5 years ago today, at MOJ: "China, Canossa, and Religious Freedom"

Here was my post from March 26, 2007:

China, Canossa, and Religious Freedom

Shameless self-promotion time:  In today's issue of USA Today, I have this op-ed, "China's lesson on religious freedom," which is about the Holy See's resistance to China's efforts to select Catholic bishops.  Here's a bit:

Although its government likes to claim otherwise, and apparently hopes people won't notice, meaningful religious freedom does not exist in China. Quite the contrary: As the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom stated in its report last year, "The Chinese government continues to engage in systematic and egregious violations of freedom of religion or belief."

And so, it was probably more disappointing than surprising when the government-controlled puppet church, the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association, late last year purported to ordain a new bishop for Roman Catholics in the Xuzhou Diocese, about 400 miles south of Beijing, over the objections of the Holy See.

Why should we care? True, we might sympathize with the millions of Chinese believers whose freedom of conscience is systematically violated, and we might harbor a general unease about China's increasing power, ambition and influence. But putting that aside, is there any reason, really, why Americans should worry much about which of these two bureaucratic adversaries — the Holy See or the People's Republic — picks Chinese bishops? . . .

The struggle for the church's freedom in China reminds us that what the separation of church and state calls for is not a public conversation or social landscape from which God is absent or banished. The point of separation is not to prevent religious believers from addressing political questions or to block laws that reflect moral commitments. Instead, "separation" refers to an institutional arrangement, and a constitutional order, in which religious institutions are free and self-governing — neither above and controlling, or beneath and subordinate to, the state. This freedom limits the state and so safeguards the freedom of all — believers and non-believers alike.