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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
December 19, 2004
Christianophobia
Love him though I must Giovanni Lajolo the titular Archbishop of Caesariana would not be the first card I'd collect if some tea bag company began issuing a promotional set depicting members of the Roman hierarchy. Recently appointed the Vatican "secretary for relations with states" which is to say the Pope's foreign minister Archbishop Lajolo is now carrying the ball for the Vatican on the issue of international religious freedom. He has carried it unfortunately right into the United Nations where he is trying to get something he calls "Christianophobia" put on the international Index together with "anti-Semitism" and "Islamophobia" two other Official Bad Things which the U.N. already pretends to discountenance. The U.N. is an incredibly corrupt organization (as the U.S. congressional inquiry into the vast "oil for food" scandal is now demonstrating) and a great bellows for empty moral declarations. It is elected by nobody; its bureaucracy answers only to itself; its General Assembly is under the voting control of shifting alliances of thuggish regimes themselves credibly elected by nobody. But is it an effective organization? Look what it did for Rwanda and is now doing for the Congo. Or consider its efforts on behalf of Palestine which has been the organization's cause c?l?bre for more than one generation. And then look at Palestine today. "Be careful what you wish for goes an old proverb. I don't think it wise for any people who might consider themselves beleaguered, to pray for the intercession of the U.N. And so with Christians, Catholic and all other. I think the Vatican has done good, useful diplomatic work, state-to-state, in getting protected status for Christian minorities in countries such as Kazakhstan. This is invisible to the world media; indeed, almost any good work will be invisible to them. But trying to do things visibly on Manhattan's big stage by the East River is to invite not merely empty, but counter-productive moral posturing. I liked the response from John Hanford, the U.S. State Department's ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, speaking in Archbishop Lajolo's company at a conference in Rome a fortnight ago. In a review of developments in countries of particular concern" (i.e. the most monstrous regimes) he noticed that The only countries that come off the list are ones we invade. Christmas is upon us and we are again reminded that Christians are persecuted in many lands. We need to distinguish between the real manly persecution that exists in China many Muslim countries and elsewhere -- places where Christians must hide their allegiances and sometimes fear for their lives -- and the more childish forms with which we are becoming increasingly familiar in North America and Europe. And yet we also need to recognize the similarities in persecutions large and small. For even where as in the United States they still form a majority Christians are the targets of molestation that becomes ever more serious if it is not resisted. It ranges from the petty campaigns to remove everything from Christmas cr?ches to Salvation Army bell-ringers from all public places by the "politically correct" to the fact Canadian churches are already bracing for the removal of their charitable status as the legal weapon most likely to be used to force them to "sanctify" "gay" "marriages". Italy the figurative heart of Catholic Christendom is where the action is in the West this year. All across Italy school and municipal authorities have been banning traditional Christmas displays from public property on the grounds that they must be offensive to Muslims -- even while prominent Italian Muslims repeatedly condemn their "excessive zeal". As they and others have observed it is the Italian left using the Muslim community as an excuse to advance its own anti-Christian agenda. "Multiculturalism" is used in the same way here -- as the cover for the ACLU and other doctrinaire organizations to assemble a "crusade" against Christians in particular. What we don't realize; what I fear even Archbishop Lajolo doesn't realize is that the enemies of Christianity make competing religious claims. Islam is the most obvious rival but so is the state ideology in China. And in the West what used to be called "secular humanism" and is now called "politically correct" has evolved into an alternative religion with its own credo its own strange gods and sacraments its own conception of right and wrong -- which just happen to resemble the old Christian system but turned upside down. And the U.N. is their Vatican. Do not expect mercy from that court. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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