Author: Daniel Philpott

This coming Thursday, February 25th, I will be leading a conference call on the persecution of Christians, among other things engaging the findings of Under Caesar’s Sword: Christian Response to Persecution, a joint research project conducted by the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame and the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, Georgetown University.

For information and to sign up, see here.

ArcU contributor Rob Joustra has written a heavily ArcU-infused review of Yale theologian Miroslav Volf’s latest book, Flourishing: Why We Need Religion In a Globalized World.  Well worth reading

Following up on my last post on the Pope Francis-Patriarch Kirill meeting, I see that several of my favorite commentators are continuing to focus on the realpolitik behind the meeting.  See here, here and here.  One commentator sees the meeting as emblematic of a turn towards ostpolitik on the part of Pope Francis who, stressing “reality over ideas,” aims to establish relationships with leaders in places like Russia, Cuba, and China, even if this means compromising religious freedom and full human rights.

They focus especially on the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, which has long been loyal to the Vatican but is beleaguered by the Russian Orthodox Church next door, and on Ukraine in general, which has been subject to the aggression of Russia under Vladimir Putin.  They focus, too, on the many political advantages that Putin and Kirill gained from the meeting while Pope Francis has stressed good will, exclaiming “finally!  We are brothers!” upon meeting Kirill.

These worries are not without foundation.  The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church has been a brave voice for religious freedom, the freedom of Ukraine, and democratization, having played a pivotal role in the Maidan Square democracy protests of 2014.  Bishop Borys Gudziak, who spoke movingly of the experience of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church under communism and at Maidan at the Under Caesar’s Sword conference in Rome in December (see this previous post), just posted a beautiful piece at First Things just before the pope-patriarch meeting offering an appraisal of the meeting that was both gracious and cautious.

In the long-term, however, there is cause for optimism even with respect to these realpolitik concerns.  Meeting and signing a statement has implications for all parties who participate.  In 1975, the Soviets and Eastern European Communist regimes signed the Helsinki Accords, an agreement of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe declaring their commitment to human rights.  Realist skeptics dismiss such an agreement as worthless: law and institutions make little difference in the world of superpower relations.  But human rights dissidents in Eastern Europe did not think it worthless.  They took courage and gained psychological support from the accords and used it to make appeals to their governments: you committed to these ideals, now live up to them.  The dissidents were empowered, as was their determination to oppose their Communist regimes.  At the time, few people outside of these countries knew of this effect.  After the Communist regimes fell in 1989, though, the story became known.  It is told by political scientist Daniel Thomas in his book, The Helsinki Effect.

Might a similar dynamic take place, mutatis mutandis, with respect to the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and perhaps with respect to Kirill’s yielding relationship to Putin?  There is much in the declaration to appeal to, including its strong words about religious freedom, its acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, however inadequate this acknowledgment might have been, and its claim to “deplore the hostilities in Ukraine,” again an inadequate description of what was surely “aggression.”  Defenders of Ukraine and its church — and hopefully Pope Francis himself — though, can now present these statements back to Kirill and even to Putin on behalf of these worthy causes in the context of the new relationship that has been forged.  Results will not be immediate, but Helsinki showed that declarations are not without consequence.

 

 

 

 

 

Yesterday, the pope met with the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church for the first time. Christians everywhere ought to celebrate the meeting. Jesus prayed “that they may be one,” as recorded in the Gospel of John, Chapter 17, and this is a momentous stride towards unity. Although the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church have been meeting and working towards reconciliation since the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), the meeting between the pope and the patriarch of the Orthodox Church’s largest autonomous church, sometimes called “The Third Rome,” has been elusive. Pope John Paul II had yearned for such a meeting, believing it to be the decisive move in realizing his dream of full unity between the churches, the healing of the rupture of 1054.  But he died without achieving it.

Commentators have raised their antennae for Machiavellianism, noticing motives for the meeting baser than sublime unity.  Most of the theories focus on Kirill.  Kirill wants to raise his stock in the Orthodox Church, especially in advance of a historical upcoming meeting of the Church’s patriarchs.  The leader of a Church that has long been intertwined with the power of the Russian state, Kirill may be boosting the prestige of Vladimir Putin, who, after all, portrays himself as the defender of Christians in the Middle East, where is intervening militarily and indiscriminately.  Kirill may also be providing cover for Putin’s designs in the Ukraine. Pope Francis is being taken for a ride. And so on.

In church politics, as in secular politics, major events are rarely free from the sorts of dynamics picked up by antennae attuned to power and prestige. Such dynamics, though, do not rob this event of its significance for the unity of the Christian church. The declaration that the pope and the patriarch jointly signed reveals this stride towards unity to be broad and deep, built around some of the most important purposes and struggles of the Christian church in today’s world. There is nothing anodyne or cosmetic about it.

Consider some of the declaration’s points:

• Early in the document, the leaders note the wounds that have divided the churches for centuries, declare that “we are pained by the loss of unity,” and “call for the re-establishment of this unity.” Their goal is full reconciliation in the Christian church.

• The first of the many issues of justice they cover is the persecution of Christians in the Middle East and North Africa, where Christians have it worse than virtually anywhere else (except perhaps North Korea).  They devote eight paragraphs to the issue in a document of thirty paragraphs. Most of these Christians are members of a Catholic or Orthodox church of some variety.  They also “bow before the martyrdom” of Christians losing their lives for their faith, thus invoking what Pope Francis has called “the ecumenism of blood,” arguably the most powerful force for bringing divided churches together.  Having the two leaders speak in unity on behalf of these beleaguered Christians can only help their cause.

• The two leaders speak more broadly about the suffering of all of the victims who have died or been displaced in the conflicts in Syria and Iraq and call for humanitarian aid.

• Two paragraphs focus on religious freedom around the world. The leaders give thanks for the rise in the freedom of churches in the aftermath of decades of “militant atheism” in Russia and Eastern Europe. Indeed, the persecution of the Orthodox Church under Soviet communism in the 1920s and 1930s was one of the worst attacks on any Christian church at any time. The document rightly notes the “situation in many countries in which Christians are increasingly confronted by restrictions to religious freedom, to the right to witness to one’s convictions and to live in conformity with them. In particular, we observe that the transformation of some countries into secularized societies, estranged from all reference to God and to His truth, constitutes a grave threat to religious freedom.”

• Evincing holism, the leaders call attention to global poverty, migration, environmental degradation, refugees, and global inequality and devote an entire paragraph to the “inalienable right to life” and the millions who are “denied the right to be born in the world.” In Russia, abortion rates are at or close to the highest in the world, one of the few places where more babies are aborted than are born.

• Two paragraphs are devoted to family and marriage.

• The declaration also speaks honestly of matters that divide the two churches. It calls Christians to refrain from stealing sheep from other churches. In concrete terms, it addresses the issue of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, perhaps the most difficult point of division over the past few centuries. The Orthodox Church protests that this church broke from the Patriarch of Constantinople and entered into full communion with the pope in the Union of Brest in 1595. The declaration affirms that this “uniate” method of establishing unity, involving a community leaving its church to join another, is not the way to establish unity but that nevertheless communities that were established in this way have the right to exist and to be respected.

• My favorite paragraph was this one, addressed to youth:

“God loves each of you and expects you to be His disciples and apostles. Be the light of the world so that those around you may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father (cf. Mt 5:14, 16). Raise your children in the Christian faith, transmitting to them the pearl of great price that is the faith (cf. Mt 13:46) you have received from your parents and forbears. Remember that “you have been purchased at a great price” (1 Cor 6:20), at the cost of the death on the cross of the Man–God Jesus Christ.”

Not only have the pope and the patriarch conducted a historical meeting but also they have set forth a substantive foundation for unity and reconciliation – one that will outlast the political motives of the day. It is a meeting that is likely to be repeated and a foundation that is likely to be deepened.

Correction recorded February 15, 2016: A reader wrote to me to report that my description of Russia’s abortion rates is outdated.  It describes the situation during the 1990s and the first half of the 2000s, when abortions indeed exceeded live births.  Since that time, though, rates have gone down.  The 2014 report of the Russian Statistical Agency claims that in 2013, 53.7 abortions took place per live birth, whereas in 2005, the number was 117.4 abortions per 100 live births.  Many thanks to this reader for this correction.  

 

Here at ArcU we’ve been commenting on France’s laïcité.  The Wall Street Journal‘s Bill McGurn ran an an op-ed piece last week offering a sharp critique of laïcité and its consequences for minorities.  He shows that the principle is having exactly the opposite effect of an inclusive, liberal society.  A better secularism is the United States’s, which is grounded in transcendently based rights.  He cites another piece along the same lines and worth reading by Elizabeth Winkler in The New Republic,  “Is It Time For France to Abandon Laïcité?”

A slightly late post for Martin Luther King Day, when it is worth recalling MLK’s argument from the Letter from Birmingham Jail when he quotes Catholic saints Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to the make the case that an unjust law is not a law at all.  It’s worth rereading every year.  Remember that he is writing to other Christian clergy who have criticized him for being too confrontational.

YOU express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an “I – it”relationship for the “I – thou” relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.
Let us turn to a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a majority inflicts on a minority that is not binding on itself. This is difference made legal. On the other hand, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow, and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal.
Let me give another explanation. An unjust law is a code inflicted upon a minority which that minority had no part in enacting or creating because it did not have the unhampered right to vote. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up the segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout the state of Alabama all types of conniving methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties without a single Negro registered to vote, despite the fact that the Negroes constitute a majority of the population. Can any law set up in such a state be considered democratically
structured?
These are just a few examples of unjust and just laws. There are some instances when a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I was arrested Friday on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong with an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade, but when the ordinance is used to preserve segregation and to deny citizens the First Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and peaceful protest, then it becomes unjust.
Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was seen sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar because a higher moral law was involved. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks before submitting to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience.
We can never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. But I am sure that if I had lived in Germany during that time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers even though it was illegal. If I lived in a Communist country today where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I believe I would openly advocate disobeying these anti-religious laws.

At the conference in Rome last month, “Under Caesar’s Sword: Christians in Response to Persecution,” (see recent post)  one of the most riveting speakers was Paul Bhatti of Pakistan, brother of Shahbaz Bhatti, Pakistan’s first Federal Minister of Minority Affairs, a Christian, who was slain by extremist Islamic militants on March 2, 2011.  Now, Paul Bhatti is in the news for opposing Pakistan’s blasphemy law in the aftermath of three death sentences being handed down against people accused of defaming the Prophet Muhammad.  See the story here.  Note how Bhatti speaks of religious freedom in the language of peacebuilding and reconciliation.

 

The recent diplomatic row between Saudi Arabia and Iran over the Saudi government’s execution of a Shia cleric both exemplifies and deepens the division between Shias and Sunnis within Islam.  Saudi Arabia and Iran are respectively the Sunni and Shia superpowers within Islam and they are in a Cold War.  Longtime observer of Islam Robin Wright details the conflict in a piece worth reading in The New Yorker.

These sentences from the final paragraph are stark:

The current split mirrors a fundamental ideological and strategic division across the Middle East that is now at least as significant as the Arab-Israeli divide, which defined Mideast conflicts over the past six decades. The escalating sectarian rift in recent years is also one of the deepest fractures since the original schism between Sunnis and Shiites, nearly fourteen centuries ago, shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad.

Last week, December 10-12, an international conference, “Under Caesar’s Sword: Christians in Response to Persecution,” took place in Rome, hosted by the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the University of Notre Dame and the Religious Freedom Project at Georgetown University. The conference was designed to learn how Christian communities around the world respond to persecution and to increase solidarity with them. It introduced the results of the world’s first systematic global investigation into the responses of Christian communities to the violation of their religious freedom. The conference was not just the reports of scholars, though, but also featured the testimonies from global church leaders as well as activists who have experienced persecution directly. A major theme was also recognizing the 50^th anniversary of Dignitatis Humanae, the Second Vatican Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. Here can be found the agenda, speakers, background information, and the like.

Here are some of the highlights of the conference:

** On the opening day, we heard from two patriarchs from the part of the world where the persecution of Christians is most in the headlines — Iraq and Syria.  Patriarch Louis Raphael Sako of the Chaldean Catholic Church in Iraq and Patriarch Youssef Younan of the Syriac Catholic Church both spoke emotionally about the plight of Christians in their region.  Patriarch Sako called for greater military intervention from the West in order to defeat the Islamic State.  Both lamented the exodus of communities that date back to the earliest times of Christianity and hoped that Christians would stay even while respecting the choice of people to leave or stay.

** What I think many of the participants, including myself, did not expect, were moving and inspiring testimonies from people who have suffered persecution at the grassroots.  There was Fr. Bernard Kinvi of the Central African Republic, who sheltered Muslims during his country’s war between Christians and Muslims. There was Helen Berhane, a gospel singer from Eritrea who spent over two years living in a shipping container because she would not renounce her faith. At the end of her panel she offered a song that she had composed while in captivity. Bishop Borys Gudziak of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church recounted his church’s long history of suffering underground under Soviet Communism and its heroic role more recently in the protests at Maidan Square in Kiev. Pakistan’s Paul Bhatti, a Catholic, spoke of his journey towards forgiveness and his decision to stay with the people of Pakistan after the assassination there of his brother, Shabhaz Bhatti, who had dedicated his life to protecting religious minorities in Pakistan.

** An extraordinary array of people attended the conference, portending the development of an integrated movement for religious freedom on behalf of persecuted Christians.  There were activist ngos like Aid to the Church in Need, Open Doors, Christian Solidarity Worldwide, and Oasis International; scholars; diplomats and ambassadors; and clerics and laypeople from numerous Christian churches around the world.  In terms of numbers, my own (rough) estimate is that about 300 were in attendance at the opening session and then around 150-250 over the remaining two days.

** The conference received impressive media attention. In attendance were journalists from The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, National Public Radio, the Osservatore Romano, The Boston Globe, Commonweal, Ave Maria Radio, and numerous other media outlets. See, for instance, this piece by Ines San Martin at Crux.  Al Kresta of Ave Maria Radio, host of “Al Kresta in the Afternoon,” interviewed numerous speakers and attendees and has decided to make these interviews a major theme of his show. This very week, I have been gratified to hear his interviews broadcast, including one with Joshua Landis of the University of Oklahoma, the Iraq and Syria expert among our scholars. Kresta’s show is syndicated among over 300 stations around the U.S.

** The second night of the conference featured a beautiful and haunting ecumenical prayer service at the Church of San Bartolomeo, a shrine to contemporary martyrs established by Pope John Paul II. The church is now run by the Community of Sant’Egidio, who hosted the prayer. Cardinal John Onaiyekan of Nigeria gave the homily, reflecting on the place of martyrdom in the Christian life.

** Central to the conference was the presentation of the findings of Under Caesar’s Sword’s team of 14 scholars, who have been researching firsthand some 30 countries where Christians have suffered persecution.  Some findings:

** There are a strikingly diverse array of countries and regimes where persecution takes place.  It’s not all Islam or even close to it.  There are regnant Communist regimes like China, Vietnam, and North Korea.  There are surprising countries like India, which is pluralist and peaceful in the popular imagination.  There are democracies and semi-democracies like Pakistan, Indonesia, India, and Nigeria.  We also looked at the increasing curtailment of religious freedom in the West, where it is exaggerated to say that persecution is taking place but where serious restrictions on religious freedom are rising.

** Responses to persecution fall into three categories ranging from reactive to proactive.  First are strategies of survival, or “coping”; second are strategies of construction where churches assert their mission in ways ranging among building bridges to other faith communities to extending social services and education, but do not directly confront the regime; third are strategies of confrontation, including popular protest and underground organized opposition.

** Strikingly rare among persecuted Christian minorities are resorts to violence.  Certainly there are cases of Christian violence, usually undertaken in self-defense, as in Nigeria, Central African Republic, and Indonesia.  Sometimes it becomes disproportionate and indiscriminate, as in the Central African Republic.  There are almost no instances of the formation of terrorist cells, though, among the Christian communities we heard about.

** In some cases, responses to persecution vivify the Christian gospel in a striking way. For instance, some Christians practice forgiveness. Paul Bhatti is a prominent example.  Others are willing to accept martyrdom. Bhatti’s brother Shabhaz stands out here.

** In part, the kind of response that Christians muster to persecution depends on the degree of repression and the size of the community — common sense, right?  But that doesn’t explain everything. China scholar Fenggang Yang of Purdue University gave the example of small Protestant communities who practiced “evangelization under all circumstances” under China’s most repressive period, 1966-1979.  Today the spectacular growth of Christianity in China can be attributed to these communities.  The blood of martyrs is seed of the Church, said Tertullian.

See this excellent piece dissecting the immoral logic of Donald Trump on fighting terrorism by Keith Pavlischek.