arcoftheuniverse

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has come out with a new video on religious freedom.  It stars Tom Farr, Director of the Religious Freedom Program at the Berkley Center at Georgetown, a partner in the Under Caesar’s Sword project with Notre Dame, as well as my colleague here at Notre Dame, Rick Garnett of the Law School.  It is short, sharply made, and worth watching.

I am pleased to share this video report of the conference Under Caesar’s Sword: Christian Response to Persecution.  It’s 12 minutes and is on Vimeo.  I present it on behalf of the conference’s two hosts, 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.

Today Secretary of State John Kerry designated ISIS’s violence against Christians, Yazidis, and Shia Muslims as genocide.  Nina Shea of the Hudson Institute captures it well:

Secretary of State John Kerry officially recognized that ISIS is waging genocide against Christians, Yazidis, and Shiites in the areas under its control. This is only the second time the U.S. government has condemned an ongoing genocide: In 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell designated what was going in Darfur as genocide. And today’s declaration, as I wrote yesterday, almost didn’t happen — owing to resistance from some quarters. Kerry’s announcement was a surprise, one that defied deliberately lowered expectations. There was a State Department notice just yesterday that any such designation required longer deliberation and wouldn’t be made in time to meet the March 17 congressionally mandated deadline. But at 9 a.m. Eastern, Secretary of State Kerry took to the podium and asserted: “In my judgment, Daesh is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control, including Yazidis, Christians, and Shia Muslims. Daesh is genocidal by self-proclamation, by ideology, and by actions — in what it says, what it believes, and what it does.” This official American genocide designation is a critically important step. Genocide is internationally recognized as the most heinous human-rights offense. Legally, it is known as the “crime of crimes.” And while the Genocide Convention does not prescribe specific action to “prevent and protect” against genocide, the conscience does. RELATED: Witnessing the Genocide in Iraq This designation will not only lift the morale of these shattered religious groups, it also has the potential of serving justice through the prosecution of those who aid and abet ISIS as fighters, cyber recruiters, financiers, arms suppliers, and artifact smugglers.

Other good pieces on why the designation is rightly deserved have come out in the past couple of days by Anne Corkery and Kirsten Powers.

Following up on my last post on Donald Trump’s dictatorial inclination, I appreciated The Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank’s piece voicing the same theme.  I was also happy to see a common letter signed by prominent Catholics urging Catholics not to vote for Trump, citing his promises to carry our torture and reprisals against terrorists’ families.  But a poll of Michigan voters, where primaries are being held today, shows Catholic Republicans favoring Trump disproportionately.  Let’s hope they will read the letter and listen to their church.

Of all Donald Trump’s calculated braggadocio, the part that most augurs his presidential lawlessness are his words on torture, which he restated starkly in last night’s Republican debate in Detroit. When asked to comment on CIA Director Michael Hayden’s averral that members of the military could defy orders asking them to commit unlawful acts like killing civilians and torture, Trump had this to say:

[Waterboarding is] fine, and if we want to go stronger, I’d go stronger too. Because frankly, that’s the way I feel. Can you imagine these people, these animals, over in the Middle East that chop off heads, sitting around talking and seeing that we’re having a hard problem with waterboarding? We should go for waterboarding and we should go tougher than waterboarding.

He insisted that members of the military would have to obey his orders as president and that he also supported killing members of terrorists’ families.

Torture blatantly contradicts both the domestic law and the international treaty commitments of the United States. While waterboarding was used during the administration of President George W. Bush, it elicited great controversy and was argued widely to constitute torture. That Trump would “go stronger” shows that he is perfectly willing to engage in methods that unambiguously constitute torture and that he has little regard for the law.

Today, he clarified that he would obey the laws as president. But how can we trust that?  He has made so many reckless statements, performed so many reversals, and ranted so often about undertaking lawless acts that his backtracking can be regarded as little more than another ephemeral zig zag.

To break international and domestic law with abandon, to order subordinates to carry out crimes, to carry out torture and crimes of war – these are the quintessential deeds of a dictator. All those who would vote for Trump and who simultaneously exude their love for American democracy will have no excuse for not having known better should Trump be elected and disregard the law flagrantly.

Not least among the culpable are Christians who vote for Trump. He is polling strong among evangelicals regardless of the National Association of Evangelicals’ denunciation of torture as incompatible with the gospel. Likewise, the Catholic Church teaches that torture is an intrinsic evil – not to be done under any circumstances. Christians – and all people of good will – not only ought not to countenance voting for Trump but are compelled to raise their voice against him.

America magazine has just published an issue on international religious freedom — five feature pieces, all worth reading.  Two are by ArcU contributors, Mary Ann Cusimano Love and myself.  Mary Ann writes brilliantly on the responses of Catholic to persecution — echoing the theme of the Under Caesar’s Sword conference in Rome this past December, which she attended — and brings to bear her first-hand research on the plight of Iraqi Christians.  She shows how responses to persecution can be motivated by mercy and mesh with peacebuilding.

My own piece expands on an op-ed I published back in November arguing that the Catholic Church’s long historical road to religious freedom, culminating in the Declaration on Religious Liberty at Vatican II, can be a usable model for Islam to expand its religious liberty.

See the other pieces, too, by Fr. Drew Christiansen, S.J., Elias Mallon, and a jointly authored piece by Fr. Thomas J. Reese and Mary Ann Glendon.

 

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.