An Eastern Catholic who has studied at Ottawa’s Sheptytsky Institute for Eastern Christian Studies, Religious Freedom Ambassador Andrew Bennett serves as a cantor and sub-deacon in Ukrainian Catholic divine liturgies in the Ottawa area.
Bennett, who was named to head the Office of Religious Freedom Feb. 19, told a conference call Feb. 25 with CCN and other religious media that religious freedom is not about “theological debates.” Instead his faith “allows me to be open to those of other faiths who are also seeking God.”
With “some understanding of their beliefs and their mindset” despite differing theologies, his faith will help keep the focus on the human issue of religious freedom, he said.
“The Christian faith teaches me to see the image and likeness of God in every other human being,” he said. “That’s going to be my approach when I approach all these people of different faiths.”
He stressed religious freedom and freedom of conscience also applies to non-religious people who may live by a philosophy.
The Office of Religious Freedom is the outgrowth of Canada’s longstanding record in upholding human rights in the world, Bennett said, noting Canada was an active member in the founding of the United Nations and an early supporter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Canadian people, not only their governments, have championed human rights, and the office will “amplify” one of those rights, the right to freedom of belief and of conscience.
“It’s about human dignity,” he said. “If you can’t be free to believe, free to understand the world in a particular way,” whether through a religion or a particular philosophy, “it’s hard to accede to other rights.” Religious freedom is “fundamentally a human rights issue,” about “human dignity,” he said.
The office has been set up because “religious persecution has accelerated in various parts of the world” in recent years.
“For those who do not have a voice we can hopefully be that voice in the world,” he said.
While Bennett will promote awareness of religious persecution, he will not be entering into domestic debates such as that surrounding Quebec’s mandatory Ethics and Religious Culture program that is being forced even on private Catholic schools, or Ontario’s Bill 13 that will force Catholic schools to allow gaystraight alliances.
“My focus is on foreign policy, not domestic,” said Bennett.
Religious freedom is “a major priority for the government” and the religious freedom office will build on and support initiatives that have already been made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.
The focus will be on the persecution of individuals and individual human rights, though Bennett noted religious persecution can take on different forms, from the blocking of building permits, to enforced forms of education, to blasphemy laws that prohibit criticism of the state-sponsored religion, to apostasy laws that forbid one to leave a religion.
In the next weeks, Bennett will be meeting with “various stakeholder communities in Canada,” with his counterparts in the United States and Britain and with United Nations’ officials concerned with this file. He hopes that Canada and her allies can speak with one voice on this issue. He will also be working closely with colleagues in Foreign Affairs, CIDA and Citizenship and Immigration.
“I’ll be travelling a fair bit to countries where there is a lack of freedom of religion, a lack of freedom of conscience, meeting with groups that are experiencing persecution. I expect to be fairly busy,” he said.
Bennett does not foresee the pursuit of religious freedom conflicting with other government objectives such as trade with China, for example. Whether with China, Iran or Pakistan, “we’ll be consistent with what the government has been saying about religious freedom.”
On trade, Bennett said the Prime Minister and the foreign affairs minister always “emphasized human rights issues.”
Advocacy and raising awareness of the plight of persecuted groups abroad will form part of his mandate. His office will from time to time highlight individual cases as the government did with the assassination of Pakistani minorities minister Shahbaz Bhatti and some victims of that country’s blasphemy laws, he said.