the American founding, long regarded as part of our collective heritage, yet called into question as of late, can help us a great deal: religious freedom.  Religion is far from the only source of our divisions.  Class, race, and the status of immigrants obviously featured prominently in the election.  Religion, however, persisted as a fault line, much to the surprise of analysts who thought its relevance had faded.  At stake in the election were not only religious concerns but the very freedom of Americans to express and practice their religion.

Both left and right rued compromises of this freedom.  Among the minority groups against whom Trump stoked resentment through his skillful demagoguery, Muslims stood out.  Shunning the United States’ heritage, exemplary among Western countries, of integrating Muslims into our common life as citizens and economic actors, an achievement enabled in no small part by our tradition of religious freedom, Trump promised to bar Muslims from entry into the United States and thus expanded Americans’ legitimate worries about terrorism into a fear of all Muslims.  His proposal was a form of discrimination that violated the spirit, if not the strict letter, of religious freedom and instigated acts that violated religious freedom directly.  An FBI report of mid-November showed that hate crimes in the U.S. have surged as of late and most acutely against Muslims.  Among people who did not vote for Trump – like myself – his incitement of such animus was chief among our objections.

Religion and religious freedom, though, were also on the minds of those – like myself – who did not pull the lever for Clinton.  Trump received a record 81% of white evangelical votes and won 56% – 40% among weekly churchgoers.  In Clinton, these voters perceived a commitment to continue the Obama administration’s aggressive secularism.  This perception offers an explanation for why Clinton lost the commanding lead that she enjoyed among Catholics in summer 2016, only to lose to Trump among Catholics, 52-45%, on Election Day.  In the interim, e-mails hacked from the Democratic campaign revealed cynical and condescending plans to divide and conquer Catholics voters, while Trump wrote a letter to Catholics speaking to their concerns about life and freedom that played well in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and the other Rust Belt states critical to his victory.

At the core of the Obama Administration’s aggressive secularism have been its sharp curtailments of the religious liberty of Americans in the realms of life, marriage, and sexuality.  Through administrative decrees, judicial appointments, and the pedagogical power of the presidential podium, the administration imposed and inculcated restrictions of the sort that Pope Francis has termed “polite persecution,” implying that they are similar in kind, if not in degree, to far more serious persecution.  Motivated by a secular ideology, they involve the imposition of serious material costs on Christian believers on account of their commitment to traditional Christian teachings. The costs have been borne by merchants, universities, schools, hospitals, charities, campus fellowships, students, public officials, employees, and citizens, who have been variously fired, fined, denied accreditation, evicted from campuses, seen their businesses ruined, and otherwise barred from living out their convictions.

While the mandate of the Health and Human Services Department, challenged by the Little Sisters of the Poor in the U.S. Supreme Court, stands as the most famous of these impositions, many others have been applied at other levels of government and by a wide range of institutions.  Combined, the restrictions amount to the largest curtailment of religious freedom in the history of the Republic, a judgment derived from factoring together the number of these restrictions, their frequency, the number of people to whom they apply, and the scope of affairs that they restrict, including norms of marriage and sexuality held by every society, every religion, until 11:59 pm on the clock of history.

Americans who disregard the religious freedom of other Americans, or of citizens of other countries, are afflicted with amnesia.  They have forgotten that religious freedom is in the First Amendment to our Constitution, and in our heritage.  Religious freedom has enabled religious people who were persecuted elsewhere to find not only refuge but also equality of citizenship in the United States: Mennonites, Amish, Mormons, Muslims, Methodists, Catholics, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses.  In other times and places, too, the principle of religious freedom has been instrumental in ending strife and establishing peace among people divided by religious convictions.  The Emperor Constantine, influenced by the great Christian philosopher, Lactantius, declared religious freedom in the Roman Empire just following the colossal Diocletian Persecution.  Theologians and philosophers in Europe and colonial America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries articulated religious freedom as a principle by which Catholics and various and fractious Protestants could live together in peace.

A principle that establishes peace among people who differ over what they believe to be most important is one that Americans would do well not to forget at this moment.  Citizens wanting to make America great again should remember that welcoming religious (and other) minorities is what made America great in the first place.  Citizens wanting to advance new norms of marriage and sexuality should affirm that those who believe traditional norms to be the contours of God’s love must not be fired or fined for conducting their lives accordingly.  If religious freedom is for anyone, it must be for everyone.

I’ve long yearned for a Catholic political party.  It would be one that passes the test that Hubert Humphrey once posed for a moral nation, namely that it stands for people “in the dawn, in the twilight, and in the shadows of life.”  It would be the Democratic Party of the New Deal, the early labor movement, and the civil rights movement but without the lifestyle libertarianism.  It would be the Republican Party that was founded in the struggle against slavery, protects the unborn, and upholds marriage, but not the one that cheers the death penalty and hardens its heart towards the immigrant.  It would resurrect the pro-life Democrats and the legacy of the late Pennsylvania Governor Bob Casey.  It would be pro-life, pro-family, pro-environment, pro-immigrant, pro-religious freedom, pro-human rights, anti-death penalty, humane and law-abiding in its foreign policy, and against the radical division of classes that is now besetting America.  Such a party, I believe, would attract wide support among African-Americans, Latinos, Catholics, many evangelicals, and a wide swath of middle class Americans.

This election season, my hopes for such a party have never been bleaker and never been brighter.  Bleaker, because we’ve never had two candidates further from this position.  I will vote for neither.  I don’t decide this lightly because I think that one should strive to vote for one of the viable candidates if one’s conscience at all allows it.  Mine does not.

I follow the U.S. Catholic Bishops in the teaching that voting is not simply a matter of weighing up alternative futures in utilitarian fashion but also a matter of what kinds of policies one intentionally supports.  One cannot support policies that are intrinsically wrong or support candidates because they stand for these policies – that is, policies that are wrong whatever the circumstances or outcomes.  Both candidates support such wrongs beyond the threshold where I can consciously vote for one of them.  Others will place the threshold differently and we can disagree charitably.  But here is why I think both candidates are beyond it.

Secretary Clinton supports continuing and even expanding laws that have sanctioned the snuffing out of over 60 million unborn persons; perpetuating and expanding laws that deny the reality of something so fundamental as marriage and sexual natures; and likely the further restriction of religious freedom on behalf of laws that promote these causes.  She will bring a far steadier hand to executive leadership than Trump and more humane policies towards immigrants.  But her problems are deal-breakers.

Trump’s problems are well known and hardly worth repeating but are, briefly: support for torture; support for killing civilians in the war on terror; cavorting with racist allies; abusing women in word and deed; mocking the mentally handicapped; showing reckless disdain for the rule of law; and dismissing entire classes of human beings like Muslims and immigrants.

Both take me beyond the point where I can say, Which candidate is the better future?, and to the point where I must ask, Can I be complicit?

In Christian history, crisis and darkness form opportunities hope and renewal, and so I was delighted when, for the first time in my life, a real Catholic party appeared on the scene, the American Solidarity Party.  Built explicitly on Catholic social teachings – the wisdom of the encyclicals – the party adopts a wide ranging platform that channels these teachings into American politics.

It is inspired by Christian Democratic parties in Europe and Latin America, which – admittedly yesterday more than today – are also rooted in Catholic teachings.  Like Christian Democratic parties, the ASP is not exclusively Catholic and can appeal, I believe, to a wide range of constituencies, religious and otherwise.  The word Solidarity evokes the Polish Solidarity movement, which connected Catholic moral roots with political action and shook the world in the 1980s.

Third parties are difficult to sustain in the United States, though if there takes place such a shock to the system that one or both of the existing parties break apart – not entirely out of the question after November 8^th – such a party might seize upon the opportunity to form a new electoral coalition.

To succeed and not end up a flash in the pan, I believe that ASP should form itself as a movement with deep intellectual and spiritual roots, one that reflectively connects religious and deep moral teachings to political positions – again, Christian Democratic Parties of yesteryear and Solidarity are examples.

It would also be nice were the ASP on the ballot in Indiana, which it unfortunately is not, even as an eligible write-in possibility.  After the election, though, there will be much work to do.

Added November 5, 2016: See also this excellent piece on ASP by my friend Malloy Owen.

I am happy to have signed on to a statement on religious freedom (mostly in the global sense) that was presented yesterday in person to the Trump and Clinton campaigns.  Here is the press release, in which is embedded the group’s recommendations.  One of its implications is that religious freedom is something that everyone, religious or not, can get behind.

A reigning view in modern liberal philosophy — and Western elite culture at large — is that the rise of freedom in the modern world required the decline of Christianity, or at least its marginalization from public life.  John Rawls and Mark Lilla make the argument and laud this marginalization; philosophers like Pierre Manent make the argument and lament it.

A new pair of volumes from Cambridge University Press assembles a host of blue-chip scholars to argue that the thesis is wrong.  (I am the author of one of the chapters but it is not I but the likes of Robert Wilken, John Rist, and Remi Brague who are the blue-chippers.) Historically, and around the world today, Christianity has been an incubator and driver of freedom.  Not always, of course: Christianity has inflicted its share of unfreedom.  But if the collective claim of the volume is right, then many of our present free institutions have Christianity to thank for their origins. And in authoritarian settings around the world, Christians are fighting for freedom.

An excellent entree to these works is this review by Samuel Gregg.  To see the volumes, go to Christianity and Freedom: Historical Perspectives.

Recently, Elizabeth Sperber, a political scientist starting her career at the University of Denver and a talented scholar of religion and politics, along with her colleague Matt Herman, published a piece on the Washington Post‘s “Monkey Cage” on the fraught elections taking place in Zambia and the challenge of finding impartial observers.  The country turned to . . . its Christian churches.  It’s a fascinating case where religion is making a positive difference in politics.  Still, unresolved questions remain concerning the fairness of the elections.