Why everyone should care about the silencing of the religious voice

Benedict’s warnings last week about the silencing of Christian voices in the public square provided a wonderful argument for why the Roman church’s current agonies matter far beyond its own pews. Yet the news-skewering effect of the abuse scandal pushed his warnings to the bottom paragraphs of most news reports.

More, an institution perceived as silencing the innocent during sexual crimes, then brow beating them to keep the secret afterward, hardly seems credible crying out against the stilling of the voices of the faithful.

Yet if the Roman Catholic Church is, ultimately, able to make just and charitable recompense for the offenses of its priests, if it is able to renew its evangelical and moral mission with the abuse scandal as part of its history, Benedict’s speech at Westminster Hall last week may contain the words to rally not just Catholics, not just Christians, not just believers, but even those who put their faith purely in secular liberal democracy.

http://thepapalvisit.org.uk/Replay-the-Visit/Speeches/Speeches-17-September/Pope-Benedict-s-address-to-Politicians-Diplomats-Academics-and-Business-Leaders

In his remarkable address, Benedict argued not just for faith as a man of faith, but for freedom as a child of dictatorship. Joseph Ratzinger witnessed first-hand as a young man the full evil of what might be called associational silencing, i.e. denying human beings full status as citizens simply because of the sources of what they say. As a result, he urged us to see that democracy, not dogma, suffers most from misunderstanding or abusing the separation of church and state. After all, the great monotheisms have survived for millennia under every political system that humans can connive. Humanity’s innate religious sense apparently pre-dates even language.

But we need only skip back in time the short distance to the current pope’s adolescence to be reminded of what can happen to tolerant, liberal democratic societies when faith is first pushed into private, and then the faithful themselves are deemed insufficiently human to merit entry to the public square. 

Is such an outcome a necessary consequence of every diminishment of religious freedom? No. But an abundance of caution, not to mention an enduring love of tolerance and liberality, should prompt all who care about democracy to speak out against what Benedict rightly identifies as the silencing of the religious voice.