Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the Vatican’s Apostolic Nuncio
to the United States, is a well-traveled man, having served in
Iraq, Kuwait, Great Britain, Strasbourg, Nigeria and, now, the
United States.
As a churchman and a diplomat, the Archbishop is in a unique
position to analyze threats to religious liberty and practice (“a
fundamental and non-derogable right”) under a variety of political
regimes throughout the world. A month ago he offered his views on
the subjects of religious freedom, persecution, and martyrdom at
the University of Notre Dame conference, “Seed of the
Church: Telling the Story of Today’s Christian Martyrs.”
Archbishop Viganò’s remarks are timely in light of the current
Administration’s efforts to dragoon Catholic institutions into
becoming funders of abortion, abortaficients, contraception, and
sterilization in violation of Church law, tradition, and the
consciences of the faithful.
The Archbishop is certainly mindful of more overt forms of
religious persecution of Christians, up to and including even
martyrdom, occurring in China, the subcontinent as well as Egypt,
Nigeria, the Sudan and east Africa. He noted that “heavy hand of so
called ‘anti-blasphemy’ laws has sometimes been the method to
subjugate the Christian faith.”
But the Nuncio’s message in South Bend was geared to those who
might not yet appreciate the threat to religious liberty in
supposedly free countries including the United States.
“While it is necessary to remind ourselves of the obvious, we
must also consider the not-so-obvious, for the great danger to the
future of religious freedom lies with religious persecution that
appears inconsequential or seems benign but in fact is not,” opined
the Nuncio. These vital issues must be attended to “for these grave
concerns exist not only abroad, but they also exist within your own
homeland.”
Today, in western democracies, torture and death may not be a
threat. However, “the objective of those who desire to harm the
faith may choose the path of ridiculing the believers so that they
become outcasts from mainstream society and are marginalized from
meaningful participation in public life,” said the Archbishop. Such
persons pursue various actions which promote difficulty, annoyance,
and harassment “designed to frustrate the beliefs of the targeted
person or persons rather than to eliminate these
persons.”
The object is not “to destroy the believer but only the belief
and its open manifestations,” argued the Apostolic Nuncio. “From
the public viewpoint, the believer remains but the faith eventually
disappears.”
He was making the same point made by many American defenders of
the First Amendment, most notably, the late Father
Richard John Neuhaus, editor of First Things: The
Establishment Clause, along with right reason and natural law,
protects not just the freedom to worship, but also the free and
robust exercise of religion in the public square as much as in the
private sphere.
The Archbishop describes this latter right as “a complementary
right about the unencumbered ability to exercise religious faith in
a responsible and at the same time public manner.”
Insisting on the freedom of the Church, libertas
Ecclesiae, Archbishop Viganò maintained that “This freedom is
essential to the religious freedom which properly belongs to the
human person.” This is “a human, civil, and natural right which is
not conferred by the state because it subsists in the human
person’s nature.” So there is “a pressing need to protect religious
freedom around the world.”
The “uncertainties surrounding the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act,” is just one of many reasons to be concerned.
“When Catholic Charities and businesses owned by faithful Catholics
experience pressure to alter their cherished beliefs, the problem
is experienced in other venues,” claimed the Nuncio. “Evidence is
emerging which demonstrates that the threat to religious freedom is
not solely a concern for non-democratic and totalitarian regimes.”
We are also seeing it in the “great democracies of the world… a
tragedy for not only the believer but also for democratic
society.”
Religious freedom “is not an end in itself, because it has as
its highest purpose protection of the ultimate dignity of the human
person” — a point made eloquently by the American Jesuit
John Courtney Murray, a leading light at the Second Vatican
Council.
The Archbishop proceeds to cite a number of judicial decisions
in England and the United States in which courts have obstructed
believers’ rights in making moral choices regarding marital and
family arrangements that they find contrary to their religious and
ethical beliefs: Evangelical Christians held unfit to be foster
parents because they find “certain sexual expressions by consenting
adults are sin”; parents prohibited from opting out of courses and
texts that elevated same-sex marriages to a normative status; and,
of course, the recent opinion of Judge Vaughan Walker on
Proposition 8 in California in which he opined that religious
beliefs opposing homosexual marriages cause “harm” to gays and
lesbians.
Add to these examples the cases of Catholic Charities across the
country being removed from vital social services because they
“would not adopt policies or engage in procedures that violate
fundamental moral principles of the Catholic faith.”
The modern democratic state can emulate a totalitarian one in
desiring much more than “passive obedience,” often demanding full
cooperation from the cradle to grave according to the English
historian Christopher Dawson cited by the Apostolic Nuncio: Dawson
thus warned that “if Christians cannot assert their right to exist”
then “they will eventually be pushed not only out of modern
culture, but out of physical existence.” He acknowledged that this
was not only a problem in the totalitarian and non-democratic
states, but “it will also become the issue in England and America
if we do not use our opportunities while we still have them.”
Dawson, a convert to Catholicism, was writing in 1956 in an
essay in Catholic World entitled, “The Challenge of
Secularism.” His words are not dissimilar to those of Blessed John
Paul II, writing in his 1991 encyclical, Centissimus
Annus, in which he reminded the faithful that “a democracy
without values easily turns into openly and thinly disguised
totalitarianism.”
There is much in the Apostolic Nuncio’s remarks at Notre Dame of
a purely spiritual nature focused on Catholic listeners. However,
this presentation contains much more that is of universal or
catholic (lower case) interest. Adherents of all faiths should read
it carefully. Religious fanaticism around the globe, untethered,
again, from right reason, natural law, and tolerance of religious
diversity, has given religious freedom a bad name. The Nuncio’s
speech in Indiana is most welcome as a reminder of what is at stake
and why clear thinking on the rights and responsibilities of
religious believers and those who govern them is so necessary in
the present hour.
