Religious Freedom: Reality, Consequences

This week’s prayer service/vigil for Iraqi Christians, as reported by the Catholic Register, is a not so gentle reminder that dying for one’s faith is not some simply a story from history. People do it everyday.

When the Catholic Cardinals arrive in Rome this week, on the agenda for their conclave is a discussion of the threats to religious freedom. It’s been at the top of the Church’s agenda for some time now. And not just the Church’s, it is a near constant refrain for the United States State Department as well, the most recent example is this comment by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on a visit to Vietnam.

During October’s Synod on the Middle East, Benedict XVI endorsed the Bishops’ call for ““urgent and useful” dialogue between Christians and Muslims on the issue. In an area of the world where changing one’s faith can result in death, the Synod’s insistence that all be entitled to “the right to renounce a religion to adhere to a religion or to change religion; the right to be atheist and the equal treatment of religions in accordance with the UN Human Rights Charter” was more than a simple statement of principle. While Religious Freedom was far from the only topic of discussion, as America Magazine nicely sums up, other issues seemed to hinge on or flow from the question. The deep implications were also to be found in the Papal letter to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in which the Pope insisted “When the promotion of the dignity of the human person is the primary inspiration of political and social activity that is committed to search for the common good, solid and enduring foundations are created for building peace and harmony between peoples.”

And the concerns are not just abstract as evidenced by the Papal denunciation of ‘violence in the name of God’. As Austen Ivereigh nicely summarizes in the Guardian, Christians are fleeing the Middle East, a trend exacerbated by the war in Iraq and the violence directed at the Christians who remain escalating. But as this story from 2008 reminds us this is not a new problem. The bombings this month just add to the pain. Jane Arraf, in this piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, points out that identifying the underlying reasons for the bombings is one thing; dealing with the reasons is something else entirely, especially in this news story in the Guardian is correct and Christians generally are just one more piece in the so-called war on terror. As this analysis from Foreign Policy Magazines notes, some observers are wondering if we might be witnessing “The End of Christianity in the Middle East?” But Chris Phillips in the Guardian takes another tack entirely and asks if this talk about Al Queda targeting Christians or wondering about the end of Mid-East Christianity is simply one more phase in the “Clash of Civilisation” narrative. On the other hand, Michael Grubb writing in the Jerusalem Post suggests that the situation is even more intensely complicated, arguing that in fact Christians, at least in Iraq, were safer under Saddam Hussein than they are now.