Society
Church and State

FREE TO BE PRESENT
What is passed off as “neutrality” is instead a cultural choice to exclude religion from the public arena. We see it in the debate on gay marriage, in Obama’s healthcare reform in the U.S., and in the current Italian debate on levying property tax on non-profits. What is at stake in all this?

by Ubaldo Casotto

Between 2000 and 2007, there were fully 123 nations (at the United Nations, 193 nations are represented) in which some form of religious persecution happened. Denouncing this in his speech on the feast day of Saint Ambrose, Cardinal Angelo Scola defined these facts “the worrisome expression of a grave malaise of civilization.” The massacres in Nigerian churches are not the only attacks on religious freedom. There is a more refined way of limiting it that does not use violence, but laws, media campaigns, and undue invasion by the judiciary in fields that are not their domain.
There is no dearth of examples. Just look at certain accents in the debate on homosexual marriage in France, at the attempt to silence certain (reasonable) arguments from Catholic sources with accusations of “religious interference.” In the United States, there is Barack Obama’s health care reform that forces religious schools, hospitals, and other entities to offer their employees healthcare insurance that covers contraceptives, abortifacients, and sterilization procedures. Only the forceful reaction of the American bishops, who spoke of a “wound to religious freedom,” and the mounting court cases initiated by non-compliant Christian employers have induced the administration to review this regulation.

Christianophobia. In Italy, for months we witnessed a media campaign against the Church’s “privileged” exemption from property tax, and then once the regulation was approved, saw the secular and non-religious clubs unite in protest because this tax harms not-for-profit groups. Again in Italy, a judge, in the course of investigations into the awarding of major contracts, justified his act by identifying as circumstantial evidence of crime the “membership in or shared ideology with the group CL” of some of those under inquiry.
In the electoral period that just ended in Italy, the CL Movement published a Note in which it defended “the political impact of a living Christian community” in virtue of “its very existence” which implicates “a space and opportunities for expression.”
Now we must realize how decisive the stakes are: not just a matter of some privileges to negotiate with those in power, but the question of the very possibility of living the reality of the Christian experience, according to all the dimensions that characterize it.
It is no coincidence that the Magisterium of all the recent popes has made this an inalienable point. As far back as Mater et Magistra (1961), speaking of workers, John XXIII wrote that “giving life to associations must be acknowledged as a natural right.” Therefore, attempts to limit the freedom to participate in associations is an attack upon the fundamental rights of the person. Formally, there is no legislation denying it, but this right encounters serious obstacles on the social level when the reason for the association is explicitly religious.
The law scholar Joseph Weiler of New York University, who is also a legal advisor to the European Union, has spoken of “Christianophobia,” seen not so much in a denial of religious freedom understood as freedom of individual conscience, but in discrimination against it in public debate. Some time ago, in a speech at the Catholic University of Milan, he gave a significant example: “Let’s say there is a new government in Italy. Someone from the feminist movement could complain because there are too few women. One could agree or not, but it would be normal to hear such a complaint. Some from the Green movement could protest that there are too few environmentalists. This also would be normal. But were a priest to say there are too few Catholics, it would cause a sensation, and people would say that the Church should not intervene in politics...”
The problem arises at this level. Most people, including many Catholics, take this assumption for granted, without seeing the attack on religious freedom it contains. Fr. Luigi Giussani writes of it in The Religious Sense: “The true, the most intelligent persecution is not the one employed by Nero and his amphitheater of wild beasts, or the concentration camp. The most ferocious persecution is the modern State’s attempt to block the expression of the communital dimension of the religious phenomenon” (p. 131). And the religious phenomenon, by its very nature, is a sociologically identifiable phenomenon, visible and accessible, public. “Those of Solomon’s Portico,” they called the first Christians.
At the United Nations on April 18, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI spoke of religious freedom “as the expression of a dimension that is at once individual and communitarian,” and defended the right to be in “the public debate.” He also manifested his dismay: “It is inconceivable, then, that believers should have to suppress a part of themselves–their faith–in order to be active citizens. It should never be necessary to deny God in order to enjoy one’s rights.” But “refusal to recognize the contribution to society that is rooted in the religious dimension” has, for Benedict XVI, a tragic consequence: the fragmentation of the unity of the person.

“One more problem.” Before him, Paul VI and the Second Vatican Council stated that “the social nature of man and the very nature of religion afford the foundation of the right of men freely to hold meetings and to establish educational, cultural, charitable, and social organizations, under the impulse of their own religious sense.”  In addition, “injury therefore is done to the human person ... if the free exercise of religion is denied ...” (Dignitatis Humanae, 1965). The entire pontificate of John Paul II is a testament to the undeniable public value of religious freedom. Just one quote suffices: “Authentic religious freedom requires that the rights deriving from the social and public dimension of the profession of faith and of belonging to an organized religious community must also be guaranteed” (World Day of Peace, 1988).
Christians must be warned that presumed “neutrality of the State”–a concept derived from the laicité of the French Revolution, as Cardinal Scola explained–is used in the attempt to exclude religion from public debate. What is passed off as neutrality is a precise cultural choice that denies public citizenship to the religious phenomenon, tolerated in the best of cases as one more problem for politics. In his September 2010 Westminster speech, Benedict XVI overturned this way of thinking: “Religion, in other words, is not a problem for legislators to solve, but a vital contributor to the national conversation.” When Catholics are not fully conscious of this, they supinely accept the vulgate of the neutrality of the State, and fall into the dualism between faith and life.

“Natural,” not revealed. Benedict XVI says that the religious experience inherently has a political dimension (it is a “factor” of the “public debate of the nation”) and does not run the risk of fundamentalism; rather, it defeats it from the start: “Unlike other great religions, Christianity has never proposed a revealed law to the State and to society, that is to say a juridical order derived from revelation. Instead, it has pointed to nature and reason as the true sources of law” (Speech to the Bundestag, September 22, 2011).
   The dynamic of the relationship between faith and reason, and thus politics and law, is described by a verb that Benedict XVI uses often: faith “illuminates” reason. Instead, in Italy we see that those who exalt the Italian Constitution to quasi-sacred status willingly forget to defend Article 29: “The Republic recognizes the rights of the family as a natural society founded on marriage.” “Natural,” in fact; not “revealed.” Thus, reason can recognize it in its truth. We would do well to remember this, and remind ourselves of it, in the coming months when we will be engaged on these fronts.