Month: March 2018

This week is Holy Week for Christians and a good occasion to remember today’s Christian martyrs. The Community of Sant’Egidio , which journalist John Allen recently dubbed “The Pope’s Favorite Movement,” does just that through its annual prayer for martyrs — in which the names of recent ones are read out — in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran in Rome that takes place Tuesday of every Holy Week. Local Sant’Egidio communities, including ours here in South Bend, Indiana (where I am a member), follow suit with their own annual prayer of remembrance.

This year the prayer is more urgent that ever. Aid to the Church in Need’s 2017 report, Persecuted and Forgotten? reports that the persecution of Christians, already widespread, has only become worse in the last couple of years. The Under Caesar’s Sword project studies and reports Christian responses.

An article in yesterday’s Washington Times, details one site of this persecution that is surprising to many — India. The country’s Hindu nationalist government, and many state governments, use trumped-up charges of induced and forced conversion as a pretext to pass anti-conversion laws that serve to repress the country’s minority Christian community (2.3% of the population). Christians are also harassed and attacked by Hindu nationalist groups.

India is one of many sites — add China, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and many others — where Christians are denied their religious freedom harshly. Solidarity means remembering their Way of the Cross as we walk ours, and working for their religious freedom as we undertake our own participation in the resurrection.

 

 

 

In previous posts I have lamented the decline of the pro-life Democrats. Skeptics have told me that you can fit them in a telephone booth. Now, I fear, they’re being actively driven out of the party. Abortion rights activists sought to oust Representative Dan Lipinski, a Chicago-area congressman, who is one of the few pro-life Democrats left. He barely survived a challenge in the Illinois Democratic primary last week.

Fittingly, also last week, Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York dissected and lamented the Democrats’ failure to support life as well as Catholic education, which benefits the poor and minorities.

Wrotes Dolan on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal on March 23:

[T]he dignity and sanctity of human life, the importance of Catholic schools, the defense of a baby’s civil rights . . . were, and still are, widely embraced by Catholics. This often led Catholics to become loyal Democrats. I remember my own grandmother whispering to me, “We Catholics don’t trust those Republicans.”

I can hear my grandmother, a life-long Democrat, saying the same.

Such is no longer the case, a cause of sadness to many Catholics, me included. [These] two causes . . .  the needs of poor and middle-class children in Catholic schools, and the right to life of the baby in the womb . . . largely have been rejected by the party of our youth . . .. Last year, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez insisted that pro-life candidates have no place in the modern Democratic Party.

He concludes:

The “big tent” of the Democratic Party now seems a pup tent. Annafi Wahed, a former staffer to Hillary Clinton, recently wrote in this newspaper about her experience attending the Conservative Political Action Conference. She complimented the conservative attendees pointing out that most made her feel welcome at their meeting. They listened attentively to her views—a courtesy, she had to admit, that would not be given to them at a meeting of political liberals.

I’m a pastor, not a politician, and I’ve certainly had spats and disappointments with politicians from both of America’s leading parties. But it saddens me, and weakens the democracy millions of Americans cherish, when the party that once embraced Catholics now slams the door on us.

If the Democratic Party cannot be persuaded to shift their views in principle, it seems that the Hindenburg of November 2016 might have taught them that their radical exclusion of life and support for Catholic education are bad politics. The states where Hillary Clinton critical lost — Midwest Rust Belt states and Florida – are ones where Catholic voters exist in large numbers, are willing to vote for either party, and would be persuaded by an economic progressive who is pro-life — or at least not radically pro-abortion rights, as Hillary was — and favors support for religious schools that are on the side of the little guy. But the Democrats can no longer claim to be the party of the little guy.

In a piece at Crux, Journalist John Allen discusses a new survey conducted by Aid to the Church in Need on a topic of great interest here at Arc of the Universe, the persecution of Christians around the world. The survey assesses the attitudes of American Catholics towards this persecution and shows that they are aware of it but that they don’t think bishops are doing enough to address it.

American Catholics get it, he says:

[P]resented with a list of sixteen nations and asked to rank the severity of anti-Christian persecution in those places, American Catholics more or less nailed it, identifying North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan as the worst offenders

And yet:

[T]he results also reveal a relatively low level of urgency among American Catholics about coming to the aid of persecuted Christians. Asked to choose in terms of level of concern among five issues – human trafficking, poverty, climate change, the refugee crisis, and anti-Christian persecution – the persecution of Christians finished last.

And they don’t think their church is doing enough:

34 percent of American Catholics . . . believe their bishop isn’t doing anything on anti-Christian persecution, or, if he is, they don’t know about it, and 35 percent [believe] the same thing is true about their parish – in both cases, above one-third of the total Catholic population.

What can increase the sense of urgency and lead Catholics to urge their bishops and their parishioners to do more? The Under Caesar’s Sword project! Based on the fieldwork of 17 leading scholars of global Christianity, the project offers ready-to-use curricula for schools and parishes, a 26-minute documentary and guide for showing it to audiences, a public report that summarizes the findings, and much else. The project’s very purpose is to raise awareness and motivate action on behalf of Christians where they are most persecuted. Explore here.

The project works closely with Aid to the Church in Need and is based at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture and the Religious Freedom Institute.