I took a shot at translating Pope Francis’s remarks on religious freedom, which he addressed to the participants at our conference on international religious freedom (an official translation will be issued later). I have tried to be faithful to the text, sacrificing a bit of readability. I have done this in part because some partial translations I’ve seen are not true enough to the original, even if the resulting translation here still leaves some open spaces in meaning (which, at any rate, should not be filled by the translator). Here is the original in Italian. I’ve also got a few comments at the end of the translation.
I welcome you on the occasion of your international conference, dear brothers and sisters. I thank Professor Giuseppe Dalla Torre for his courteous words.
Recently the debate about religious freedom has become very intense, asking questions of both governments and religious denominations. The Catholic Church, in this respect, refers to the Declaration Dignitatis Humanae, one of the most important documents of the Ecumenical Council Vatican II.
In effect, every human being is a “seeker” of truth about his own origins and his own destiny. In his mind and in his heart arise questions and thoughts that cannot be repressed or suffocated, inasmuch as they emerge from the deeps and are by nature connected with the intimate essence of the person. These are religious questions and they demand religious freedom to manifest themselves fully. These questions seek to shed light on the authentic meaning of existence, on the ties that connect it to the cosmos and to history, and they mean to pierce the darkness by which the human condition would be surrounded if such questions were not asked or if they remained answerless. The Psalmist says: “When I see your heavens, work of your fingers/ the moon and the stars that you have fixed, / what then is man that you would remember him, / a son of man that you would care for him?” Psalms 8: 3-4.
Reason recognizes in religious freedom a fundamental right of man that reflects his highest dignity, that of the capacity to seek the truth and to adhere to it, and recognizes in that right an indispensable condition in order to deploy his own potentialities. Religious freedom is not only the freedom of a thought or of a private sect. It is freedom to live according to ethical principles consequent to discovered truth, whether privately or publicly. This is a great challenge in the globalized world, where weak thought—which is like a disease—lowers the general ethical level, and in the name of a false notion of tolerance ends by persecuting those who defend the truth about man and that truth’s ethical consequences.
Legal regimes, national or international, are called to recognize, guarantee, and protect religious freedom, which is a right that inheres intrinsically in the nature of man, in his dignity as a free being, and is also an indicator of a healthy democracy and one of the principal fonts of the legitimacy of the state.
Religious freedom, implemented in constitutions and in laws and translated into coherent behaviors, favors the development of relationships of mutual respect among the different faiths and their healthful collaboration with the state and political society, without confusion of roles and without antagonisms. In place of the global conflict of values, coming from a nucleus of universally shared values, a global collaboration in view of the common good becomes possible.
By the light of the acquisitions of reason, confirmed and perfected by revelation, and of the civil progress of peoples, it is incomprehensible and worrisome that, even today, in the world there remain discriminations and restrictions of rights for the sole reason of belonging to and professing publicly a certain faith. It is unacceptable that true and actual persecutions exist for reasons of religious membership! And wars too! This wounds reason, attacks peace, and humiliates the dignity of man.
It is a motive of great pain for me to observe that Christians in the world suffer the largest number of such discriminations. Persecution against Christians today is even more powerful than in the first centuries of the Church, and there are more Christian martyrs than in that era. This is happening more than 1700 years after the edict of Constantine, which granted freedom to Christians to profess their faith publicly.
I hope profoundly that your conference illustrates with depth and scientific rigor the reasons that today oblige the legal order to respect and defend religious freedom. I thank you for this contribution. I ask you to pray for me. From my heart I wish you the best and I ask God to bless you. Thank you.
Some brief thoughts (and I hope others will add theirs as well):
1. A note on the fourth paragraph with Patrick Brennan’s good questions in mind (Patrick was getting the English translation from a different source). According to my translation, the Pope did not say that “every person has a right to seek the freedom to live according to ethical principles, both privately and publicly, consequent to the truth one has found.” The full paragraph fragment in Italian is:
La ragione riconosce nella libertà religiosa un diritto fondamentale dell’uomo che riflette la sua più alta dignità, quella di poter cercare la verità e di aderirvi, e riconosce in essa una condizione indispensabile per poter dispiegare tutta la propria potenzialità. La libertà religiosa non è solo quella di un pensiero o di un culto privato. E’ libertà di vivere secondo i principi etici conseguenti alla verità trovata, sia privatamente che pubblicamente.
The phrase in question, as well as the entire paragraph fragment, is, I think, more faithfully translated as “discovered truth” rather than “the truth one has found” ; “discovered truth” refers back to the same truth that is being sought for in the previous section of this paragraph.
2. Note the reference to the “global clash of values” in paragraph six–a specific comment on our conference–and the Pope’s statement that such a clash can be overcome. That struck me as relevant to the discussion that Tom Berg and I have been having here, here, and here.
3. Nevertheless, in spite of his optimism about the prospects for religious freedom, the Pope expresses great distress about the plight of Christians in the world today, as can be seen in the paragraphs toward the close of the speech.
Wednesday, June 25, 2014
This is the second of two posts responding to Tom's post below about irony and tragedy. In the first, I tried to lay out what I perceive as some of the conceptual differences between a tragic and an ironic approach generally with some application to more theoretical issues in the interpretation of the religion clauses. In this one, I try to address some of the challenges that Tom poses about the resources (or lack thereof) that tragedy might draw on for practical purposes.
Tom argues that irony has various practical advantages over tragedy inasmuch as it provides a resource for issuing challenges and for striking deals. He raises the arguments that he and others have been making on behalf of religious exemptions as examples of the critique from irony. And he suggests that a tragic view may not offer the same kind of practical resource because it often denies that the values advocated by one side in a conflict are commensurable with the values championed by the other side.
These are all fair points. Tom is right that tragedy opens up the domain of incommensurable values. Tom is also right that the tragic view will be far less amenable as a resource for the sorts of critiques that he argues have been important.
But I wonder very much whether the ironic critique is…true.
Continue reading
Thanks to Tom for his post and his very good questions. Tom and I have been having this discussion for a good while and it is a pleasure to talk together again. Several years ago, Tom put together a wonderful conference on Niebuhr, Christian realism, and law at the University of St. Thomas. I wrote a paper for that conference that I never published on the differences between tragedy and irony, and Tom’s post made me look back at it.
My thoughts about Tom’s post are in two posts. The first post concerns the conceptual difference between tragedy, comedy, and irony as I understand the terms. The second post addresses some of the more concrete practical challenges and questions Tom poses.
This post is long, as is the next one. For the impatient reader, the quick version is that I am a tragedian and not an ironist because I believe that tragedy better describes the nature of conflict in the world, or at least in that corner of the world that Mirror of Justice contributors sometimes think about, the law of religious freedom. Deep and true conflict, and not simply the appearance of conflict that awaits the ironist’s clever harmonization, is our condition. The tragic perspective helps us to appreciate the true breadth of the chasms that separate us—chasms that, in our day, are expanding. And that is why, much as I appreciate the virtues of the ironist, and much as I admire the efforts of Tom, Rick, Doug Laycock, Robin Wilson and others to reach the sorts of agreements Tom mentions, I believe that those agreements are at best temporary, pragmatic settlements. That is not to denigrate them at all: indeed, I believe that Niebuhr himself took little more than a series of pragmatic micro-deals to be the concrete political expression of his ironic Christian realism. Negotiating conflict sensibly is no small feat. But, to the extent they have been achieved (which is, regrettably, not often enough), those agreements are not larger victories of principle. They do not tell us much at all about the commensurability of the clashing values. And their fragility and evanescence is some evidence that tragedy, not irony, is the deep force at work. Though I do believe that the tragic view has something to say about conflict resolution—something different than what the ironist says—the reason to be a tragedian is not to resolve conflict but to perceive as completely as possible the nature and depth of our divisions. They are very great.
Concepts. What are we talking about in using these terms? Let me focus first on Niebuhrian irony, and then contrast it with a tragic view.
Continue reading
Tuesday, June 24, 2014
Following up on my post below, I thought to add a few thoughts about some of the themes that emerged from the presentations on international religious freedom at our conference in Rome.
The keynote address was delivered by the Berkley Center’s Tom Farr, whose primary claim was that in order for international religious freedom to thrive as a human right, we need a deeper grounding--both principled and pragmatic--of the importance of the right of religious freedom as both an anthropological reality and as a practical necessity. I had the honor of moderating Tom’s talk and asked him whether in this particular climate what was needed was a thicker account of religious freedom or instead an (even) thinner account. He gave a thoughtful answer reflecting both the need for deep structures of justification and the difficulty of achieving consensus about them.
The first panel concerned the politics of international religious freedom and included the United States Ambassador to the Holy See, Ken Hackett, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, Heiner Bielefeldt, and Pasquale Annicchino of the European University Institute. It was in Dr. Bielefeldt’s talk that a useful tension began to emerge among some of the speakers--between those who were bullish or optimistic about the prospect that international law can effectively promote religious freedom and those who were a little more skeptical. Dr. Bielefeldt falls into the more optimistic camp--a good thing indeed, given his position. He emphasized the difference between the promotion of religious freedom in order to advance civic peace, on the one hand, and its promotion in order to vindicate a basic human right, on the other. Here I was reminded of the controversial “civic peace” justification in the American law of religious freedom and that Rick has written about so well.
The second panel dealt with comparative perspectives on international religious freedom. The perspectives compared included those of the member states of the Council of Europe and of Italy specifically. I was particularly interested in Marco Ventura’s lucid presentation about the difference between divergent and convergent approaches to religious freedom among and across European member states. Professor Ventura described the move toward convergence and argued for even greater convergence than has already been achieved. I had some questions about this coming from a country that has also struggled with the issue of convergence and divergence in the constitutional law of religious freedom. Again, the tension between globalism and regionalism was in evidence in a slightly different way.
The third panel concerned Islamic and Christian perspectives on international religious freedom, and included presentations by Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, Olivier Roy, and Nina Shea. Here the primary point of tension involved the causes or roots of religious persecution of these two major religious groups. And here, too, there was skepticism, principally from Professor An-Na’im, about the efficacy of human rights regimes to protect religious freedom. “There was a world before international human rights, and there will be a world after international human rights,” he said.
In all, a very rewarding set of presentations.
