Month: August 2018

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Remember Christians in Nigeria

For the last two days, U.S. Catholics have been clicking for updates on Archbishop Vigano’s testimony against high-level prelates, including Pope Francis. As they should be.

Meanwhile, 6,000 Christians have been killed in Nigeria this year at the hands of Fulani herdsmen.

How many of us know about their plight?

I published the first of a two-part series of blogs on this on Friday at the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops’ blog on religious freedom, God’s Servant First.

Here is a preview:

Sure, I had heard of Boko Haram, the infamous Muslim terrorist group in Northern Nigeria whose name means, “Western education is a sin,” but I had not known that since 2009, Boko Haram has destroyed over 200 churches, displaced nearly two million people, killed at least 20,000 people, created over 200,000 refugees, and kidnapped hundreds, including many women whom it has made sex slaves. While Boko Haram has attacked and killed both Muslims and Christians, Christians are disproportionately represented among these many victims, and, of course, explicitly targeted. In 2013, it is estimated, more Christians were killed as a result of persecution in Northern Nigeria than in the rest of the world combined. . . . Why is this so little known among Christians in the West?

And:

Much more recently and apart from Boko Haram operations, reports have revealed large death tolls of Christians at the hands of Muslim Fulani herdsmen in the states of Kaduna, Benue, Plateau, Taraba, Adamawa, Kwara, Borno, and Zamfara. Since this past January, over 6,000 Christians, most them women, children, and elderly, have died in raids and other attacks. In 2015, there were 4,028 killings and 198 church attacks, nearly double those of the previous year. The attacks increased again in 2016 and continued into 2017.

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Review of Under Caesar’s Sword

“Informative, enlightening . . . relevant . . . will remain the standard text in this field” reads a review of Under Caesar’s Sword: How Christians Respond to Persecution by Peter Admirand of Dublin University, writing for Reading Religion, a blog of the American Academy of Religion.

The review opens thus:

At interfaith events at a Dublin synagogue which I attend, an elderly Jewish man always raises the issue of the persecution of Christians and laments over why the world remains silent. The book under discussion does not delve deeply into that specific question, but offers the most informative, enlightening, and (sadly) relevant treatment of the current global persecution of Christians and the diverse ways Christians respond to the violence and injustice unleashed against them. In terms of statistics, five hundred million Christians, roughly 20% of the global total, live in countries where “they are vulnerable to severe persecution” (10).

And here was an insightful paragraph:

In some Christian circles, the story of Christian persecution of the Other is the dominant trope: Christians who burned heretics and committed genocide against Native Americans and other indigenous groups and cultures; Christian persecutions and violence in the long history of Jewish-Christian relations; Christian crusades against Muslims; and so on. These damning and humbling failures must always be taught. However, the requirement to speak out and condemn all violence and injustice remains a priority. In too many places globally, Christians are victims of ghastly violence and retribution, or are systematically restricted from practicing and spreading their faith and beliefs.

The whole review is well worth reading.

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A Saint Under Caesar’s Sword

Among the responses of Christians to persecution around the world uncovered by the Under Caesar’s Sword project, some stand out for their saintliness and holiness.

One is Fr. Frans van der Lugt, a Jesuit priest who refused to leave his people in Homs, Syria, and was murdered for it, as described in a recent piece in Aleteia.

The author, Weronika Pomierna, describes his spirit:

“The most important thing is to keep up hope and not to despair. Only then can I help others! If I leave my home, nothing will stay of it. Besides, there are still Christians here. About 28 people. I do not want to leave them,” said the 75-year-old Jesuit priest, Fr. Frans van der Lugt.

He speaks of this in one of the videos he made, where he can be seen walking among the rubble down the streets of Homs, wearing his worn-out gray sweater.

In other videos, in the background you can clearly hear the sound of bombs exploding and gun shots. “I will stay here even if there are no more Christians, because I came here for Syria, for all Syrians. I am here to serve them and this country, which I have loved so dearly,” he says.

Many found these words incomprehensible: Here we have a European who could easily leave during the siege of Homs, yet rejects this possibility in order to stay with those he was called to serve. He wants to be there with them till the end, even when there are only 28 Christians left.

She concludes:

From the very beginning he believed that people can live together, despite their differing views. He would also constantly remind us that we are all brothers and should love one another, Lilian recalls. He was a holy man, indeed! Many thought so. He had pure goodness in him. People sensed that he was like Jesus. Everyone could come to him to talk. He did not create any distance. When I talked with him, I felt that I was unique in his eyes, but absolutely everyone who spoke to him had the same feeling. Some Muslims, too, called him “holy.”

On the first anniversary of Fr. Frans’ death, his confrere and friend said during Holy Mass that he was sure that Fr. Frans immediately forgave his killer. He added that if only this man had stopped to look in his eyes, full of goodness and peace, he would not have shot the priest.

Pray for us, Father.

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Yes, It’s Genocide; Yes, It’s Religious — The Case of the Rohingya Muslims

Last week, I covered the case of the Uighur Muslims in China. The Rohingya Muslims in Burma are also an egregious case where Muslims are denied their religious freedom — in this case, in the context of what is arguably genocide.

The Religious Freedom Institute has just released an excellent report on the violence against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma. The report shows that the violence is widespread in scale, warranting a genocide designation, that is strongly religious in character, and that it severely violates religious freedom. It covers violence against other peoples in Burma as well. It is produced by RFI’s South and Southeast Asia Action Team, of which I am a member (though I had no hand in the report).

Here is the report’s summary:

Nearly one year ago, on August 25, 2017, a wave of violence was unleashed against Muslim Rohingya in Rakhine State, Burma. Thousands were killed in brutal fashion and more than 700,000 were displaced. In a new report, the Religious Freedom Institute (RFI) considers the facts of what happened in August 2017 and the broader context of religious freedom violations in Burma. The report also puts forward concrete recommendations on what is to be done.

COVER - RFI-Rohingya Crisis - August 2018.jpg

The Rohingya Crisis: The Shameful Global Response to Genocide and the Assault on Religious Freedom  adds to the mounting documentation of the plight of the Rohingya, an ethnic and religious minority of Burma (Myanmar) and is a call to action.

This report should serve as a reminder of the needs of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya who flooded into Bangladesh in the aftermath of the Burmese military attacks in August 2017. While the influx of refugees has largely subsided, the needs of the individuals, families, and communities who survived the crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide perpetrated by the government because of ethnicity and religion still remain.

The Rohingya are not alone in their endurance of blatant attacks to their rights to religious freedom. Christians among the Kachin, Chin, and the marginalized Naga communities of Burma face are still facing rights restrictions. They are once again seeing targeted military campaigns, in some cases perpetrated by the very same units who targeted the Rohingya.

This report is in response to the unresolved refugee and humanitarian crisis that extends beyond the Rohingya and threatens to be forgotten. The report provides an overview of the historical, ethno-religious, humanitarian, and international dimensions of this particular crisis, and emphasizes that the overwhelming evidence merits the label of genocide and crimes against humanity be applied to the atrocities perpetrated against the Rohingya by the Burmese military and other actors.

Regardless of what label is applied, the evidence of atrocities against the Rohingya is overwhelming. In light of such evidence, the Burmese government and international community must ask themselves, are they unaware or unconcerned about the genocide being perpetrated against the Rohingya Muslims of Burma?

These violations of religious freedom and acts of genocide against the Rohingya of Burma cannot go unanswered. The international community, individual governments, and faith leaders and their congregants around the world, must not be silent in the face of such a blatant assault on religious freedom and such a violent act of genocide.

Meanwhile, a compelling piece on the Rohingyas appeared in National Review by Nina Shea, who has been one of the world’s leading advocates for international religious freedom for over a quarter of a century. The nub of her case is here:

Since 1999, Burma has been designated a severe and systematic religious persecutor under the U.S. International Religious Freedom Act. Its ethnic Rohingya Muslim and Kachin, Chin, and Karen Christian minorities have been regularly oppressed and subjected to brutal attempts of forcible conversion by its Buddhist majority. Violent conflict between them and a military bent on “Burmanization” has raged on and off since the country’s 1948 independence from Britain.

In 2012, the attacks against the Rohingya Muslims in Burma’s northern Rakhine state became particularly intense. That year, Genocide Watch issued an emergency alert that these Rohingya were being slaughtered and driven from their homes. On May 20, 2013, noted human-rights advocates Jose Ramos Horta, Muhammad Yunus, and Benedict Rogers wrote of these early warning signs of genocide in the New York Times:

The Rohingyas were recognized until the 1982 Citizenship Law stripped them of their citizenship and rendered them stateless. Since then, they have faced a slow-burning campaign of persecution, which exploded last June and again in October, resulting in the deaths of at least 1,000 and the displacement of at least 130,000. . . . Human Rights Watch has published evidence of mass graves and a campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In 2015, amid continuing horrific news accounts from Rakhine, the prestigious Allard K. Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic at Yale Law School produced a legal analysis finding “strong evidence of genocide against the Rohingya population,” based on “the record of anti-Rohingya rhetoric from government officials and Buddhist leaders, the policies that specifically target Rohingya, and the mass scale of the abuses against Rohingya [that] make it difficult to avoid inferring an intent to destroy Rohingya.” By 2016, 93,000 Rohingya had been killed, brutalized, raped, or forcibly displaced, according to the UNHCR.

  She calls on the U.S. Secretary of State to designate the crisis genocide.

 

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Trumping Our Civil Religion

Friend and colleague John Carlson at Arizona State has published an op-ed piece arguing that President Trump is spurning the United States’s civil religion in promoting his own cult of personality — a quest to be God? He concludes:

Trump’s inaugural and presidency have deepened fissures over what it means to be, as our national motto affirms, one nation made up of many diverse peoples.

Do we embrace “American Exceptionalism” or “America First”? Should we lead the international order, or compete with Russia to be a craven superpower? Will we open our doors to the world’s “tired, poor and huddled masses yearning to be free,” or send them back to the “s***hole countries” they come from? Put starkly, are we a nation “under God” or under Trump? We must choose.

Civil religion, grounded in “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” provides strength for resisting Trump’s noxious cult of personality. As high priests of civil religion, presidents usually use the authority of their bully pulpit to summon the nation to noble purposes. But without the sermon, a president no longer commands a pulpit. And all that is left is the bully.

We now must look to other leaders and citizens to restore the civil religion that Trump has renounced.

Read the whole thing and see his other interesting work on religion and politics and, most recently, global citizenship, here.

 

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Massive Internment Camps, Religious Cleansing in Western China

One of the world’s largest religious freedom violations was brought to light this past Friday in a United Nations report on the detention of some one million (in some estimates two million!) Uighur and other Muslim minorities in internment camps in Xinjiang Province in Western China at the hands of the Chinese government.

These minorities have long lived in tension with the Chinese government, who fears their separatist tendencies and uses the rhetoric of the War on Terror to legitimate its suppression of them. (See this excellent piece by Mehdi Hasan). The Chinese government exaggerates, as Hasan explain:

That isn’t to say that Uighur militant groups are a myth, but the few that do exist are small, weak, and pose very little threat to the Chinese state. Most are inspired by local factors rather than international alliances. To quote Michael Clarke, an Australian academic who has studied Xinjiang, “It’s not that China shouldn’t be concerned about [global terrorist ties], but the core issue is that the linkages have been exaggerated by the Chinese government.”

Xinjiang Province also happens to be the home of China’s largest oil and gas reserves.

Religion is integral to the internments and to the Chinese government’s suppression of Uighurs in recent years. A common criticism of religious freedom advocates is that they depict conflicts as religious that are really about something else: economics, self-determination. Here, yes, these factors are also involved. But so is religion — in a big way. Hasan describes China’s policies:

The Chinese government seems bent on humiliating and abusing the Muslims of Xinjiang. In recent years, Beijing has banned Uighur parents from naming their sons “Muhammad”; children from entering mosques; and government employees from fasting during Ramadan. Muslim men are prohibited from growing “abnormally” long beards, while Muslim women cannot wear the face veil in public.

Then there are the “political camps for indoctrination,” cited by the U.N. panel last week, in which hundreds of thousands of detainees are forced to shout Communist Party slogans; declare their loyalty only to the Chinese dictator, President Xi Jinping; and are “lectured about the dangers of Islam.”

The word “Orwellian,” therefore, does not do justice to the harrowing accounts of abuses coming out of Xinjiang, rightly dubbed a “police state” and “apartheid with Chinese characteristics” by The Economist. The U.N. panel said it was a “massive internment camp” — “a sort of ‘no-rights zone.’”

The camps merit outrage, not the indifference shown by heads of Western and even Muslim majority states. Hasan again:

So where is the global outcry? Where are the protests from Western governments, which so often claim to value human rights above all else? President Donald Trump says he has “a lot of respect for China” and likes to brag that Xi Jinping is “a friend of mine.” On a visit to China earlier this year, British Prime Minister Theresa May won plaudits from Chinese state-run media for being “pragmatic” and ignoring Western journalists and activists who “keep pestering [her] to criticize Beijing” over human rights abuses. Her fellow European leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, has visited China 11 times in 12 years — but has never publicly raised the issue of the Uighurs on any of those trips.

Where is the outrage from the governments of majority-Muslim countries, which so often claim to speak on behalf of their oppressed Muslim brothers and sisters across the globe? They are loud in their condemnation of Israel’s subjugation of the Palestinians and Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya. But a million Muslims behind bars? Beards and veils banned? Imams humiliated? The news out of Xinjiang has been met only with radio silence from the 57 member states of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Take the Turkish government, which in the past has spoken out in defense of the Turkic-speaking Uighurs, but these days is keen on cozying up to Beijing. Or consider the Iranian government, which not long ago announced a “new chapter” in Tehran-Beijing relations, praising China for having stood “by the side of the Iranian nation during hard days.”

The camps remind everyone that Muslims are often the recipients, not just the perpetrators, of massive human rights and religious freedom violations. The world’s states, the human rights community, and, not least, religious freedom advocates are called to respond.

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Evangelical Episcopal Repentance

Recent allegations about years of sexual abuse on the part of ex-Cardinal Theodore McCarrick have elevated years of scandal in the Catholic Church to new heights and dissipated hopes that the Church’s can put these troubles in the past. Not only are the acts that have been revealed heinous but also they were (allegedly but with strong evidence) committed by a priest en route to one of the most prominent prelatures in the United States, accompanied by honors, accolades, garlands, ecclesial influence . . . and (some of) his fellow bishops’ (highly probable) knowledge of his treachery.

Heretofore the scandals have been mostly about the abuses of rank-and-file priests and the failure of bishops to address them. Now, it is bishops’ knowledge of other bishops’ misdeeds and crimes that is at stake. The U.S. Church’s credibility is at a new low and the prospect of continued departures from the pews at a new high.

I count myself among those who hold that nothing less than an independent investigation led by laity can uncover who knew what and failed to act and begin to restore the Church’s credibility.

Over the past two decades that these events have taken place, though, I have often asked myself why the Church’s dominant language and response to the scandals has been an essentially secular one — that of law courts, bureaucratic procedure, and corporate deflection. Admittedly, enormous law suits force such behavior. There is no question, too, that safeguards of a bureaucratic nature are indispensable for protecting would be victims.

Still, I have often sensed that the Gospel has been left to the sidelines. If the Church is the Body of Christ, then why doesn’t it be what it is and face its sin and woundedness according to the logic of its founding, which was, after all, a decisive and thorough defeat of sin, an episode of cosmic restoration and healing, an act of solidarity with victims, an invitation to repentance, and an act of forgiveness?

The meaning of this comprehensive act of reconciliation for the crisis at hand would take some thinking through. I was heartened, though, to see a piece today along these lines written by Dawn Eden Goldstein, a widely read Catholic blogger who has written extensively on facing past wounds, including those arising from sexual abuse, through mercy and healing. She writes:

Given that the bishops form a college in continuation of the Apostles’ own, they need to take the initiative in summoning themselves, as a body, to public acts of penance for (1) the sins of bishops and all clerics, and (2) those who enabled or failed to act against such wrongdoers.

She elaborates:

The US bishops have the responsibility to show all the members of the Body of Christ what true contrition and reparation looks like. If the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) announced it was summoning every one of its members to a public act of personal and collegial reparation, the bishops would thereby show they understand that (1) the sins of shepherds have a particularly destructive impact upon the entire Church and (2) if even one bishop is guilty, the entire college owes reparation to God, that He may heal the wound their brother inflicted upon His holy people.

The idea had been floated but not followed through, she explains, quoting ArcU blogger Michael Griffin:

Collegial penance is not a novel idea. In April 2002, as the abuse crisis was unfolding, Pope John Paul II called all US cardinals to Rome for a private meeting. Afterwards, the Vatican issued a communiqué proposing, among other things, that “it would be fitting for the Bishops of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to ask the faithful to join them in observing a national day of prayer and penance, in reparation for the offences perpetrated and in prayer to God for the conversion of sinners and the reconciliation of victims.”

Theologian Michael Griffin describes in his 2016 book The Politics of Penance the disappointing response of the bishops to the Pope’s recommendation. The USCCB agreed only to instruct bishops to fast and do private penance on August 14 2002. Although they included the option for local dioceses to offer public acts of penance on that day, just a small handful of bishops followed through.

In September 2016, Pope Francis called upon every episcopal conference worldwide to designate a Day of Prayer for abuse victims. This time, the USCCB did at least respond with a public act – a Mass at the beginning of its 2017 spring meeting in Indianapolis with two hundred bishops in attendance. Once again, however, the bishops did not bind themselves to performing public penitential observances in their own dioceses; such acts were recommended but remained only optional.

She goes on to describe how repentance so far has fallen short and how it can be improved — well worth reading.

Following Goldstein’s lead, we might do more to think through what other dimensions of evangelical reconciliation have to offer. Whereas repentance has been discussed but scantly followed through, another practice that Jesus taught clearly — forgiveness — has been seldom mentioned at all. What might it mean? It’s the subject of a future post.