If you're ignorant about what's happening in Darfur--or less informed than you should be--click here. From the New York Review of Books, 2/9/06. The introduction follows:
Genocide in Slow Motion
During the Holocaust, the world looked the other way. Allied leaders
turned down repeated pleas to bomb the Nazi extermination camps or the
rail lines leading to them, and the slaughter attracted little
attention. My newspaper, The New York Times, provided
meticulous coverage of World War II, but of 24,000 front-page stories
published in that period only six referred on page one directly to the
Nazi assault on the Jewish population of Europe. Only afterward did
many people mourn the death of Anne Frank, construct Holocaust museums,
and vow: Never Again.
The same paralysis occurred as Rwandans were being slaughtered in
1994. Officials from Europe to the US to the UN headquarters all
responded by temporizing and then, at most, by holding meetings. The
only thing President Clinton did for Rwandan genocide victims was issue
a magnificent apology after they were dead.
Much the same has been true of the Western response to the Armenian
genocide of 1915, the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, and the Bosnian
massacres of the 1990s. In each case, we have wrung our hands afterward
and offered the lame excuse that it all happened too fast, or that we
didn't fully comprehend the carnage when it was still under way.
And now the same tragedy is unfolding in Darfur, but this time we
don't even have any sort of excuse. In Darfur genocide is taking place
in slow motion, and there is vast documentary proof of the atrocities.
Some of the evidence can be seen in the photo reproduced with this
essay, which was leaked from an African Union archive containing
thousands of other such photos. And now, the latest proof comes in the
form of two new books that tell the sorry tale of Darfur: it's
appalling that the publishing industry manages to respond more quickly
to genocide than the UN and world leaders do.
In my years as a journalist, I thought I had seen a full
kaleidoscope of horrors, from babies dying of malaria to Chinese troops
shooting students to Indonesian mobs beheading people. But nothing
prepared me for Darfur, where systematic murder, rape, and mutilation
are taking place on a vast scale, based simply on the tribe of the
victim. What I saw reminded me why people say that genocide is the
worst evil of which human beings are capable.
On one of the first of my five visits to Darfur, I came across an
oasis along the Chad border where several tens of thousands of people
were sheltering under trees after being driven from their home villages
by the Arab Janjaweed militia, which has been supported by the Sudan
government in Khartoum. Under the first tree, I found a man who had
been shot in the neck and the jaw; his brother, shot only in the foot,
had carried him for forty-nine days to get to this oasis. Under the
next tree was a widow whose parents had been killed and stuffed in the
village well to poison the local water supply; then the Janjaweed had
tracked down the rest of her family and killed her husband. Under the
third tree was a four-year-old orphan girl carrying her one-year-old
baby sister on her back; their parents had been killed. Under the
fourth tree was a woman whose husband and children had been killed in
front of her, and then she was gang-raped and left naked and mutilated
in the desert.
Those were the people I met under just four adjacent trees. And in
every direction, as far as I could see, were more trees and more
victims—all with similar stories.
[To read the rest, click here.]
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Here is the text of the President's remarks, delivered by telephone, to the thousands gathered at the March for Life in Washington, D.C. Here's a bit:
[W]e come from many backgrounds -- different backgrounds, but what unites us is our understanding that the essence of civilization is this: The strong have a duty to protect the weak. . . .
I appreciate so very much your work toward building a culture of life-- . . . a culture that will protect the most innocent among us and the voiceless. We are working to promote a culture of life, to promote compassion for women and their unborn babies.. . . We know -- we know that in a culture that does not protect the most dependent, the handicapped, the elderly, the unloved, or simply inconvenient become increasingly vulnerable.
Shamelessness time: I have an op-ed in today's USA Today, discussing the views of Judge Alito and Justice O'Connor on religious-freedom matters. Here's a bit:
Alito is an eminently worthy successor to O'Connor. What's more, he is all the more fitting a replacement, given their shared commitment to what has been quite rightly called our "first freedom": The freedom of religion protected by the First Amendment.
Like O'Connor, Alito understands that our Constitution does not regard religious faith with grudging suspicion, or as a bizarre quirk or quaint relic. They both appreciate that, in our traditions and laws, religious freedom is cherished as a basic human right and a non-negotiable aspect of human dignity. This is why both jurists have occasionally come under fire from activists who misunderstand the "separation of church and state."
Our Constitution separates church and state not to confine religious belief or silence religious expression, but to curb the ambitions and reach of governments. The point of the First Amendment is not to "put religion in its place," but instead to protect religion by keeping the government "in its place." The Amendment's Establishment Clause is not a sword, driving private religious expression from the marketplace of ideas; rather, it is a shield that constrains government precisely to protect religiously motivated speech and action.
By the way, I should note that the error in the piece regarding the date of the Holmes quote is one that, as the paper will make clear tomorrow, was the editors' and not the author's.
For an interesting essay by Gary Wills (Catholic) on Jimmy Carter (Baptist), on religion in politics, and on the culture of death, click here. From the New York Review of Books, 12/9/06.
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The following essay--by Luke Timothy Johnson, who is Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament at Emory University, where I too now teach--is from the 1/27/06 issue of Commonweal. I hope the essay is widely read.
After the Big Chill
Intellectual Freedom & Catholic Theologians
Luke Timothy Johnson
Suppose we indulge our fondest
hopes. Let us imagine that Pope Benedict XVI turns out to be quite
unlike what many expected, and that he embraces a spirit of theological
openness and generosity. No longer would a respected and respectful
editor of a Jesuit journal be removed for the sin of advocating
fairness; no more would a leading theological ethicist be removed from
a tenured position or a systematic theologian be quelled by the same
threat.
In this new atmosphere, local pastors would no longer
be summoned to account in Rome on the basis of parishioners’ calls to
the bishop (as priest friends of mine have been). Scholars (like me)
would not be disinvited to conferences on Aquinas because they
criticized John Paul’s theology of the body, or be asked to sign a
statement that they would not do anything to “embarrass the church”
when lecturing at a university, or, on the basis of other anonymous
calls, be warned by the vicar-general of an archbishop who is now a
cardinal against being “soft on the bodily Resurrection” of Christ when
teaching New Testament to adult Catholics. The “big chill” within
contemporary Catholicism includes all those mechanisms, overt and
covert, by which the Vatican has deliberately sought to suppress
theological intelligence and imagination in the name of doctrinal and
moral “Truth.”
Now suppose all these measures stopped because Benedict
XVI turned out to be someone who actually moderated his predecessor’s
repressive instincts. Would the church then be in a state beatific?
Would a healthy balance between magisterial authority and theological
inquiry be struck then?
I am not sanguine. For one thing, the chill has become
systemic. The episcopacy shaped by John Paul II will continue to
perpetuate its fearful distrust of theologians. Defenders of the
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) argue that its
investigations and sanctions of theologians are about “truth in
advertising”-Catholic theologians in Catholic colleges should teach the
way the Vatican says they should teach. Such a claim does little more
than reduce theological truth to catechesis.
Is there a better way to think about the relationship
between theologians and the church’s hierarchy? I think so. If we focus
our hope for the church on the personality or policy proclivities of
this or the last or the next pope, we simply perpetuate the Vatican’s
tendency to identify the church with the magisterium and the
magisterium with the pope. That, in turn, contributes to the
ill-conceived conviction that all theological wisdom must spring from a
single source. This fixation is problematic even-perhaps especially-if
we grant that John Paul II and Benedict XVI are genuine and even
important theologians. This fixation on the papacy results in the
steady theological impoverishment of the church as a whole, precisely
at a time when the task of articulating the church’s faith is urgent
and daunting. The effort by the Vatican and its allies to control
theological debate reflects little trust in the capacity of theologians
to criticize one another-something they have never been reluctant to
do-and even less trust in the best-educated laity in Catholic history
that is hungry for intellectual engagement with the faith that is not
condensed and condescending. Defenders of the CDF’s actions like to say
that theology is an ecclesial, not merely an academic, vocation. I
agree. It is precisely because theology is done by and for the church
that it requires the highest gifts of theological intelligence and
imagination. Some of the best theological talent available to the
church today is found outside the clergy. If these lay theologians
teach in Catholic colleges or seminaries, they are placed under strict
control; if they teach in Protestant or secular schools, they are
largely ignored. Many in the hierarchy seem indifferent to the academic
theological community, while others seem hostile to the climate of
intellectual freedom that theology needs.
[To print and/or read the whole essay, click here. Here is the concluding paragraph:]
The theological impoverishment of the church today is real and if
something is not changed, it will undoubtedly get worse. Perhaps it’s
too much to hope that the present model of the church as household can
open itself to a healthy conversation with the image of the church as
the living body of the resurrected Christ, particularly if the present
heads of household think that theirs is the only model that is true to
revelation. But they are wrong. The alternative (and, I insist,
complementary) image of the church is, if anything, truer to the good
news as found in Scripture. Those of us who long for a church in which
it is possible to be both smart and holy, both loyal and critical, live
in hope that something of this vision may gain recognition. Still,
suppose the big chill continues, through the papacy of Benedict XVI
(despite our fondest hopes) and the papacies to follow. What can
theologians do? They can continue to speak prophecy and to practice
discernment among God’s people. What is at stake is the integrity of
the church’s witness to the living God.
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Sunday, January 22, 2006
It appears that Richard John Neuhaus would rather have a schism than a truce. Read for yourself here.
Rob
On education issues, the Bush Administration does not seem particularly subsidiarity-friendly. In addition to the dubious No Child Left Behind Act, a proposed new federal college aid program requires eligible students to have completed "a rigorous secondary school program of study." Aside from the awkwardness of the federal government deciding which schools are "rigorous," private school students appear to be excluded categorically, as the bill further specifices that the program of study must be "established by a state or local educational agency and recognized by the secretary."
Rob
On 14 December 2005, the EU Network of Independent Experts (Network) on Fundamental Rights issued their opinion No. 4-2005: “The Right to Conscientious Objection and the Conclusion by the EU Member States of the Concordats with the Holy See.” Download conscientious_objection.pdf The European Commission requested the opinion of the Network on the legal status of religious conscientious objection in existing and future concordats between EU Member States and the Holy See. The European Commission posed several questions, but the one I believe that is applicable to our MOJ discussion is this: do conscience clauses in concordats create incompatibilities with fundamental rights of individuals and the law of the EU? Several of us addressed the issue of conscience last couple of months in various domestic legal settings. The EU Network has now brought the matter into the world of international law.
The question of whether concordats containing provisions protecting the right to religious conscientious objection are compatible with the protection of “fundamental rights” and EU law raises serious consequences for the Church and the integrity of its concordats. But the integrity and sanctity of conscience is also compromised. The Network concludes that the concordat clauses it reviewed are incompatible with EU law and the “fundamental rights” guaranteed under its legal scheme. The Network does admit that conscience is an issue that receives limited protection under various human rights instruments and the law of the EU; however, it is only one of several rights that are protected, and the protections accorded to conscience, including claims to conscience based on religious beliefs, are not absolute. The Network asserts that the limited right to conscience based on religious belief must be balanced with other rights that address concerns for: same sex unions; “reproductive health rights”; abortion; euthanasia; artificial fertilization; and, artificial contraception.
In writing its opinion on the legal status of concordat conscience clauses, the Network has reached some tricky, unfortunate, dangerous, and, in my opinion, unsupportable conclusions. For example, in the area of abortion, the Network asserts that the right to religious conscientious objection cannot interfere with access to legal abortion; therefore, healthcare practitioners who exercise their right to religious conscientious objection must refer the woman to a qualified health care practitioner who will agree to perform the abortion. This means that the conscientious objector becomes an indirect rather than a direct accomplice in the matter to which he or she objects. One wonders about other the impact that other developing “rights” beginning to surface in some EU countries, e.g., euthanasia or assisted suicide, will have on the right to conscience. The Network offers a chilling preview of what to expect when it states that in those countries where euthanasia and assisted suicide are “partially decriminalized,” conscientious objectors should not be protected in a way that deprives “any person from the possibility of exercising effectively his or her rights as guaranteed by the applicable legislation.” The Network also appears inclined to be restrictive on the rights of pharmacists to claim exemption based on conscience from selling contraceptives including “morning after” pills. The Network is much clearer about matters involving sexual orientation. The Network appears close to endorsing a Netherlands position that “any form of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation… should not be tolerated…” It is interesting that the Network relies on the law of this one EU member but not conflicting laws of other EU members.
Although the opinion of the Network, by itself, is not a legally binding text, it is a forecast of things that may develop in the future. At the least, the opinion reflects the views of influential voices within the EU today. And these voices do not offer comfort to those who have legal protection of their conscience and religious belief under international law. I doubt that the drafters of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights would agree with interpretations offered by the Network. The current climatic chill in Moscow seems to be moving west at a quick pace but manifesting itself in legal interpretation. RJA sj
