Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom

Here’s a story I just filed on the Harper government’s intetnion to establish an Office of Religious Freedom as part of Foreign Affairs. that would report to the minister of countries that oppress religions or do not protect them when other citizens attack.
AMazingly, there are people against this. Of course, it is a tactic of Harper’s enemies to keep emphasizing anything about religion under this government, to build the story that the Harper government is under trhe influence of (gasp) Christians who are TRYING TO RAM THEIR FAITH DOWN OTHER”S THROATS.
So while the office to protect religious freedom seems admirable, the opposition will atack it anyway in order to build their case. The hilariously paranoid book, Armageddon Factor, is an example of this tactic.

Canada plans controversial Religious Freedom Office, copies U.S.
Meanwhile, US Commission on International Religious Freedom nearly loses funding

By Steve Weatherbe

As Muslims firebomb Christian churches in northern Nigeria, and the Chinese Communists imprison the faithful of many religions, the Conservative government of Canada is planning to respond with its new Office of Religious Freedom modeled after one the U.S.

Canadian critics of the government are recycling criticisms first used in 1998 when the U.S. created the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom (USIRF) was as part of the State Department. To the evident confusion of many Canadians, the same legislation set up the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom (USCIRF) . The latter, which is semi-autonomous and stands accused of pro-Christian bias, barely escaped extinction in December, as a last-minute reform bill gave it another three years’ funding but cut its budget and forced seven commissioners to resign.

While the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called on Congress to refund the Commission, its Canadian counterpart has offered no encouragement to the government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to bring its own Office of Religious Freedom into being this spring. Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops spokesman Rene Laprise told the Register the conference “had no comment on that. We are waiting to see how it works.”

Religious Liberty is the First Liberty
Less circumspect was Father Raymond de Souza, newspaper columnist, sometime Register contributor, and a participant in the government’s consultation process about the new Office. “This is a very good idea. Religious liberty has always been the first liberty. The freedom of the English church from the English monarchy was the first thing in the Magna Carta. Freedom of religion is the first right in the U.S. Bill of Rights and in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. If the state controls that, all other freedoms are in peril.”

Critics of the office include Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario, Canada’s most populous province. Missing the point of the Office entirely, he said Canada already had a safeguard for religious freedom. “We have a document in this country that does that; it’s called the Charter of Rights [and Freedom].”
When the Conservatives promised to create the office, during the runup to last summer’s decisive election victory, they won the support of the opposition Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff. But Ignatieff, a foreign affairs expert, is long gone. His replacement, Bob Rae, has accused the Conservatives of creating the office to pander to ethnic and religious minorities. “It has much more to do with Canadian domestic politics than it has to do with the necessity of having a coherent strategy for the promotion of democracy and human rights,” said Rae.
The charge of vote pandering arose from another prominent Liberal, backroom operator Warren Kinsella, who blogged 10 reasons for not having the Office, or about five too many, given the many contradictions. Reviewing invitees to a government consultation in October on the Office, he complained that there were no Hindus and, while Muslims were present, they did not belong to the two most numerous Islamic sects, leaving his readers to wonder how ignoring the largest voter blocs could be considered pandering.
Other objections included the Office’s expense–$5 million a year—and the fact that it won’t be bipartisan as the American one is, clearly confusing USIRF, which is the model for the Canadian office and is part of the State Department, with USCIRF, which is bipartisan, advisory and independent of the administration.
Kinsella also combined persistent claims about the U.S. Commission’s pro-Christian bias with current left-wing concerns about the Harper government’s presumed pro-Christian bias, and accused the Harper government of cultural imperialism for foisting its Christian values on other countries. But then he undermined these concerns by claiming that Canada was not important enough for other countries to pay any attention to it anyway.
But those who do care about religious rights disagree. Allen Hertzke, presidential professor of political science at Oklahoma University calls the Canadian move “an exciting development.” What’s more, Canada’s middle-power status is actually an advantage. “Whenever the U.S. raises the issue, it is always open to criticism, as a superpower, of having mixed motives. Canada doesn’t carry that baggage.”

As to what business Canada or the United States have monitoring or complaining about religious rights violations elsewhere, Hertzke said, “We’ve heard that criticism a lot in the U.S. But, in fact, both countries are obliged to stand up for religious freedom and for other human rights in international forums, as are all signatories to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. It is perfectly legitimate for Canada to call other countries, including the United States, to account on how they are living up to their obligations.”

Hertzke dismisses Kinsella’s other criticism that the U.S. Office of International Religious Freedom (USIRF) has shown a pro-Christian and anti-Muslim bias. “That was raised when the law creating the office was being debated but today it is usually heard only from Islamic leaders who want to divert attention from religious rights violations in their countries. If anything we see the State Department bending over backwards to appear unbiased, by focusing on Muslim on Muslim persecution, or Christian on Christian.”

Predatory Proselytization
However, the same cannot be said for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) The Commission, as set up, has nine commissioners, three each appointed by Senate, House of Representatives and the President. While USIRF reports annually on every country, USCIRF reports only on problem countries. According to Hindu activist Suhag Shukla, co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, the Commission not only ignores many “hot spots” of religious persecution such as Malaysia and Syria because Christians are not the victims there, but the whole intent of the U.S.’s religious freedom laws is to enable “predatory proselytization” by Christian missionaries in countries where other religious predominate. Shukla applauded the shrinking of the commissioners’ terms, which will result in seven of the nine incumbents stepping down, most of them Christian.
This criticism even found support from within USCIRF itself. according to Janet Epp Buckingham, one of the Evangelical participants in the Canadian government’s consultation. “USCIRF itself made some statements after the [Canadian] announcement [saying] ‘don’t make the mistakes that we did. This office should be multi-faith, multi-religious, representing many communities out there experiencing religious persecution.’ That is a self-criticism they would make.”
Several critics of the Canadian plan also implied that, since religion itself was bad, religious freedom was bad too. Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International Canada, said religion can have “ contentious relationship” with other human rights, such as homosexuality and women’s rights. And Kinsella ended his list of reasons with,“Throughout history, many [wars] have started at the intersection between faiths.”
But Canada’s Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, the outspoken Catholic who engineered the Conservative party’s successful wooing of ethnic minorities, is unapologetic about the Office. “Perhaps there are some rabid secularists out there who don’t understand there are a lot of vulnerable religious minorities under attack around the world,” said Kenney. “To those people who would challenge [the Office] because they are uncomfortable with religious faith, I would say, ‘Get over it.’ We’re talking about fundamental rights here.”
Voice to the Voiceless
Canada’s foreign affairs minister, John Baird, was equally frank in announcing the creation of the Office at the General Assembly of the United Nations. “It is our common duty to uphold the rights of the afflicted. To give voice to the voiceless.As citizens of the global community, we have a solemn duty to defend the vulnerable, to challenge the aggressor, to protect and promote human rights and human dignity, at home and abroad.”
He went on to defend Israel and condemn its attackers along with such oppressive regimes as Assad’s Syria, North Korea, Kaddafi’s Libya, Communist China and Iran. As well, he faulted the United Nations for making mockery of its own principles.
The push for the Office came from Canada’s Evangelical Christian churches. Though they comprise a much smaller slice of the religious pie in Canada than in the U.S. (under 10 per cent), evangelicals are the only Christian group that is growing, and their influence with the Conservative government of Stephen Harper is significant.

Some of the concern about the new Canadian Office is that the Conservative government has provided only the vaguest details: It will have a staff of five, an operating budget of $500,000 a year and a total budget of $5 million a year. This has left everyone wondering where the non-operational funds will go. The American example suggests it will be granted to non-profit organizations and individuals who are champions of religious freedom.

Sanctions are rare
Does the American Office have a real impact? Hertzke says it does, though not in the way intended by the legislation. This requires the U.S. government to impose one of a range of sanctions on countries that seriously oppress religions, but Hertzke says this rarely happens. Frequently, however, when a country is already being sanctioned for something else, religious oppression is added as a reason.

What have turned out to be their most powerful tools for both USIRF and USCIRF are their respective annual reports, says Hertzke. USIRF’s report is especially authoritative and influential, because it relies on original research by State Department operatives.

Hertzke also believes that the investigations leading up to the report has an important impact on State Department staff who might otherwise spend their time on economic affairs, forcing them to spend time with minority religious leaders.

Joseph Kung, founder and director of the Cardinal Kung Foundation, which is dedicated to defending the underground Catholic church in China, says of USIRF and USCIRF, “They are doing a helluva good job. We need them to tell the world what is going on.” Kung said that without USIRF and USCIRF, nobody would know what was really being done to Christians in China, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

Hats off to University of Victoria

Many universities in Canada have cravenly given in to political correctness and required pro-life demonstrators to do their business in secluded areas. Especially those daring enough to present the Genocide Awareness Project and its array of pictures from various massacres and genocides of history, plus, of course, pictures of abortions.

But the University of Victoria has chosen to allow the Youth Protecting Youth pro-life group on campus to present a mini-GAP in a well-used area, outside the campus library, I believe. As a result, the local arch-feminist=pro-aborts and maybe student society board too have condemned the university and YPY alike.

The pro-aborts have already moved to take away YPY’s club funding (again and again with a few hours notice) and are proceeding with a hearing to discipline the club further. At least one member of the board, Tara Paterson, is a rabid pro-abort who has led the charge against YPY in the past, but what are the bets nobody will question the propriety of her sitting in judgement on YPY despite being a queenpin with the arch-rival pro-abortion club?

hats off to U Vic and to YPY.

But theMany universi

Phil Jacobs Trial taking too long

When did Phil Jacobs get arrested? Was it over a year ago? And now, it will be another for the trial to happen. Nearly. Not till October 9, 2012 will the BC Supreme Court try the former Catholic priests for charges of molesting Victoria altar boys. That’s too long for this case or any other case. it is a blot on the record of the Liberal government. Justice delayed is justice denied and so on.
For your records, Jacobs watchers, his case number is 151281-2.

Since I wrote this the Vancouver Sun has done a major story on delays in the BC courts and how hundreds of prosecutions may be thrown out by judges on the grounds that justice delayed is justice denied.

Victorian Christians are cool to Life

As head of Victoria’s new prolife organization, Choose Life Victoria, I’ve been disappointed, but not,I guess, surprised, by the underwhelming response from all denominations, their leaders, their clergy and most of their members, to our appeals for support.
I expected more from the Catholic priests, I have to say. I din’t know what to expect from the Evangelical pastors and I have to say they met this expectation.
One youth pastor, hilariously, said he was worried that if he encouraged his flock to join us in the 40 Days Vigil outside the abortion clinic at Helmcken and the Old Island Highway, they might be associated with the Occupy movement!
Pietism is the name for this. Obviously, American evangelicals got over it decades ago. Not so the Canadians.
As for Catholics, well, we’ve got the country we deserve, is all I can say.

The New Sung Gloria

 

This is a revision: I had the key words I was complaining about wrong. My apologies.

 

I’ll make this short and sweet: probably of interest only too Catholics. The new sung Gloria requires us to either sing or listen to the chorus eight times. “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of goodwill. .That’s about seven times too many in my book, though I admit I have a tender ear when it comes to repetition. The spoken triplets have aways seemed appropriate, especially when they have a twist on the third: The ‘Lamb of God…’ with ‘grant us peace in the third iteration, the ‘Lord I am not worthy…’ and now, back again, through my fault, though my fault…
But choruses the eighthtime round, frankly, make me want to leave the building. I don’t think I can blame the Blessedly Banal Mart Haugen for this.

Defending the Catholic public schools

Here are a column I wrote with the idea of sending it to the National Post, and a letter with the same intent, both in response to the debate there over the Catholic public schools in Ontario, whether they should set up gay-straight clubs, and whether they should exist at all.

I got too busy with other things and never completed or sent either. Here they are. I might add that the Catholic system as it now exists was created in 1982 or thereabouts, a completely parallel system to the secular public schools. But the previous version, wth public funding only up to Grade 10, existed since before Confederation. Indeed, its creation was one of the causes of Confederation. It came about as the result of a rare alliance of Irish Catholic assemblymen from Canada West (Ontario) in the legislature of the United Canadas with French Catholic assemblymen in Canada East (Quebec). Mostly the Irish voted with the English and against the French. On this issue they ganged up to give Canada West Catholic schools and Canada East minority English schools. But the Grits under George Brown in Canada West saw this as an argument for a federal union of British colonies (and not a unitary system) in order to get those damn Catholic Frenchies out of Ontario’s internal affairs.

Both are addressed to the Post’s general readership. For Catholics the question ought to be different:  why bother having a Catholic school system if it can’t be, or won’t be, Catholic? Here in Victoria, how Catholic are the Catholic schools? How distinctly Catholic? Do they teach Catholic morality? Do they teach a Catholic view of science? Of history? Of the arts? Are they even aware such things exist?

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, a Catholic himself, is proposing legislation requiring the province’s fully-funded Catholic system to set up gay-straight students’ clubs in furtherance of his anti-bullying program. Setting aside the merits of this particular initiative, this has revived the larger debate over the very existence of the Catholic schools. Against it are marshaled these arguments: that it is anachronistic; that it adds “enormous” costs (as the Post’s Chris Selley would have it) through duplication, that its moral teaching on homosexuality is wrong and, indeed, hasn’t been believed by “the majority of Canadians” (according to a recent letter writer) since the Enlightenment.
Behind the argument over Catholic moral teaching lies the assumption that the public schools were created to teach not just the three Rs, but values. And Ontario’s public school system was indeed created for all those purposes (and also to reduce crime in Toronto, because of all the juvenile delinquents running loose), but the moral values it was tasked to deliver were specifically Protestant and specifically the values of the Protestant majority in the mid-1800s. But there was also a sizeable minority of Catholics who rejected the compulsory Protestantization of their children. Hence the controversial creation of Ontario’s (or Canada West’s) Catholic system more than a century ago, the result of a rare alliance of French Catholic legislators in Canada East ganging up with a few Irish Catholic assemblymen in Canada West.
Today, the Ontario government and Post columnist Chris Selley clearly believe that the system is a tool of social engineering. Its job is to teach the values of the government of the day, regardless of the parents( though Selley would prefer to express this as the values of society: one means the other.) It is high time to challenge this idea. Ontario would be better off if both school systems taught their parents’ values, and not the government’s values.
So, if the Catholic system teaches homosexual behavior is sinful and if that is what Catholics want it to teach, isn’t it their business? The obvious objection is that this would justify Muslim schools that taught, for example, its students to hate Jews. Or fundamentalist Protestant schools that taught the Genesis version of the origin of the world.
But here’s an obvious difference: it is against the law in Canada to teach hatred of any racial or sexual group. It is not against the law to teach that certain sexual acts are wrong or that the universe was created in six days. There is no provincial or federal law prohibiting these latter beliefs. That homosexual behaviour is “intrinsically disordered” is a belief of a significant number of Catholic, Protestant, Muslim and Sikh Canadians and it is their right to pass the belief on to their children via their schools, funded with their tax dollars.
Apart from the question of whether the public schools should be using their precious hours with our children to inculcate the current social agenda (be it environmentalism, anti-bullying or normalization of minority sexual behaviour), there is this: one of our society’s implicit values is pluralism, which includes tolerance for minority behaviour but also much more. We believe in a free press, for example, in terms both of freedom from censorship, but also of the freedom to start as many newspapers as we want to pay for. Sadly the same freedom does not exist for television and radio but happily it does for Internet sites. Thus there are many competing newspapers and websites with competing versions of the facts. This means duplication, or “enormous” cost. Why does Toronto need four daily, English language newspapers and others in other languages? It cannot be justified cost-wise, surely. Wouldn’t be cheaper to have just one?
Cheaper only maybe, not better. Because it is better for Canada to have competing generators of values and worldviews. We all recognize that it is better to have, not only many different universities, but ones that generate their own syllabuses taught by their own teachers. Much cheaper would be to have one professor for each subject sitting in, say, Toronto, teaching Economics 301 to students all over Ontario via closed circuit TV. Cheaper but not better. Similarly it is better to have competing lawyers, prosecutors and defence lawyers, and competing politicians, government and opposition. This way there is more chance of getting to the real facts.
The same argument applies to the Catholic schools, and by extension, to churches, and even to families. These are all institutions that are free to generate values independent of the state and the news media and of whoever is controlling those other institutions. In some countries the state dictates the values in all areas of life. Which kind of country does Canada want to be?

Let’s take Chris Selley’s argument in Dec. 15’s Full Pundit for abolishing the “anachronistic” Catholic school system –“the enormous cost of duplicating these services”—and turn it against the duplication of newspapers in Toronto. Just imagine how much the cost of everyone’s daily paper would be reduced if there were only one: the savings on redundant columnists alone would lower the price of each copy considerably.
That is if anyone actually believes Selley’s naïve premises: first, that only cost matters (and not, for example, pluralism), and second, that bigness in public administration brings savings. In fact, his arguments were used decades ago to justify amalgamations of major cities like Toronto but many public policy analysts now disbelieve that bigger is cheaper and find instead that bigger institutions bring their own built-in cost add-ons, while urban areas composed of many smaller municipalities bring such advantages as competitive services and tax rates, and more responsive elected representatives and bureaucracies. In the city context, it is Selley’s assumptions that are “anachronistic.”

More Subversive Thoughts–about Papal Worship This Time

I’m reading a book called The New Media, with a subtitle indicating it is about how the Catholic Church and Catholics as individuals can use the new media blogs, Ipods, etc, to spread the faith. One thing I’m struck by: how especially the younger contributors to this anthology like to quote at length from Papal statements on communications by the last two pontiffs.

I just skip these. I’m skeptical about whether either man has or had special insight or expertise into the New Media. I don’t think Catholics with expertise of their own used to write this way. Was this because we had more trust in our own ability to understand and reflect Catholicism? Were we wrong?  This practice strikes me as akin to Fundamentalist Protestants or dogmatic Marxists prefacing each comment with proof texts from the Bible or the works of Marx or Engels.But even moreso it reminds me of the adulation required in Totalitarian regimes to be directed towards the All-Seeing Leader, especially the current boss of North Korea.

The Pope is infallible on matters doctrinal. He’s not a universal guru.

Dangerous Thoughts on Priestly Child Abuse

By Steve Weatherbe

Here is my proposition: given that what is alleged to have happened in the Phil Jacobs case and what is known to have happened ( i.e.,an alleged child molester fired in one diocese and hired in another, now charged with reabusing there) has indeed happened elsewhere hundreds of times with other Catholic priests, it behooves us to consider whether there is something wrong with the System.
My second proposition: if there is something wrong, we need also to consider what aspects of the Catholic Church’s current structure are God-given and indispensable, and which parts are wholly human, even if, possibly, wholly well-meaning.
The apostolic succession means not only that the Pope and his bishops are the transmitters and guarantors of the faith—and that a true Catholic is one who is in communion with a bishop in communion with the Pope.
Does it necessarily follow that parish priests must run the parish and that bishops must run the dioceses as divine rule autocrats?
I ask this questions because of what analysts have said about the clergy abuse scandal and other, similar scandals in other professions such as medicine. And that is, where the general public had more say, the response to abuse came more quickly. The medical profession, for example, resisted and ignored complaints of abuse by female patients. Lawsuits then threatened the professional bodies, which had members of the public on their boards. As well, the legislative bodies that appointed these lay members put on the pressure. The professional bodies responded.
Ditto church denominations which had lay control: these have responded much more quickly than the Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church has not been skeptical enough of its own leadership, of the human potential for sin. In contrast, look at the checks and balances built into the US political system. These checks and balances are based on skepticism: the presidency has some exclusive powers; others he shares; still other governmental powers are reserved for other institutions in the US government. Such checks are absent in the Catholic system.
I propose that bishops should have exclusive power over ordaining priests and supreme power over protecting doctrine. But lay people should have a formal role in approving or dismissing priests, through, say, a diocesan council. In the US Church now there is, as a result of the scandal, a one-strike-and-your-out rule for priests who are complained about. This seems like overkill: why not what other denominations have: an open, rule-based judicial process involving the laity? These are merely technical proposals, but the principle behind them is that we should not trust, we should distrust, the male-only priesthood’s ability to police itself in secret. Especially in areas of sexual misconduct because of the possibility of a secret, homosexual, self-protecting cabal within the clergy and episcopate.
Who will watch the watchers? The question answers itself. It has to be someone else: that’s us the laity.

Protected: Phil Jacobs and the Clergy Abuse Scandal

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Rebutting Dawkins’ Murderous God

And not just Dawkins, but all the neo-atheists, like to throw in our face the murderous, even genocidal deity of the Old Testament. You know, the God who who orders the destruction of the Canaanites, or who punishes Saul for not killing the king of the Amelekites.

So recently I heard a kind of general counter-argument, unpersuasive because it was so general. And that argument was: We Christians believe Jesus is the fulfillment of the Old Testament. Any interpretation of the OT which is inconsistent with Jesus is a a wrongful interpretation, and the murderous God of the OT is inconsistent.

Okay, fine, but then what do we do with the murderous God of the OT? How do we interpret Him? I found a good answer to that one in a book I’m reviewing for the National Catholic Register called The Church and the New Media, which is collection of articles by various Catholic users of  so-called New Media. The relevant article to the issue at hand was by Father Robert Barron, who blogs and youtubes regularly in defence of the Faith. He categorizes the main challenges that come from commenters on his blogs, and one of the main categories he calls “Religion and Violence.” (Fr.Barron’s website is Word on Fire)

It is here I find the rest the argument against the neo-atheists’ murderous God. He starts from the position that Holy Scripture must be read through the lens of a forgiving, not-violent Jesus, and moves on the the position that Scripture comprises a variety of literary forms, that must be read in the context of the time and situation of the human authors. He then contends that the story of Saul and the Amelekite king is not history, but an allegorical story intended to convey the writers’ belief that God desires that we should not tolerate evil at all. The pagan Amelekites represent evil and their king is the last surviving vestige of that evil that we, for love of God, should not tolerate. The Amelekites may have been a real people, but in this account they stand for evil, especially evil in ourselves. Barron applies the message to an alcoholic in recovery, who wants to fudge a little bit and just drink on weekends.