Category: General

The enthusiasm for Pope John Paul II that I have expressed in the last two blog posts is apparently not shared by a French court, which has ordered the town of Ploëmel, France to take down its statue of John Paul II under France’s 1905 law establishing laïcité.  The statue quotes the former pope’s motto, “Be not afraid.”  The court, it seems, would have the good citizens of Ploëmel be afraid — of its jurisdiction.

More on mercy in politics emerges from an international seminar that I attended in Brussels today, “The Treasure of Solidarity: Lessons for Europe.” Sponsored by the Centre for the Thought of John Paul II in Warsaw, the seminar assembled a fascinating group of mostly Polish politicians and intellectuals, many of whom were active in the Solidarity movement of the 1970s and 1980s that overthrew Poland’s Communist government in 1989, leading, in turn, to the end of the Soviet empire and to the end of the Cold War.

Reflecting back on Solidarity, they identified several extraordinary features. First, it brought together in a sense of community sectors of society who would not otherwise be inclined to associate with one another – workers, managers, farmers, and intellectuals. Second, it was arguably the first truly working class movement to overthrow a government – ironic, given the Communist regime’s claim to represent the working class. Third, it was a rare revolution in that it succeeded without collapsing into revenge or war. Fourth, relatedly, it was non-violent. Fifth, it was a Christian revolution, undergirded by Catholic thought and the leadership of John Paul II.

There was also a general consensus that Solidarity was quickly forgotten about soon after Communism was defeated. Speakers felt that Poland has descended into deep domestic divisions; it is now the most divided country in Europe, according to one panelist.

These cleavages include a division over the Communist past. Conservatives believe that the Roundtable negotiations of 1989 proceeded too quickly, involved too hasty a compromise with the Communist government, and that too little has been done to bring accountability and the telling of truth about the Communist period. Those on the left demur, calling for a drawing of a line across the past in order that the nation may move on with its future. Another source of intense controversy is over the Smolensk air crash that killed President Lech Kaczynski and other top officials on April 10, 2010, with one side believing it was an accident and the other side that it was a conspiracy. Then, there are culture wars over life and marriage, divisions over economic policy, and a general sense that the spiritual depth of the Solidarity years has been replaced by materialism and technocracy.

Many speakers thought that Solidarity’s stress on reconciliation, faith, and forgiveness could be retrieved and brought to bear on Poland’s cleavages as well as on those of other countries and relationships between countries – Poland and Ukraine, for instance.

Pope Francis has issued a “Bull of Indiction” declaring the coming year, beginning December 8, 2015, a Year of Mercy.

Does mercy have meaning for global politics? There is a long tradition, including thinkers as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and John Rawls, holding that the first virtue of the political order is justice. But justice, while crucial, is “not enough,” insists Pope Francis. Alone, it descends into legalism, resulting in its own destruction. Complementary to justice and critically necessary to politics is mercy.

Pope Francis is not the first pope to espouse mercy, despite the fact that he is frequently celebrated for his novelty. Pope John Paul II made mercy a major theme of his pontificate and argued in his second encyclical of 1980, Dives in Misericordia (“Rich in Mercy”), that mercy could be a political virtue. Mercy, he argued, is the will to restore all that is broken in human affairs.  We might see mercy, then, in policies aimed at directly alleviating suffering — for instance, humanitarian relief.  Most distinctively, though, John Paul II thought that mercy could be manifested through forgiveness.

Forgiveness in politics? The very phrase rings oxymoronic. But John Paul II thought the idea held promise and argued as much not only in Dives in Misericordia but also in two subsequent Messages for the World Day of Peace, one in 1997 and one in 2002, the latter in the wake of the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Is there any evidence that forgiveness is actually practiced in politics? In the past generation, forgiveness has entered global politics in the context of a wave of tens of countries facing past crimes of dictatorship, genocide, and civil war. A discourse, and substantial evidence for the practice, of forgiveness can be found in countries ranging from South Africa to Uganda, Sierra Leone, Guatemala, and Chile. Forgiveness is often associated with religion and stands in contrast with the global practice of “transitional justice” and its stress on law, rights, and especially, judicial prosecution.

Mostly, forgiveness is practiced by individual victims, as I have documented through a recent study of victims of armed violence in Uganda, conducted in partnership with the Refugee Law Project (mentioned in this previous post). Far more rarely is it practiced by leaders, but this is not unheard of.  An outstanding example is Nelson Mandela, who forgave apartheid leaders after being released from his prison sentence of 26 years and set an example that many other South Africans followed.

Forgiveness has also taken place in the high politics of international relations. The decision in 1950 of France, Italy, and other western European states to incorporate Germany into the embryonic form of what is now the European Union can be seen as an act of forgiveness.  A recent book by political scientists Brent Nelsen and James Guth documents that Christian notions of forgiveness were much in the mind of the statesmen, mostly of Christian Democratic parties, who supported federation most strongly and helps to explain why they took a path quite different from the punitive approach towards Germany that Europe took after World War I.

Forgiveness may be rare in politics but it is not absent and has become more common in the past generation. It thus depicts one response in the political realm to Pope Francis’ call for mercy.

This past Sunday, Pope Francis spoke of the Armenian genocide of 1915-1916.  His use of the g-word drew the ire of Turkey, which officially denies that genocide took place and thus withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican in protest. Pope Francis showed bravery in speaking up in this way.  So did the pope at the time of the killings, Benedict XV.  The fascinating story is told here in an interview with German historian Dr. Michael Hesemann that just appeared in Aleteia.

In a new book entitled, The Armenian Genocide [Völkermord an den Armeniern], Hesemann reveals for the first time the content of never-before-published documents on “the greatest crime of World War I,” and how Pope Benedict XV and Vatican diplomacy tried to stop the deportations of the Armenians into the Syrian desert, save the victims and prevent the massacre of an entire people.

In this interview, Hesemann shares his findings, which include evidence of Masonic involvement, and expresses both his admiration for Pope Francis for drawing attention to the genocide of Christians and ethnic minorities, and his disappointment over the absence of the German Ambassador to the Holy See at Sunday’s commemorative Mass.

A writer who travels regularly to Cuba for humanitarian work reports on a growing sense of unrest in Cuba.  This is taking place while religion grows even as it still faces repression.   This paragraph captures the author’s spirit well:

While Evangelical and some Catholic churches are seeing new growth, Cuban society is disintegrating. Cities are seeing a growth of gangs and chemical addictions. Cuba has the highest rate of divorce in Latin America, and grinding poverty drives thousands of young women into prostitution. A female physician who doubles as a Pentecostal pastor told me that the biggest problem facing Cuba is philosophical—nihilism and relativism, which produce a sense of hopelessness. The result is a birthrate under replacement level. With fewer babies being born, and one of the highest abortion rates in Latin America, Cuba’s population of 11 million is declining.

What follows is an insightful guest post by Dennis Hoover, who is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Institute for Global Engagement, an innovative think-tank that promotes religious freedom through a methodology of friendship and engagement.  Dennis is also executive director of the Center on Faith & International Affairs (CFIA) and edits CFIA’s journal, The Review of Faith & International Affairs, a lively journal that serves as a forum for thought and practical ideas in religious and international affairs.

America has an Islam crisis which is centered, in a very basic way, on how to even talk about it. Nowhere was that more clear than in the controversy surrounding last month’s “White House Summit to Counter Violent Extremism.” In the weeks leading up to the Summit, the Administration was subjected to withering criticism—mostly from the right, but also from some formidable voices on the left—for refusing to describe as “Islamic” any terrorism committed by self-declared Muslims. Although this rhetorical posture has a long and bi-partisan history, in the current context patience is thin for anything that smacks of political correctness.

Enter the new “Office of Religion and Global Affairs” at the State Department, led by the widely respected Shaun Casey. Can Mr. Casey help rescue the debate? The daunting challenge will be to find the sweet spot of constructive candor.

The Office of Religion and Global Affairs is in some ways a continuation of the State Department’s prior Office of Faith-based Community Initiatives. But more than the name has changed. Several religion-related entities are now consolidated under the Office of Religion and Global Affairs: the Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the Special Representative to Muslim Communities, and the Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism.

Plenty are calling the changes welcome news. Institutional capacity and strategic coherence are improved, not to mention branding clarity (“faith-based” has always been a clunky, if not constitutionally suspect, modifier to use in a governmental context). However, having raised the profile of religious engagement in U.S. foreign policy, the bar is now also raised in terms of the rhetoric employed in religion-focused diplomacy—most especially in engagement of Muslim leaders, organizations, and movements.

What is or isn’t said about Islam is going to be minutely scrutinized (not least by the Obama Administration’s many critics in the Fox News echo chamber). Tough topics will need to be raised. Treading too lightly risks wasting everyone’s time on polite inter-faith platitudes of peace. Yet an overabundance of name-shame-blame “candor” about Islam can be not only time-wasting but acutely counterproductive—it unnecessarily confers religious legitimacy on violent extremists, and alienates Muslim allies in the war against them.

And the office will need to say something: Two of the three envoys now reporting to Casey are explicitly about engaging Muslim actors, and the third is focused on combating Anti-Semitism, which of course involves confronting Muslim Anti-Semitism alongside all the other growing forms of Anti-Semitism (many of them Christian).

What to say? And how to say it? There are no easy answers, but a helpful point of rhetorical reference is President Obama’s own speech at the White House Summit to Counter Violent Extremism. Although most of the news media missed it completely, Obama’s oratory did in fact reach a new level of constructive candor:

Al Qaeda and ISIL do draw, selectively, from the Islamic texts. They do depend upon the misperception around the world that they speak in some fashion for people of the Muslim faith, that Islam is somehow inherently violent, that there is some sort of clash of civilizations. … [T]here’s a strain of thought that doesn’t embrace ISIL’s tactics, doesn’t embrace violence, but does buy into the notion that the Muslim world has suffered historical grievances—sometimes that’s accurate—does buy into the belief that so many of the ills in the Middle East flow from a history of colonialism or conspiracy; does buy into the idea that Islam is incompatible with modernity or tolerance, or that it’s been polluted by Western values. … So just as leaders like myself reject the notion that terrorists like ISIL genuinely represent Islam, Muslim leaders need to do more to discredit the notion that our nations are determined to suppress Islam, that there’s an inherent clash in civilizations.

Here’s hoping the newly reconfigured and renamed Office of Religion and Global Affairs will be similarly deft in its diplomatic truth-telling in the challenging years ahead.

An excellent piece in Foreign Policy — significantly, a highly mainstream forum — documents the strange silence in the U.S. about violence towards and displacement of Christians in the Middle East.

Here is a preview:

Last August, President Barack Obama signed off on legislation creating a special envoy charged with aiding the ancient Christian communities and other beleaguered religious minorities being targeted by the Islamic State.

The bill was a modest one — the new position was given a budget of just $1 million — and the White House quietly announced the signing in a late-afternoon press release that lumped it in with an array of other low profile legislation. Neither Obama nor any prominent lawmakers made any explicit public reference to the bill.

Seven months later, the position remains unfilled — a small but concrete example of Washington’s passivity in the face of an ongoing wave of atrocities against the Assyrian, Chaldean, and other Christian communities of Iraq and Syria. The Islamic State has razed centuries-old churches and monasteries, beheaded and crucified Christians, and mounted a concerted campaign to drive Christians out of cities and towns they’ve lived in for thousands of years. The Iraqi city of Mosul had a Christian population of 35,000 when U.S. forces invaded the country in 2003; today, with the city in the hands of the Islamic State, the vast majority of them have fled.

Every holiday season, politicians in America take to the airwaves to rail against a so-called “war on Christmas” or “war on Easter,” pointing to things like major retailers wishing shoppers generic “happy holidays.” But on the subject of the Middle East, where an actual war on Christians is in full swing, those same voices are silent. A push to use American aircraft to shield the areas of Iraq where Christians have fled has gone nowhere. Legislation that would fast-track visa applications from Christians looking to leave for the United States never even came up for a vote. The White House, meanwhile, won’t say if or when it will fill the special envoy position.

“It’s been difficult to get the attention of the previous administration, or the current one, when it comes to the urgent need to act,” said Rep. Anna Eshoo, the California Democrat who drafted the visa legislation. “The classic definition of genocide is the complete annihilation of a group of people. The Islamic State is well on its way. It keeps me up at night.”

Several of our posts have dealt with the hot question of how deeply rooted violent jihadism is in Islam.   An excellent recent piece in The Economist looks at debates on the question that are now unfolding within Islam itself.   It is well worth reading.

This past Thursday night, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, President of the University of Notre Dame for 35 years, passed away.  Obituaries in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and other prominent venues have recounted his legendary accomplishments and stories associated with him.

Hesburgh, of course, is the priest to the left of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the picture at the top of this page, one that was taken in Chicago in 1964. Appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights by President Eisenhower in 1957, taking on the chair of the commission in 1969, Hesburgh was far more than a figurehead in the civil rights movement.  He traveled the country hearing of and writing reports on African-Americans who lacked access to voting, housing, jobs, education, opportunity, and justice.  When the commission was hobbled by partisan wrangling in its early years, he brought the members to a Notre Dame retreat at Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin for a day of fishing and eating steaks.  The agreements achieved there paved the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1964.

In 1971, Hesburgh tussled with President Nixon over Nixon’s opposition to school busing.  Shortly after Nixon’s re-election in 1972, he asked Hesburgh to resign and Hesburgh accepted.

Hesburgh sought to continue his civil rights legacy by founding the Center for Civil and Human Rights in 1973.  Today, as a result of Hesburgh’s own influence, the Center stresses human rights, which it promotes around the globe.  But we never forget what Hesburgh did for America’s historic civil rights struggle.  A large scale version of the picture of Hesburgh marching with King hangs in our lounge.

It was perhaps the greatest episode of Hesburgh’s leadership as President of Notre Dame.  First, he was motivated directly by the commitment to social justice that he derived from being a priest.  He said that “priest” would be the one word that he would want on his tombstone.  Second, it was leadership that made a great difference in the lives of Americans and that strengthened the country’s founding ideals.  Third, it was a sign of his national reputation that his leadership had already garnered that he was appointed to the Civil Rights Commission after only five years into his tenure as university president.

May this legendary American, and even more so, this extraordinary priest, rest in God’s eternal peace.