Preserve and Defend Freedom of Religion: Card. Turkson
Slovakia, 4 March 2014: Preserve and defend freedom of religion, because it sums up
each person's freedom to live according to his own deeper understanding of the truth,
said Cardinal Peter Turkson, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace,
on Tuesday at a conference titled "The Church and Human Rights", held in Bratislava,
Slovakia, on the initiative of the Slovak Bishops' Conference. Please find
below the full text of his speech The Catholic Church and Human Rights
Cardinal Peter K.A. Turkson President
In the name of the Pontifical
Council for Justice and Peace, I congratulate the Slovak Bishops’ Conference for the
initiative to hold this conference on the Church and human rights.
Ever since
the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace began its work, soon after the Second
Vatican Council, the promotion and protection of human rights have been essential
components of our mandate.
So thank you for the opportunity to explore with
you some of the ways in which the Catholic Church teaches, promotes and protects human
rights.
Introduction
After the 1948 Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, Blessed John XXIII and his successors have developed the Church’s social
doctrine in the area of human rights. The Church affirms the foundation of fundamental
human rights in human dignity and therefore defends the universal character of these
basic rights. The Church rejects the relativism that some national regimes and interest
groups increasingly apply to rights.
In his first World Day of Peace Message,
Pope Francis expressed this deep regret: “In many parts of the world, there seems
to be no end to grave offences against fundamental human rights, especially the right
to life and the right to religious freedom.”
Violence against religion is suffered
disproportionately by Christians. The Church urges that religious freedom be treasured
and defended by all, whatever their own convictions, because it epitomizes the freedom
to live by one’s deepest understanding of truth.
As Pope Benedict XVI explained,
this is consistent with the healthy secularity of the legitimate modern State in which
religious and temporal matters are separate. But such freedom is opposed by the aggressive
secularism that attacks any beliefs that it does not share, and by some religious
fundamentalists with the same tendencies.
Inherent Dignity of the Human
Person
Many people speak of human rights. Very rightly, they refer to their
violations. Very rightly, they proclaim that human rights must be protected. Very
rightly, they advocate that human rights must be promoted. Yet what are the human
rights we are talking about?
In order to have a well-grounded sense of this
subject, let us recall what led the United Nations to issue the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (UDHR) in 1948.
The Second World War had still not ended when
the United Nations was founded in 1945. In some areas, wars continued. The drafters
of the Universal Declaration were well aware of the countless grave violations of
human rights that had been committed especially in the two World Wars. Member States
were in agreement that a blatant disregard and contempt for human rights had resulted
in barbarous acts which outraged the conscience of mankind.
For this reason,
Member States desired a bold agreement: a consensus document that would proclaim to
the world those values that are common to all of humanity. Thus, soon after the birth
of the United Nations, Member States issued the Universal Declaration “as a common
standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations.”
I draw your attention
to the words “common standard of achievement”. This text was to enshrine the aspiration
to which every person and every organ of society should subscribe.
With this
aspiration in mind, what do we mean? To what should all humankind aspire? Rather than
enumerate rights and freedoms, I invite you to focus on their foundation.
The
first sentence of the Preamble of the Universal Declaration states: “Whereas recognition
of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members
of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.”
That is, the ground, the foundation, the substrate of human rights and freedoms is
“the inherent dignity of the human person”.
This dignity is perceived and understood
first of all by reason. It is not found in the human will or in the reality of the
State or in public powers. It is found in the human person himself and in God his
Creator. The philosopher Jacques Maritain, who helped to draft the Universal Declaration,
put this point succinctly when he wrote:
the worth of the person, his liberty,
his rights arise from the order of naturally sacred things which bear upon them the
imprint of the Father of Being and which have in him the goal of their movement. A
person possesses absolute dignity because he is in direct relationship with the Absolute,
in which alone he can find his complete fulfilment.
This is utterly radical.
Your human rights and mine do not depend upon the will of other people. Human rights
arise from our dignity as created in the image and likeness of God. Thus we should
not be surprised that the Catholic Church regularly affirms the inherent dignity of
the person as the foundation of human rights, and the right to life from conception
to natural death as the first among all human rights and the condition for all other
rights of the person.
“The dignity of the human person and the common good
rank higher than the comfort of those who refuse to renounce their privileges,” Pope
Francis teaches. “When these values are threatened, a prophetic voice must be raised.”
Therefore the Church is a vigorous partner in efforts to make human rights a reality.
Touchstones
of Human Rights
In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church,
human rights are described as universal, inalienable and inviolable.
Human
rights have these three characteristics not by human dictate or even universal democratic
agreement. Rather they stem from the deepest “foundation stone” of divinely-given
human dignity. From this comes the natural vocation of all men and women to transcend
themselves. The deep yearning for transcendence can never be extinguished. It will
always surface in efforts towards achieving the common good and peace.
Human
rights are universal in that they apply to allhumans without exception
of time, place or subject, as the Vienna Declaration states: “The universal nature
of these rights and freedoms is beyond question.” They are inviolable insofar
as they are inherent in the human person and in human dignity, and because the proclamation
of these rights demands their complete respect by all people everywhere and for all
people everywhere. Finally, these rights are inalienable insofar as no one
can legitimately deprive others of these rights, whoever they may be, since this would
do violence to their nature.
In his 2008 visit to the General Assembly of the
United Nations, Pope Benedict XVI reiterated this truth. He noted how “human rights”
has grown as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations.
However, he warned against the ideology of relativism. Relativism removes these rights
from their proper context because it implies that rights are notbased on the
natural law inscribed on our hearts and thus notpresent in all cultures and
civilizations.
This relativistic conception restricts the range of application
of rights because it permits the meaning and interpretation of rights to vary and
their universality to be denied in the name of different cultural, political, social
and even religious outlooks.
Quite to the contrary, a great variety of viewpoints
must not be allowed to obscure the basic truth: rights are universal, and so too is
the human person who is the subject of these rights.The fact that there
are unchanging values common to all of humanity means quite simply that human rights
are a given. They are common to all persons. They do not depend upon the fashions
and trends of societies or on the will of governments. In everyday terms, this means
that everyone has them; no one can lose or misplace them; and they cannot legitimately
be denied or removed.
On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration,
at the United Nations in Geneva, the Holy See drew attention to another cause for
concern: ideologies that attempt to rewrite human rights or create new ones. Perhaps
proponents are misled by the fact that fundamental rights can be expressed in different
particular manners in different social and cultural contexts. A “healthy realism”
will recognize that this variation is compatible with the universal character of the
underlying rights, and it will block the misguided proliferation of pretended rights:
A
healthy realism, therefore, is the foundation of human rights, that is, the acknowledgement
of what is real and inscribed in the human person and in creation. When a breach is
caused between what is claimed and what is real through the search of so-called “new”
human rights, a risk emerges to reinterpret the accepted human rights vocabulary to
promote mere desires and measures that, in turn, become a source of discrimination
and injustice and the fruit of self-serving ideologies.
The Church has a serious
concern when the ideology of a particular group of individuals can somehow create
a new human right. One example is the attempt on the part of some to legitimize the
killing of an unborn child through the promotion of so-called “reproductive rights”,
“reproductive services” and other loaded terms which mask the tragedy of abortion.
Euthanasia, according to some, should also be a human right, and not only
for adults! For the first time in history, in February 2014, the Belgian parliament
accepted the principle that even a child, with no limit of minimum age, could ask
to be killed to end his/her suffering. "This law – the Bishops of Belgium wrote --
opens the doors to the extension of euthanasia to the handicapped, the demented, the
mentally ill and eventually to those who are tired of life.” Jean Vanier, the founder
of L’Arche, said it is urgent to rediscover how to support the vulnerable people around
us so that our society can once again call itself “human society”.
Another
example is the use of the term “gender” to suggest that sex is not biologically grounded
as male and female but is simply a social construct or produced by what individuals
think or feel they are. Moreover, attempts to recognize those engaging in homosexual
behaviour as a specific group to be accorded human rights go beyond the protection
to be guaranteed to all people under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Related
to this is the suggestion that marriage could somehow be redefined, despite the fact
that marriage is, by nature, between one man and one woman for their mutual love and
increase of the human family, as affirmed in international law.Such positions
distort reality because they attempt to rewrite human nature, which de natura cannot
be rewritten.
As Cardinal Francis George of Chicago stated with great clarity,
“The nature of marriage is not a religious question. Marriage comes to us from nature.
Christ sanctifies marriage as a sacrament for the baptized, giving it significance
beyond its natural reality; the State protects marriage because it is essential to
family and to the common good of society. But neither Church nor State invented marriage,
and neither can change its nature.”
In this context, the Church vigorously
upholds the rights to life and bodily security of everyone, everyone, regardless of
their perceived “sexual differences.”The Church sees this as a matter
of the most basic rights. Homosexual persons “must be accepted with respect, compassion
and sensitivity. Every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.”
Thus,
while the Church regrets the discordance between homosexual behaviour as such and
what we understand as the norm for God-given human nature, she upholds the integrity
of everyone’s rights. See our Lord’s reaction when the townspeople wished to stone
a woman to death for adultery: He managed to preserve her life and bodily security
(John 8:1-11).
Religious Freedom
Let me now focus on one
fundamental right, namely, religious freedom.
The Universal Declaration of
1948 already upheld freedom of religion as one of the fundamental human rights inherent
in every person. As it states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience
and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom,
either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his
religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”
Let
me repeat: the right to freedom of religion is inseparable from freedom of thought
and conscience. It applies to everyone. It includes the freedom to change one’s religion
or belief. It also includes the freedom to manifest that religion or belief both in
private and communally.
Less than two decades later, the Fathers of the Second
Vatican Council affirmed these same principles in Dignitatis humanae, the Declaration
on Religious Liberty. They specified that the right of the individual and of communities
to social and civil freedom in religious matters carries with it the right “to be
immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human
power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his
own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others,
within due limits.”In addition, they pointed out that
It is in
accordance with their dignity as persons – that is, beings endowed with reason and
free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility – that all men
should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek
the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth,
once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth.
However, people cannot discharge these obligations consistently with their own nature
unless they enjoy immunity from external coercion as well as psychological freedom.
Therefore the right to religious freedom has its foundation not in the subjective
disposition of the person, but in his very nature.
One year after the promulgation
of Dignitatis humanae, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Covenant
on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). Happily, Article 18 of this Covenant restated
and expanded upon the principle of religious freedom as contained in the Universal
Declaration. The Covenant affirmed that:
no one should be subject
to coercion that would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief
of his choice; freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only
to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety,
order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others; and States
Parties are called to respect the liberty of parents to ensure the religious and moral
education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.
Moreover,
the ICCPR also affirmed the right of minorities to profess and practice their
own religion.
In 1991, Blessed John Paul called religious freedom “the source
and synthesis” of all the basic human rights. He defined religious freedom as “the
right to live in the truth of one's faith and in conformity with one's transcendent
dignity as a person.”
Present-day Challenges to Religious Freedom
The
principle of freedom of religion is enshrined in international human rights law. One
of the great tragedies of today is that it is not upheld in all countries and by all
governments.
Pope Benedict drew attention to this grave situation in his 2011
Message for the World Day of Peace. He observed that in some areas of the world, to
profess one’s religion endangers one’s life and personal liberty. In other areas there
are more subtle and sophisticated forms of prejudice and hostility towards believers
and religious symbols.At present, Christians are the religious group which
suffers persecution in the largest number of countries on account of its faith.They experience daily affronts and often live in fear because of their faith
in Christ, their pursuit of truth, and their plea for respect for religious freedom.
This situation constitutes a grave violation of human rights and must be confronted
on all levels. Governments have a responsibility to their people, whatever their religion,
to protect them from violations of their human rights, including their right to freedom
of religion.
Moreover, as Pope Benedict XVI pointed out during his Apostolic
Journey to Lebanon in September 2012, for the right to religious freedom to be upheld,
it must also be preserved free from two opposed trends today that run contrary to
freedom of religion. These are extreme and negative forms of secularization, and a
violent fundamentalism that claims to be based on religion.
Pope Benedict decried
the secularism that wants to reduce religion to a purely private concern, and
that sees personal or family worship as unrelated to daily life, ethics or one’s relationships
with others. Further, secularism gives the State control over religious expression
and denies citizens the right to express their religion openly. By contrast, “secularity”is a positive orientation. It “frees religion from the encumbrance of politics”;
it maintains
the necessary distance, clear distinction and necessary collaboration
between the two spheres. […] No society can develop in a healthy way without embodying
a spirit of mutual respect between politics and religion [… while they] cooperate
harmoniously in the service of the common good. This kind of healthy secularity ensures
that political activity does not manipulate religion, while the practice of religion
remains free from a politics of self-interest which at times is barely compatible
with, if not downright contradictory to, religious belief.
The other problem
is extreme forms of fundamentalism. Pope Benedict explains how this phenomenon arises
from
“economic and political instability, a readiness on the part of some
to manipulate others, and a defective understanding of religion. [It] afflicts all
religious communities and denies their long-standing tradition of co-existence. It
wants to gain power, at times violently, over individual consciences, and over religion
itself, for political reasons”.
It follows “a logic opposed to
divine logic, in other words, not by teaching and practicing love and respect for
freedom but rather by intolerance and violence”.This is not religion but
a falsification of religion, for religion in its essence seeks reconciliation and
the establishment of God’s peace throughout the world. Religions are therefore called
to cleanse themselves from such temptations and to illumine and purify consciences.
Religious Education for Building the Social Order
What kind
of change is needed for human rights to be better protected and upheld in all parts
of the world? “Religious education” is of inestimable value in this regard. Pope Benedict
has called it the “highway” that leads new generations to see others as their brothers
and sisters – as brothers and sisters with whom they are called to work and to journey
– as brothers and sisters who know that they are members of the one human family,
from which no one is to be excluded.
Allow me to provide a powerful expression
of this one human family. In September 2010 it was my honour to lead the Holy See
delegation at the Plenary Session of the United Nations General Assembly. The topic
was poverty and development. I pointed out that development is seriously undermined
by irresponsible governments, global processes and major institutions when their policies
and actions fail to uphold the inherent and equal dignity, the individuality, and
the transcendence of every human being. The methods of some anti-poverty campaigns
tended to target the poor in ways that suggest that the solution to global poverty
is to eliminate the poor. Furthermore, material poverty has partners – relational,
emotional, and spiritual poverty.
So we reminded the General Assembly that
the human person must be at the centre in our quest for development. To combat global
poverty requires justice and solidarity in the form of investments in the resourcefulness
of the poor and, far from eliminating them, making them protagonists in their emergence
out of poverty. The poor need education to be transformed from dependency to resourcefulness.
If everyone’s political, religious and economic rights and freedoms are respected,
the paradigm will shift from mere poverty management to wealth creation; from viewing
the poor not as a burden but as part of the solution.
Finally, we should not
only recognize that religious freedom is the source and synthesis of all human rights.
We should also recall what genuine religious belief contributes. Genuine religious
belief points us beyond present practicalities towards the transcendent; and it reminds
us of the possibility and the imperative of moral conversion of all persons, of the
duty to live peaceably with our neighbour, of the importance of living a life of integrity.
In the apt words of Jürgen Habermas, “Among the modern societies, only those that
are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious
traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the
substance of the human.” Properly understood, religious belief brings enlightenment;
it purifies our hearts and inspires noble and generous action to the benefit of the
entire human family; and it motivates us to cultivate the practice of virtue and to
reach out towards one another in love.
CONCLUSION
May
God bless today’s Conference with all the compassion, creative fidelity and courage
necessary to make human rights truly and really accessible for everyone throughout
the world.
Moreover, may today’s Conference encourage the Church in Slovakia
in all that you are doing to promote respect for human rights.
Let us make
our own the hope of the Holy Father, “that the daily commitment of all will continue
to bear fruit,” and that all God’s people may enjoy genuine peace “as a fundamental
human right and a necessary prerequisite for every other right.”