By Steve Weatherbe

AN AMERICAN archbishop has called on Vancouver Island believers to practice a Christianity of resistance against social and political forces that would deny religious believers any voice in public affairs.

Charles Chaput, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Denver, gave two talks to 400 members of the Vancouver Island Catholic diocese at an October 15 – 17 conference titled ‘Faith in the Public Square’ – but his message was clearly aimed at a broader audience.

Canadian and American Christians often have trouble understanding the brutality of anti-religious repression in other countries, he said. Meanwhile a softer, more insidious form of persecution has been going on in democratic countries of the West. The process clothes itself in the language of progress, but it has little to do with humanity’s moral development. Rather, it has a lot to do with kicking Christianity out of the public square.

Other headliners at the event were Nelson Bishop John Corriveau and Irish singer and politician Dana Scallon.

Chaput said that the modern emphasis on human rights was deceptive, providing for an individual’s right to worship and believe as he chooses, but also teaching that neither individuals nor the churches they belong to have any right to speak on public policy. Religious believers are portrayed as buffoons, hypocrites or dangerous eccentrics, Chaput said.

Unless Christians push back against this growing cultural message, Chaput warned, the culture will persuade even Christians that their faith is something they should keep to themselves, and that it is bad manners to interject their beliefs into the political process. They might also come to believe that certain basic Christian beliefs are in fact hateful, intolerant and repressive of other people’s freedoms.

Chaput also stressed that religious freedom means freedom for the church as a community and organization to fulfill its mission to preach the gospel. This freedom comes from God, not human laws, and must be asserted in the face of oppressive governments. He cited the example of Pope Gregory VII standing up to Emperor Henry IV, who sought to control the church within his territories. The church is never a threat to good government, Chaput said, but it is a hedge against the vanity of earthly rulers and totalitarian governments.

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Bishop Corriveau condemned the current concept of individual rights for leading to the tyranny of the autonomous self. Freedom based on the autonomous individual is a false freedom, he said. For Christians, the triune God should be the model of freedom. The Father is not free because he is autonomous. He is free because his relationship with the Son is without subordination or domination.

In contrast, feminist politics drives a wedge between a mother and her child over the abortion issue by championing the autonomy of the woman. But pro-life groups do the same if they champion the child without reference to the mother.

Corriveau cited Helen Keller, the champion of the hearing and speech impaired. Keller, he said, was a perfectly autonomous individual,  willful and egocentric. But she only became a person when her teacher, Annie Sullivan, taught her to acknowledge her relationships with other people.

Corriveau went on to critique globalization, which, according to Pope Benedict XVI, has made us neighbours, not brothers. The job of Christians in the public square, he said, is to bring this quality of brotherhood and sisterhood to all of life. Christians should resist globalization’s division of the world’s people into rich and poor, winners and losers.

Dana Scallon provided a humorous after-banquet speech on the second night of the conference , as well as a powerful pro-life song, ‘This is My Body,’ together with two Victoria singers. She sang the part of a woman left bereft by an earlier abortion, Connie Dinwoody, editor of the Diocesan Messenger, sang the part of a woman contemplating the operation, and St. Andrew’s High School music teacher Phillip O’Reilly sang the part of Jesus – each giving a different meaning to the title phrase.

Scallon described her own time in the public square, as a presidential candidate in the Irish elections (she came third) and as a member of the European parliament, where she combined with other pro-lifers to stop foreign aid from going out with strings attached, requiring the recipients to promote abortion services.

December 2010