Category: Public square

In Truth And Tolerance: Christian Belief And World Religions Cardinal Ratzinger advanced a proposal that was rather innovative with respect to the theological hypotheses most widespread today: to abandon the idea of the inculturation of a faith that is culturally neutral in itself, which would be transplanted into different cultures regardless of their religions, and have recourse instead to the encounter of cultures (or â??interculturalityâ??), based upon two strong points.

On the one hand, the encounter of cultures is possible and is constantly taking place because, in spite of all of their differences, the men that produce them share the same nature and the same openness of reason to the truth.

On the other hand, the Christian faith, which was born from the revelation of the truth itself, produces what we might call the â??culture of faith,â?? the characteristic of which is that it does not belong to a single specific people, but can subsist in any people or cultural subject, entering into relation with the individual culture and encountering and co-penetrating it. This is concretely the unity, and also the cultural multiplicity and universality, of Christianity.

Cardinal Camillo Ruini Theology and culture: Borderlands

It is in the law that the deep-seated nature of our ‘culture-muddle’ is beginning to be manifest. The secularization thesis which denied real significance to religion, also suppressed intellectual life. By divesting religious actors and institutions of their social, economic and political influence, it at the same time, permitted anomalies to flourish in many disciplines and a down-grading – or ‘disenvisioning’ – of public life. Only now is it becoming respectable again, for example, to write about the deep interrelation of religion and law. It is only the presence of minorities with different legal systems based in holy texts that has allowed this particular debate to resurface. For such minorities the privatisation of religion is unthinkable. Yet the English legal establishment resolutely maintains the secular fallacy that it is ‘neutral on religion’.

Academics who long ago jettisoned religious categories as a means of understanding anything, will have to go fishing over the side of their boats to retrieve the unthinkable. Religion is once again become a live, as opposed to a merely textual issue – in public life, in law, in social policy, and in the academy – and any political vision for Britain, merely by the exigencies of existing race legislation, will have to take religion seriously.

If religion is once more a vital political issue – thanks in large measure to the presence of Muslims in Europe – it presents an urgent opportunity for the Church both intellectually and practically to retrieve its sense of itself and its role.

Jenny Taylor The Myth of Religious Neutrality

People who take the question of human truth, freedom and meaning seriously will never remain silent about it. They canâ??t. Theyâ??ll always act on what they believe, even at the cost of their reputations and lives. Thatâ??s the way it should be. Religious faith is always personal, but itâ??s never private. It always has social consequences, or it isnâ??t real. And this is why any definition of â??toleranceâ?? that tries to turn religious faith into a private idiosyncrasy, or a set of personal opinions that we can have at home but that we need to be quiet about in public, is doomed to fail.

The mentality of suspicion toward religion is becoming its own form of intolerance. I can see a kind of secular intolerance developing in our own country over the past two decades. The modern secular view of the world assumes that religion is superstitious and false; that it creates division and conflict; and that real freedom can only be ensured by keeping God out of the public square.

But if we remove God from public discourse, we also remove the only authority higher than political authority, and the only authority that guarantees the sanctity of the individual. If the twentieth century taught us anything, itâ??s that modern states tend to eat their own people, and the only thing stopping this is a resistance based in the human spirit but anchored in a higher authorityâ??which almost always means religious witness.

You know, thereâ??s a reason why â??spiritualityâ?? is so popular in the United States today and religion is so criticized. Private spirituality can be quite satisfying. But it can also become a designer experience. In fact, the word spirituality can mean just about anything a person wants it to mean. Itâ??s private, itâ??s personal, and, ultimately, it doesnâ??t place any more demands on the individual than what he or she wants.

Religion is a very different creature. The word religion comes from the Latin word religareâ??to bind. Religious believers bind themselves to a set of beliefs. They submit themselves to a community of faith with shared convictions and hopes. A community of believers has a common history. It also has a shared purpose and future that are much bigger than any political authority. And that has implications. Individuals pose no threat to any state. They can be lied to, bullied, arrested, or killed. But communities of faith do pose a threat. Religious witness does have power, and communities of faith are much harder to silence or kill.

Charles J. Chaput, Archbishop of Denver Religious Tolerance and the Common Good

In a striking example of self-analysis, about 500 delegates, including both practising and nominal Muslims, attended an inaugural Secular Islam Summit this month in St Petersburg, Florida.

The declaration was signed by such luminaries as Ibn Warraq, a widely published author, whoA group of prominent secular Muslims has shown the kind of unconditional willingness to engage in self-criticism which is so well-established in the non-Muslim West. The declaration points the finger at some of the pillars of institutional Islam, calling on governments to â??reject Sharia law, fatwa courts, clerical rule, and state-sanctioned religion in all their formsâ??, and to â??oppose all penalties for blasphemy and apostasy, in accordance with Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rightsâ??.

Rather than trumpeting the message of Muslim conservatives, who call for obedience to authority structures, this new group demands â??the release of Islam from its captivity to the totalitarian ambitions of power-hungry men and the rigid strictures of orthodoxyâ??.
In perhaps the most controversial statement of all, the group calls for â??a fearless examination of the origins and sources of Islamâ??. This suggests that the scriptural foundations of Islam, the Qurâ??an and Hadith, should be subject to scrutiny.

Of course, there must be some doubt about the extent to which the secular Muslims will have any impact in Muslim-majority countries. Yet theirs is a voice that is long overdue. Under the right circumstances, they might trigger a process of profound self-examination among some Muslims.

Peter G. Riddell A breath of Islamic fresh air – Secular Muslims are creating signs of hope: donâ??t knock them

The St Petersburg Declaration – There is a noble future for Islam as a personal faith, not a political doctrine

Europe’s current problems are entirely self-inflicted. This does not mean, however, that the result will be less catastrophic. By subverting the roots of its own Judeo-Christian culture – a process that started with the French Enlightenment (as opposed to the Scottish Enlightenment, which was not anti-religious) – a religious and cultural vacuum was created at the heart of European civilization. The collapse of faith in its own values has, not surprisingly, led to a demographic collapse because a civilization that no longer believes in its own future also rejects procreation. Today, a new religion and culture is supplanting the old one. There is little one can do about it, but hope for a miracle.

America’s immigration problems pale in comparison with what confronts Europe. America’s major ethnic minorities – Blacks as well as Hispanics – are Christian, while the meanstream culture is also rooted in Christianity. In Europe a secularized post-Christian culture is facing a Muslim one. The secularized culture is hedonist and values only its present life, because it does not believe in an afterlife. This is why it will surrender when threatened with death because life is the only thing it has to lose. This is why it will accept submission without fighting for its freedom. Nobody fights for the flag of hedonism, not even the hedonists themselves.

I suppose one could feel sad about all this, but sadness is not what I feel. One can feel compassion for those who die in accidents, fall in battle or get murdered (like the countless unborn children that perish every day) but can one pity those who have killed their own future for the pleasures of the present? Europe’s predicament, I repeat, is entirely self-inflicted. Not Islam is to blame. Secularism is.

Paul Belien The Closing of Civilization in Europe

I think weâ??ve reached a point where certain things need to be clarified about the rights, liberties and dignities of independent bodies with the State (the Archbishop of Canterbury to Robert Pigott of the BBC on Jan 24th 2007).

In what follows I want to explore why I think that the Archbishop has offered that careful and profoundly serious observation and to ask, in the light of recent events and with the publication imminent of the long-awaited Sexual Orientation Regulations for the UK Mainland, whether there are limits to the â??reachâ?? of the State?

The Government – basing itself in a range of convictions and ideas quite widely but by no means universally held, and often loosely linked to the Human Rights Act – is behaving increasingly as if Government and Parliament were the sole arbiter of what is right and good and wholesome, whether for individuals or for society.

There is appearing a jealous, if somewhat edgy, and a rather poorly informed intolerance of alternative moral and ethical authorities, and especially of those based in the life and the traditions of communities of Faith.

And unless, to use the Archbishops judicious language, â??certain things……are clarifiedâ?? and certain people think about all this with rather more care, there seems to be a real danger that this country will come to lose the contributions made to every aspect and level of its life by its range of independent voluntary bodies, many but by no means all of which have their roots and motivation in the Churches or in other communities of Faith.

At stake is the status of marriage in British society. Government and Parliament are imposing upon the country â?? and especially upon the Churches â?? alternative concepts of the family and of parenting as the equivalents of marriage.

Where does this leave this countryâ??s hard-won traditions of religious freedom and of the freedom of the individual?

The Government is rightly concerned that the Human Rights Act should be valued and welcomed, not misused as whipping-boy by means of all sorts of fantastic charges against it. The Government could have used the HR Act, as the Polish Government used it, to exempt Roman Catholic and other adoption agencies from the SORs. But instead it has chosen to privilege secular over religious ideologies, perhaps because it thinks it opportune to cut the Churches down to size after the autumnâ??s arguments over (so-called) â??Faith Schoolsâ??.

And Government is colluding with those who would corral the Churches and the Faiths into the private sphere, so as to leave â??the street, public life and political decision-making open to the influence only of secular ideologies.

No wonder the RC Archbishop of Southwark has called the recent decisions about Faith-based adoption agencies â??a triumph of dogmatism over freedom of conscienceâ??.

Nor are these the first examples. Registrars are required, at the risk of their jobs, to officiate at marriages of transgendered people and at registrations of Civil Partnerships, even if they have conscientious hesitations about doing so. Verified stories abound of Faith-based, and especially Church-based, organisations that offer social care, often to some of the most disadvantaged and demanding individuals and groups, which have had their public funding threatened as officialdom is anxious about a crucifix on the wall or Grace before meals.

Is this ignorance? Or prejudice? Or is it intolerance, even fear of an influence and a source of authority beyond and implicitly challenging the authority of the State? Must diversity of provision have been designed and authorised by Whitehall and Town Hall, rather than developed over centuries in a society that has had to struggle hard and long to win its freedom from Government.

How close are we getting to the point when a religiously-formed conscience will be seen as an obstacle to, rather than an inspiration for, service in Parliament, and still more in high political office? What an irony, as we celebrate William Wilberforce and all the others, of many churches and more than one Faith, through whose efforts in Parliament the Slave Trade was abolished.

The Rt Revd Michael Scott-Joynt, Bishop of Winchester, When the State decides what the Church believes

What are the main problems with the Regulations? Doesn’t regulation 14 (the religious exemption) provide all the protection Christians need?

There are a number of problems with the Regulations (many of which are set out in greater detail below). For example:

1) The Regulations automatically assume that homosexual civil partnerships are fully equivalent to heterosexual marriages and therefore it is assumed that any discrimination (in the provision of goods and services) between married couples and homosexual civil partners is illegal.

2) There is a crucial gap in the protection of vicars and ministers so that it will be illegal for them to teach their congregation that they should follow the Bible’s teaching on sexual morality even where this conflicts with the SORs. For example, it would be illegal for a vicar to cite the example of the Christian printing company and then say ‘it is better to follow the Bible’s teaching and risk being sued than to be complicit in sin by printing leaflets promoting gay pride’.

3) There is no protection for individuals to guarantee their freedom of conscience – the only exemption for religious belief (Regulation 14) applies to organisations rather than individuals. Therefore an individual Christian GP, for example, would have no freedom of conscience to refuse to give a reference recommending homosexual parents as suitable for adopting because the GP did not believe it would be right/in the best interests of a child to be raised without a father and a mother. This does not make sense in light of a doctor’s freedom to refuse to recommend/perform an abortion on the grounds of conscience under the Abortion Act.

4) There is no specific protection for faith schools which are bound by the law in the same way as all schools. Also, there is a substantial danger that it will be illegal under the SORs for faith schools to continue to teach that extra-marital sexual relationships are wrong.

5) There is no protection for commercial Christian organisations, however strong their Christian ethos (e.g. a Christian printing company will be acting illegally if they refuse to print fliers promoting gay sex).

6) There is no protection for many voluntary organisations which, although run by Christians who are motivated by their faith, are not strictly ‘religious’ in the language of the legislation (e.g. a Christian homeless shelter would not be able to hold the policy that ‘we will not provide services to someone if this were to promote homosexual practices’).

7) There is a substantial danger that where a church or other religious organisation receive funding from the local authority to provide goods or services (e.g. if a church receives state funding to run an overnight homeless shelter), it will lose all the protection under Regulation 14 and would not even be able to refuse membership of the church to openly practising homosexuals.

8) There is a danger that it will be unlawful for vicars to be able to continue to preach that same-sex relationships are sinful because preaching itself is not protected by the religion exemption and may contravene Regulation 9. It is true that Regulation 14 does offer a substantial degree of protection to churches and other religious organisations that are not ‘solely or mainly commercial’ and which do not provide goods, services etc on behalf of a public authority under a contract. So, for example, under the Regulations, in the vast majority of cases, a church will be free to refuse to let out a church hall to a group wishing to promote homosexual practices. However, as the list (above) shows, there are still many problems with the Regulations.

Lawyers Christian Fellowship Sexual Orientation Regulations 2007 Frequently Asked Questions (PDF)

Lawyers Christian Fellowship

Christian Concern for our Nation

Been meaning to write to your MP? They Work for You is the quick way to find them and tells you how they have been voting.

How strange that our Catholic adoption agencies, which seek homes for some of the most vulnerable and difficult-to-place in our society, should be seen as discriminatory, when in accordance with religious belief and practice they ask only for the freedom for themselves to choose for those children an environment which in their professional wisdom is the one most likely to promote their happiness and well-being.

I begin to wonder whether Britain will continue to be a place which protects and welcomes the works of people shaped and inspired by the Church. My fear is that, under the guise of legislating for what is said to be tolerance, we are legislating for intolerance. Once this begins, it is hard to see where it ends. While decrying religion as dogmatic, is dogma to prevail in the public square, forcing to the margins the legitimate expression and practice of genuine religious conviction? My fear is that in an attempt to clear the public square of what are regarded as unacceptable intrusions, we weaken the pillars on which that public square is erected – and we will discover that the pillars of pluralism may not survive.

The question is whether the threads holding together pluralist democracy have begun to unravel. That is why I have sounded this note of alarm. It is as a British Catholic citizen, pleading for the continuation of our proud democratic tradition of respect for the exercise of religious belief, that I have spoken before you tonight. I am conscious that when an essential core of our democratic freedom risks being undermined, subsequent generations will hold to account those who were able to raise their voices yet stayed silent.

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor RELIGION AND THE PUBLIC FORUM – the Corbishley Lecture, 28 March 2007, Westminster Cathedral Hall. the full lecture is a Word document at the bottom of the page

Well roared, Cormac. I think that in tone at least this is a first in the UK. Now what coverage has this speech received?

What is occurring in modern Europe? We are all observers of how a dramatic weakening of Europeâ??s Christian identity is taking place. Europe is losing the characteristics given to it by Christianity â?? I would like to stress: both Western and Eastern! Borrowing some words from the title of our conference, Europe is losing its soul. Over the centuries the Christian soul of Europe gave it life, made it remarkably attractive for the most remote countries and peoples and endowed its culture with universal character.

European values are becoming more and more secular, but I would not say that these values have totally lost their ties with Christianity. Many of them could not have appeared if there had been no Christianity in Europe. They represent a watered-down, worldly version of traditional European Christian values, and in this devitalized version are often turned against the Christianity that gave birth to them, casting doubt on the Christian identity of Europe. Breaking with the spiritual foundations of European civilization, these values risk losing the good that was placed in them by Christianity. Our concern is that Europe, having lost its connection to Christianity, may in the end make recourse to such forms of oppression or even violence against the individual that have always been foreign to her. Russia, as no other country, has experienced just how grave the break with oneâ??s spiritual roots can be for civilization, something that threatens societies not only with the loss of their countenance, but also with the rise of violence toward the person, egregious violations of personal freedom and the suppression of spiritual needs. The history of Russia in the twentieth century should serve as a warning to modern Europe, demonstrating that the rejection of the spiritual and cultural foundations on which a civilization is founded can present a serious threat to civilization itself. Indeed, the forms of social relations that were shaped in the twentieth century were to a significant extent a secularized variant of values characteristic of the Russian spiritual tradition: collectivism became the secularized version of conciliarity (â??sobornostâ??â??) and the community-centered life, a single state ideology replaced the spiritual authority of the Church. The effects of this substitution are well-known to everyone. Thus, secularism, the break with spiritual traditions, represents a great threat to the existence of European civilization.

At the foundation of this declaration lie two principal distinctions: between two meanings of human dignity, which we have agreed to call value and dignity, as well as between two meanings of freedom: freedom as the non-determinatedness of human actions and freedom as not being subjugated to evil and sin. The fact that man is created in the image of God, as well as the fact of the Incarnation, i.e. the assumption by the Son of God of our nature for the salvation of the human race, serve as the basis for the affirmation of the pre-eminent value of human nature. This value cannot be taken away or destroyed. It should be respected by everyone: by other people, society, the state, etc. An integral part of human nature that gives it special value is the freedom of choice. This freedom was placed into human nature by God Himself and cannot be violated by anyone: neither other people, nor evil powers, nor even God Himself.

By itself this freedom is only an instrument with which the person realizes his moral choices. Freedom of choice should be used for attaining freedom from sin. Only by liberating oneself from the shackles of sin and acquiring the â??freedom of the glory of Godâ??s childrenâ??, as St. Paul wrote in his Epistle to the Romans (8,21), can one give meaning to his inherent ability to make free choices and acquire that which in the Declaration is called dignity. Human dignity is the highest goal of existence. Expressed in theological terms, it corresponds to the likeness of God in the person. Dignity is acquired when one makes his choices in favour of the good, and is lost when one chooses evil.

Just as freedom of choice, human rights, to which the Declaration is dedicated, are instruments that should serve the higher goal of the moral perfection of the person. On the one hand, the Declaration recognizes human rights as an important social establishment that defends people as Godâ??s creation from infringements from outside. On the other hand, it places the category of human rights into a moral context. The text of the Declaration states: â??We are for the right to life and against the â??rightâ?? to death, for the right to creation and against the â??rightâ?? to destruction. We acknowledge the rights and liberties of the person to the extent that they help the person rise toward the good, protect him from internal and external evil, and help him to realize his potential positively in societyâ??.

Therefore, as mentioned in the text of the Declaration: â??Rights and liberties are inextricably connected with the obligations and responsibilities of the personâ??. In the Declaration the categories of the liberties and rights of the person received an additional, very important dimension â?? the moral dimension. This dimension sets a higher goal to the essentially instrumental categories of the freedom of choice and rights. Thanks to this moral dimension, the category of human rights acquires a teleological completion and a goal that lies beyond its own boundaries, in the realm of the most profound areas of human existence. From this perspective the Declaration contains a more multi-faceted, complex and holistic approach to the problem of human rights, an approach that takes into account the fact that the person bears the image of God and that his existence should have moral significance.

Along with the participants of the Tenth World Russian Peopleâ??s Council, we too can testify to the fact that the welfare and perhaps the very existence of human civilization in a globalized world will to a great extent depend on the ability to combine rights and freedoms with moral responsibility. For freedom and morality, placed by God Himself into human nature and which belong to everyone regardless of their culture or religion, are able to combine the existing civilizational models in a peaceful and viable manner.

Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad Introductory Speech at the European Conference on Christian Culture â??Giving a soul to Europeâ?? Vienna, 3-5 May 2006