PASSIONIST JPIC COMMITTEE
Passionist Position Guide Religious Freedom: A Call to engage in a challenging dialogue Fr. Sebastian MacDonald and John Gonzalez
2011
This year’s world day of peace message by Pope Benedict XVI was titled: Religious Freedom, the Path to Peace. The Catholic Church starts off every year with a message of peace that reflects over an issue of social concern in the hope that the Catholic community will take to heart this Papal message and become agents of peace in our troubled and violent world. This year the Pope’s reflection starts by contemplating the recent violence in the Middle East and especially in Iraq that is targeted at the Christian minorities of these areas. The Pope specifically mentioned the October 31st attack in Baghdad where 52 faithful Catholics were killed while celebrating Mass. In light of this and other forms of religious repression Pope Benedict XVI is inviting us to be peacemakers by engaging in dialogue: For the Church, dialogue between the followers of the different religions represents an important means of cooperating with all religious communities for the common good. This call to dialogue is not a simple challenge. When a nation or institution like the Church declares its support for human rights or principles like religious freedom they do not intend to simplify an obviously complicated issue with a simple legal remedy. The call for dialogue by the church is a call for us all to engage with a complicated issue by discovering in dialogue the various perspectives that are confronted by this issue and respecting all these perspectives as legitimate concerns by people who share our own human dignity but who approach these issues from their own unique experience. In the past the Passionist community has offered position guides to give people an opportunity to engage with these issues by pursuing an objective and unbiased journey into a couple of legitimate but conflicting perspectives surrounding the issue. For the purpose of this constructed argument we continue to call on two of our early church who shared a different perspective in promoting the Gospel message. In Acts 15 we are told of the famous council of Jerusalem where St. Paul and St. James demonstrate how different perspectives can be discussed within a fraternal spirit of respect and unity. In our own nation we recently experienced a complicated situation that questioned our definition of religious freedom. In the proximity of the ground zero in New York an Islamic organization proposed the building of a Mosque and community center. The issue raised many concerns regarding both religious and cultural sensitivities especially in the place where the United States suffered the great terrorist attack by an Islamic militant organization. Fr. Sebastian MacDonald provides us with two thoughtful arguments using the theological personalities of our two great Apostles in seeing the legitimate concerns that emanate from this issue. We remind the reader that the goal of a discussion is not to press one’s perspective over another’s. The council of Jerusalem was not a court of law that had to decide for either Paul of James. Instead it is a forum where a compromise can be sought after a respectful exchange takes place between the legitimate concerns of both parties. 2
Position 1: Respect for the Feelings of Those Traumatized by 9-11? Structures can prove provocative as well as “constructive”. This has especially been the case with “walls” the past half century or so: the Berlin wall, the Israeli wall, the Arizona wall. In each of these cases, such structures evoked more anger than harmony. They suggested hostility, separateness, division. Is this the case with another kind of structure, “the mosque”, being proposed in Manhattan in New York City by the Muslim community? A mosque, of course, is not a wall. It’s a religious building dedicated to the worship of God. Is it as liable to evoke anger or conflict as a wall is? It seems to be so, or, if not precisely these reactions, then certainly upsetness and unpleasantness, perhaps more akin to sadness and hurt feelings. The nearness of the proposed house of worship to Ground Zero, where nearly 3000 persons lost their lives on September 11, 2001, has evoked opposition from many persons in New York City, especially those who lost kith and kin on that occasion, one planned and executed by a group associated with Al Quaeda. How thoughtless and even heartless the building of a moque appears to be, running roughshod over emotions still raw from an event not yet ten years old. Deep feelings and emotions are involved. Is this deliberately intended as a provocative act? It might be just the opposite, a conciliatory gesture of reaching out on the part of mainline, upright Islamic people, wanting to soothe hurt and grief by an investment in a sign of the Holy God brought near a place where a cursed event occurred. Cannot this effort be interpreted as an outreach of good will, seeking to bring beauty and peace where ugliness and disharmony had prevailed? Why need this be seen as a problem to be eliminated rather than an opportunity to be appreciated? Not a win-lose proposition, but a win-win one: a monument to the good will of a people who deplore 9-11 as much as other New Yorkers, who, indeed, lost loved ones too in the carnage of that day. But, granted the possibilities for goodness associated with this venture, there still remains the matter of feelings, of sentiment, of emotion embedded in many people in the city, none of which is susceptible to reasoned argument. The question is asked: why doesn’t the Islamic community recognize this element of feelings? Why does it think that this venture of theirs will calm and soothe the intensity of feeling? Is it misreading the intensity of the sentiment, or does it think that it has subsided and been forgotten about, or, worse, does it just disregard this issue of emotion, as if it’s overblown and uncalled for? Likely none of these possible interpretations is correct. It’s simply something the Muslim worshipper wishes to do, in its effort to offer God the recognition He deserves from His devoted followers. And this community, as any religious group, has the right to do so, one embedded in natural law, and explicated, in this case, by a specific amendment to the U.S. Constitution, in fact the very first one: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This amendment is probably referenced more than any 3
other of the 27 amendments to the Constitution. New Yorkers certainly acknowledge this, but they maintain it’s not a matter of rights, but of feelings. They would not oppose a mosque being built, but at a greater distance from Ground Zero. They recognize that the proposed building is not only a mosque, but also a public building open to all New Yorkers for a variety of purposes conducive to many things the city values, but, again, why not this overture of a helping hand at a place where it will be welcomed? They realize that most Muslims are not members of or even sympathetic to Al Quaeda and its practices of terrorism, but they worry about attitudes found in The Koran, the Muslim holy book, seemingly supportive of violence. But, when push comes to shove, do not rights, especially those enshrined in the foundational document of this nation, prevail over sentiments of anguish and grief? What would become of this nation and its laws if their violation was countenanced on the score that feelings would be hurt if an exception was not made for special reasons? And, indeed, is there not another mosque, already built some years ago, nearby, without evoking any outburst of opposition?—which is true, except that it antedated the 9-11 apocalyptic event, whose impact has reversed the course of history, much as the crossing of the Red Sea by the Moses-led Israelites turned things completely around. So it comes down to a conflict between a right, a very basic one, and a set of feelings. Are not feelings easily dismissed as poor competitors against the weightiness of a right? Perhaps not. Feelings are indeed emotions and sentiments, shared by all of us, part of the endowment of our humanity, designed by the Creator to enhance and improve our humanness. Feelings serve us well, both empowering us to engage in activities with greater zest and energy, and protecting us against adversarial situations that could harm us. They are not to be dismissed as of lesser significance to us than our powers of thought and will. Feelings can get out of hand, and can be irrational, but so can mind and heart or will. Can a right be insisted upon if it causes injury to another? If the other is offensive and dangerous, then, yes, the right of self-defense prevails over injury caused to another. But if the right’s claim, in its turn, proves offensive and injurious to another, then it may not prevail in a conflict such as this one. After all, the right to religious expression is not being completely rejected, since another mosque stands nearby. In addition, the Islamic community is completely welcome to build this mosque, but in a different site, somewhat removed from the disputed area. So the right is not being opposed absolutely—just partially. For the Muslim community to insist on this particular location seems an unjustifiable infringement of peoples’ understandable feelings about the impropriety of doing so. After all, there have been other cases of conflict between rights claimed by religious groups and human issues, that were settled in favor of the human factor, lest injury occur to the human component involved, such as the Jehovah Witnesses’ repudiation of blood transfusions versus the well-being of their children, or the Mormon position on polygamy vs. the states’ interest in the institution of marriage or even the recent Catholic mode of procedure in sex abuse cases, 4
where a mantle of secrecy surrounding the transfer of transgressing clergy into situations of endangerment to yet other young people was maintained as a religious practice, vs. some very disturbing human situations. Admittedly, the conflict in these examples was not precisely between rights and feelings, since factors other than “feelings” were at issue. But they illustrate religiously-based claims to a right being curtailed because of ensuing human injury. The bible too provides interesting commentary on conflicts between rights and very human issues, where, in a manner of speaking, the right is foregone in the face of these human considerations. St. Paul offers illustrations out of his own life, as when he downplays the right (not acknowledged at the time) of the run-away slave Onesimus to his freedom before the claims (and feelings) of his owner, Philemon, or when he modulates the right of a Christian to eat perfectly good meat sold on the market (though earlier on used in pagan worship ceremonies), but scandalizing a recent convert to the faith from paganism, upon seeing his fellow-Christian eating such meat, (1 Cor. 10.23-30) or Paul’s appealing to his right as a Roman citizen to be tried before Caesar out of very realistic feelings he will not receive a fair trial before a Jewish religious court (Acts 25.6-12). All of these cases cite conflict between claims to religious rights and some very human factors. And, in each case, the right based on religion cedes before the human element. While it is true that in this matter the Muslim community has feelings too, as well as rights, and it can be asked why their feelings should not be honored, it seems that they are better situated to renegotiate their feelings than their fellow New Yorkers are, since they can mitigate their feelings by building elsewhere, even nearby, whereas their fellow citizens are less favorably situated to renegotiate their feelings, in view of a mosque that will remain where it’s built as a permanent reminder. This win-lose scenario might better translate, if at all possible, into a win-win project. For example, should New Yorkers prevail in this dispute, they could contribute to the building of a mosque elsewhere, but nearby. Or should Islamic religious rights win out in this disagreement, the Islamic community could ask fellow New Yorkers to have a say in the design of the mosque, much as they had in the case of the new structures replacing the World Trade Towers. There can be better ways of proceeding than the stand-off currently in place. By way of a concluding remark, we recall how previous position guides sought to provide additional illumination on the discussion of specific topics by appealing to the contrasting views of the Christian life that two apostles such as James and Paul exemplified. To continue this comparison in this case, an appeal might be made to the approach Paul often took to matters of dispute. He, at times, found occasion to skirt the clear directive to be found in law, especially Jewish religious law, in favor of a value that lay beyond the ambit of law. Were he to be invoked in this case, he would likely side with the New York citizens who have no clear direction, as provided in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but who, nonetheless, feel they are arguing for something of greater import than the right to religious freedom, and so feel no constraint before the directive of this amendment: another instance of Paul's frequent appeal to freedom before the law, in certain instances. 5
The Right to a Mosque of Our Own The building of a mosque near the site of the destroyed World Trade Towers was not an explicit exercise of first amendment rights on the part of the Islamic community of New York. Though others, in defense of what that community attempted to do, quickly appealed to this issue of “rights”, the Muslim community had not thought in that vein, at least initially. The appeal to a “right” makes headway on the American scene, clarifying what is defensible or indefensible. It is wholesome that people think in those terms. However, given the growing crescendo of appeals to “rights” over the past number of years, a certain hue and cast has been thrown upon many disputes in this country, enveloping them in a legal framework more forcefully than the earlier sense of this amendment intended to do. For, in the early constitutional setting of the term “right”, such as the right to exercise one’s religion, an adversarial tone, attacking or defendingthe right was not as evident as today. Rather, early on, right was a prerogative of the “person”, prior to any legal/judicial foundation for it. Its initial foundation was human nature/the dignity of the person. The first amendment right to religious expression and practice was not a consequence of some prior principle or position, but was rather a facet of the way human persons are constituted. While the first amendment can be appealed to in justification of the Islamic desire to build a mosque on this disputed site, it is primarily in view of the full meaning of the human person, prior to any formulation within a legal framework. Somewhere down the line, should this disagreement continue, a court of law may become the venue of the ongoing debate, but, underlying that is an appreciation of what it means to be a human person. A human being is one capable of recognizing and worshiping God. To obstruct this is to dehumanize someone, and this is a core issue in opposing construction of the mosque. While the Islamic community has a "right" to build a mosque on the site in question, it's the issue of the inherent dignity as a community of human persons underlying this right in the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Islam is not appealing to specious reasoning utilized by only a few at the margins of the human community. Its worldwide membership numbers a billion, equal to that of Roman Catholicism. Like any group of that size, it has a variety of minority divisions, comparable to the multiple rites within the Roman Catholic community, not all of which see eye to eye on everything, but such divisions do not weaken this specific claim. Among such Islamic groups are radicals, such as Al Quaeda, which espouses violence to advance its cause. Al Quaeda is the group responsible for 9-11, not the Islamic community at large. The U.S. government recognizes this, and clearly focuses its retaliatory actions against Al Quada alone, not against Islam as a whole. And Al Quaeda does not reserve its violence only for nonIslamic populations, but spews it out against fellow-Muslims, as the events unfolding in Iraq and Afghanistan have amply illustrated the last few years. In fact, in the 9-11 attack, a number of American Muslims were killed in the Twin Towers. Islam has no love for Al Quaeda. Its desire to build a mosque near the site of the destruction in no way suggests a hidden agenda to support or justify the horrors of 9-11. 6
Just the opposite. Islam wishes to join forces with fellow-Americans, especially New Yorkers, in bringing to bear a totally different approach to this tragedy: one of prayerful worship of God (Allah)--an approach completely at odds with the misunderstanding of those regarding it as a further instance of the 9-11 aggression. In Christian terms, this is an act of reparation, not a renewed attack. Islam wishes to join Christians in calling up the spiritual energy of religion to offset and overcome the hate-filled animosity of Al Quaeda. Christian New Yorkers should recognize a friend when they meet one. Catholics especially should welcome this overture on the part of Islamic New Yorkers, regarding it as further instance of the things Catholics and Muslims already have in common--a recognition fostered by the Vatican itself on the international level, as when the two of them formed a common bond at the U.N. to defend the rights of the human family/marriage against those who would redefine marriage/family in such a way that sexual differentiation no longer constitutes the inner nexus of what the marital bond is all about. In addition, both Islam and Catholicism see child-bearing as the heart and core of marriage, especially by repudiating the inroads of abortion. Furthermore, each of them furthermore promotes the well-being and special status of women in its midst--admittedly in quite distinct ways--but nonetheless loud and clear. Apart from the UN forum, we note other dimensions of harmony which their religious inclinations promote, such as a special holy day each week (Friday/Sunday), reverence for a holy book, the Koran and the bible (which is shared in large measure by each), reservation of a special place for prayer (mosque, church/cathedral), a number of holy places/shrines (Mecca, Rome), religious authority figures (imams, priests), esteem for those excelling in the soaring heights of prayer (suffis, mystics), a series of holy periods throughout the year (Ashman, Mawlid, Ramadan/Lent/Advent), practices of prayer (beads/rosary), veneration of special holy people (Mohammed/Jesus, saints etc.), penitential dietary practices, the familiar call to daily prayer (minaret/angelus belfry), postures for prayer (bow, kneeling), a rich history of art/architecture, a vibrant missionary spirit to incorporate others into its ranks, etc. The impact of these many points of similarity should be the downplaying of differences and diminishment of antipathy, and the growth of fellowship and collaboration. The proposed New York mosque is an opportunity to symbolize such convergence, even to the point of collaborating in the project, so that the mosque comes to represent a gathering space, not only for the Muslim community, but also for those of other religious convictions. There is much good awaiting to be recognized in each group, and the mosque should not be held hostage to an incident atypical of Islam. Rather, it should be another factor among the already multiple similarities shared by Islam and Catholicism. There should be a place within this proposed mosque for study and learning about the shared riches in their religious experience, leading to mutual enrichment. The mosque does not represent a threat, nor the repetition of an insult, but a gesture of outreach, fellowship and friendship to contain and reduce hatred in the world. In line with an appeal to the apostles, Sts. James and Paul, to bring often differing points of view to bear upon matters of disagreement, it would certainly be in accord with St. James' well-known 7
defense of the law, especially Jewish religious law, as a reliable guide for conducting oneself worthily before the Lord. In this instance, it would likely be his tendency to accord full weight to the import of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and to defend vigorously the right of the Islamic community to exercise their freedom to pursue their religious aspirations of building a mosque close to the 9-11 site. This is an interesting case in which freedom and the law converge toward the same conclusion: it is lawful to exercise one's freedom in this way. While both apostles appeal to freedom, in this instance Paul does so by moving away from the letter of the law (of the first amendment), while James makes the same appeal to freedom, but by finding it clearly embedded within the amendment. But there is a difference in the freedoms. Paul's support of freedom would be like a freedom "from" the urging of the first amendment, whereas James' affirmation of freedom is comparable to a freedom "for" the inner meaning of that amendment. Conclusion: The fruits of dialogue are creative solutions This discussion demonstrates the complexity that surrounds an issue such as the proposed Park 51 Mosque. The American and Catholic principle of religious freedom is cherished as a fundamental right that flows from the dignity of the human person. The principle of religious freedom is not being debated here. What is being debated is the spirit of this principle. Religious freedom has been defined in the past as the separation of church and state. This definition may not be very useful. In truth separating church and state may be as impossible as it is to separate the body from the soul. What is being sought by this principle is the just relationship that needs to exist between these two vital aspects of human society that fully respects the dignity of all people. A principle must function within society through the application of the rule of law. However the legal enforcement of that principle cannot debilitate the spirit of what the principle was meant to protect. This principle serves the dignity of the human community and that in turn seeks to serve the common good. It is the common good that we hope to achieve in defending principles such as religious freedom. The best interest of us all requires that we engage in dialogue over this issue. The principle is sound but the issues are complex and as we can see from the debate that was offered above it involves the complex reality of feelings, rights and social sensitivities. The solution is not a simple answer. If we hope to apply a simple litmus test on the issue then we will be missing the point. There is a solution but it requires a creative consideration from all who will be impacted by the decision. The only way we will get to this creative solution is through a spirit of mutual reflect and compromise. In the debate above both arguments held a valid truth that needed to be heard. If the involved parties could openly discuss their feelings and concerns within an atmosphere of mutual respect and with a willingness to compromise then we will come to a creative solution that both protects religious freedom and promotes the common good. Archbishop Dolan of New York offered to facilitate such a discussion and although we are not aware of what became of that conversation we do know that it did calm an otherwise tense situation. 8