By Dennis Gruending

I travelled with my family in India in 2008 and my most useful guide was the writing of a Scot named William Dalrymple. This past spring we travelled in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan and found that Dalrymple has done it again in his book From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium, which was first published in 1997. Dalrymple searched out and described Christian communities in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel (including the occupied West Bank), and Egypt. While the book is a bit dated, it remains a compelling and useful resource describing the disturbing reality that Christians are either being forced out or are leaving the countries that he profiles. The most accommodating nation in the region is Syria and even there Christians fear for their future.

Dalrymple says that the great flowering of Christianity in the Middle East began after the Roman emperor Constantine declared in the 4th century that Christianity would be the official religion of the empire. The golden age, embodied in the Byzantine Christianity, lasted for about 300 years, until the rise of Islam in the 7th century. During that time, Dalrymple writes, “the Levant was the heartland of Christianity and the centre of Christian civilization.” But he writes that Christianity is suffering “a devastating decline in the land of its birth.”

Dalrymple certainly is not anti-Muslim. He says that for centuries the predominantly Muslim countries of the Ottoman Empire practiced a far greater tolerance for Christians and Jews in their midst than Christian countries of Europe did for either Jews or Muslims. “Only in the 20th century has that tolerance been replaced by new hardening in Islamic attitudes,” Dalrymple says, adding that this is in great part due to a series of humiliations visited upon Muslim countries by the West. “Almost everywhere . . . the Christians are leaving,” he says. (Read on …)

By Dennis Gruending

France’s National Assembly recently approved a bill that would make it illegal to wear in public garments such as the niqab or burqa, which incorporate a full-face veil. Similar laws are in force or being contemplated in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and Spain. Supporters of the legislation say that veils are a provocative symbol of Muslim fundamentalism that has no place in a secular country. They say as well that the veil is more of a cultural than a religious symbol and that it is not essential to Muslim worship. Those who would do away with the veil see themselves as liberating women from a certain oppressive interpretation of Islam. On the other hand, opponents of the legislation say that it is discriminatory against Muslims, that it offends religious liberty, and that it is not the business of the state to tell people how they should dress. (Read on …)

Note: Joe Gunn is executive director of Citizens for Public Justice, an Ottawa-based ecumenical group advocating for social justice. He has worked for churches and church organizations, mainly Catholics, in Canada and Latin America, and he was director for the Social Affairs office of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB). In March 2010, he delivered the Sommerville lecture in Christianity and Communications at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario. I am, with Gunn’s permission, providing here an excerpt from that speech.

On October 17th, 1996, Canadians turned on their evening newscast to hear CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge begin with these words: “Good evening. A blistering attack on governments across the country today, from Canada’s Roman Catholic bishops. The issue is poverty. The bishops accuse governments of using the most vulnerable people in society as human fodder in the battle against deficits. And the bishops weren’t the only ones speaking out…”

The bishops were holding their annual plenary gathering in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Before they began the meeting, however, the bishops of the Social Affairs Commission gathered with a roomful of local activists, including the president of the National Anti-Poverty Organization. To the assembled media, the bishops released their pastoral letter at Hope Cottage, a church-run soup kitchen in the downtown core. People living in poverty spoke, so it wasn’t only the bishops who got the microphone. And after the press conference, the media accompanied the men in black to serve lunch and eat together at the soup kitchen.

Today there seems to be a big change in terms of the public voice of the churches. The Catholic Church has not been totally silent, but if you go to the “Documents” section of the website of the Social Affairs Commission of the bishops, only one text has appeared since March 2008. Today, the capacity and determination of the churches to work for social and ecological justice seems weak. Service to the world now seems less of a concern than doctrine and maintenance of a shrinking membership base among the largest, historical denominations. Economically, the mainline churches are suffering, with unfortunate cuts to church staff and budgets becoming widespread. Is this change happening in all the Christian churches? Is there still a role for conscientious Christian leadership in public justice in Canadian society today? And if so, how might it best be done?

Should Christians be engaged?

Citizens for Public Justice [the organization that Gunn leads] believes that “if religion is understood to be one’s ultimate commitment or life orientation, then it cannot be confined to private life, particular rituals or institutions.” After all, why argue for keeping Christianity or Islam out of public life, when other “religious” value systems like capitalism, liberalism or humanism are not restricted? To ask a person of faith to leave their beliefs behind as soon as a political discussion begins is like asking a lung to refuse to breathe in air. The real issue is how people of faith can and should contribute to a hopeful citizenship.

Not only do Christians have to get involved in public justice, then, but the proper way to advance on this path to holiness is by addressing the causes of suffering of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the Earth community.

Status of faith-based work for justice

A month ago I contacted the social ministry offices of Canada’s nine largest Christian churches and asked if they’d answer a few questions about their social ministries. Eight of the nine were more than pleased to do so: only the CCCB refused to respond. I received helpful replies from the Presbyterian Church in Canada, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, the United Church in Canada, the Christian Reformed Church, Mennonite Central Committee, the Canadian Religious Conference, and the Canadian Council of Churches (CCC).

Among the nine church groupings in the survey, more than two-thirds have fewer staff resources today as compared to five years ago. Several organizations now use short-term internships filled especially by students. Increasingly, volunteers are mandated to serve on committees where staff once served. One respondent expressed disappointment that there were “few, if any” justice educational resources for church use in congregations, and expressed disappointment that there is “no capacity to draft briefs or make presentations to government committees.” When asked what had happened to budgets for this work of social ministry over the past five years, five of the groups reported that they had suffered decreases (some of even up to half), and two had no increase.

When asked about future expectations, six of eight churches that responded to this question expect decreased budgets in the short term future, with the larger groups at reductions of 9-10%, which are levels that could mean losing staff. One church office gave staff a week off without pay as a cost saving measure.

Finally, I asked the most difficult question: “Do you feel that your church office has increased, decreased or enhanced effectiveness in social justice ministries over the past five years?” Seven respondents answered. Three mentioned greatly decreased effectiveness, while two said things remained about the same. One respondent felt his church had “in practice, essentially abandoned its work on social justice” spending most of its time on internal issues and sexuality. This person added, “I suspect those who are passionate are working outside the formal church structures.”

Another revealing commentary was that, “With the sequential decimations of church office staff in all the important member churches of the CCC, there is nothing like the capacity there used to be to undertake substantial joint work compared to five years ago. We continue to rely on sister organizations for substantial policy work: Project Ploughshares, Citizens for Public Justice, KAIROS. . . but unfortunately, those partners are also vulnerable.”

The case of KAIROS

The situation of KAIROS having its funding cut by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) has been in the news recently. What has not been well-covered is that official Catholic support for ecumenical social justice work through KAIROS has been curiously muted. Although both Development and Peace (D&P) and the Catholic bishops serve on KAIROS’ board, their financial commitment to the organization has diminished over the years. The Catholic bishops now give KAIROS $100,000, and all of that comes from D&P. Six years ago, they gave over $250,000. It is the faithful and generous contributions from religious sisters that maintain the Catholic contribution to this ecumenical social justice ministry today.

Not only financial support, but also political support has been waning. In early December, a memo sent to all the bishops reported, “the CCCB executive committee unanimously agreed that the Conference of Bishops will not embark on a campaign to pressure the government of Canada to reconsider its funding decision” concerning the cuts to KAIROS. The executive gave two reasons for inaction: “The international program of KAIROS has always been secondary for the CCCB,” and “The CCCB is not convinced that such a campaign will result in success.”

Contrast this response with that of South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who stated on December 9 that, “The world needs more of KAIROS Canada. It would be an unparalleled setback for the poor, vulnerable and disenfranchised if the voice and work of KAIROS in the global South is muted.” The board of Citizens for Public Justice echoed this concern in their letter to the prime minister, stating “CPJ is concerned that this decision may be another in the trend to discontinue funding of groups who raise questions about current policies, thereby silencing some of the diverse voices that are essential for a healthy public debate about international issues of justice and stewardship.”

New tone needed

While the recent voices of the Christian churches in Canada have been muted and maligned when they have engaged in the public sphere, public dialogue and political advocacy are still constitutive elements of what it means to be a person of faith. But it seems clear that this must now be done differently than in the past.

First, there is still a role to play in defending ecumenical social justice ministry in the churches – I see no reason to cede hard won ground now occupied by the organizations like KAIROS that represent almost 40 years of struggling to live the Gospel faithfully in action. We cannot spend all our strength in attempting to maintain church structures for social ministry if these efforts make such demands upon our energy that we are not free to address the real social and ecological challenges that history places before us.

Secondly, lay people will have to lead the way in defending ecumenical social justice ministry in the Canadian churches, and even start new movements. We should get over any assumption that the churches’ social witness has to be further clericalized in order to be valid. Laypeople of all sexes should be able to reclaim their social mission as well as their contribution to the emerging non-white church’s more inclusive voice.

Thirdly, the way we’ve designed the process of preparing and delivering church statements must change. Have you ever been asked your opinion on an issue, or invited to help develop an opinion in dialogue, study and debate with your church leadership? If we don’t involve more people in these processes, we can’t expect them to fully accept any eventual stances as their own.

Fourthly, we need to walk the talk before we squawk. The example of the 1996 pastoral letter on poverty suggests how a process was developed to draft a message with others, and deliver this text with the only people who could be the architects of their own liberation: people with a lived experience of poverty. Otherwise, the message would have lacked authenticity and credibility.

Fifth, it is important to ensure that the spoken word of the churches is delivered to defend the poor and vulnerable. It is crucial and not always easy to ensure that these words do not arise in order to promote the churches’ own interests and reputations, instead.

Sixth, any pronouncement has to be delivered with appropriate humility. Polls tell us that Christianity is the affiliation of 77% of Canadians, but only 17% attended a place of worship in the previous week. As some say, “Canada is a nation of believers, but not belongers.” A Christendom view of the world is no longer prevalent. A whole new role, perhaps a smaller role, for organized Christian religions is emerging.

Perhaps the situation offers possibilities for groups like Citizens for Public Justice and other lay associations to be more collaborative and helpful to churches that are desirous of recovering their voice on public justice issues. And perhaps we need to remind ourselves that large, unwieldy institutions don’t always have the genetic make-up to be prophetic. The cutting edge seems to flourish more easily on the margins, in smaller groupings that are more nimble, responsive, and enjoy fewer organizational constraints. Perhaps the Christian voice in public affairs today should best be presented in new tones – but we should not accept that voice being either muted or maligned.

By Dennis Gruending

It’s been a bad month for Pope Benedict XVI and the Catholic hierarchy, and by extension a bad month for Catholics in general. The church has been rocked by more allegations, many of them now proven, regarding past sexual assaults by priests on young boys and adolescents, and by news of subsequent cover-ups by bishops in Ireland and Germany. These revelations follow a torrent of similar cases in the U.S. in the past decade, others in Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands and France, and still others in Canada that surfaced mostly during the 1980s and 90s.

There are now allegations that Pope Benedict, when he was a powerful cardinal, refused to take action against Father Lawrence Murphy, an American priest who had sexually abused as many as 200 boys, many of them deaf, in Wisconsin over a period of 25 years. Father Murphy died, never seriously challenged and still a priest, in 1998. There are other allegations that Benedict, when he was the Archbishop of Munich in 1980, refused to discipline priest predator under his authority but rather had him reassigned. The Vatican, along with some cardinals, archbishops and bishops have gone into a mode of full damage control. On Good Friday, as the pope looked on during mass, a priest who is close to him compared recent criticisms of the church to the holocaust perpetrated upon Jewish people. He later offered a half-hearted apology in the face of withering criticism.  On Easter Sunday, again with the Benedict attending at the mass, a cardinal compared criticism of the pope as what he described as the malicious gossip of women. This week two senior cardinals appeared on Vatican Radio to talk about an anti-Catholic “hate” campaign targeting the pope because of his opposition to abortion and same sex marriage.

I worked for the bishops

The broad outline of events is available to anyone who watches the news or reads newspapers. I do not intend to pronounce on what Pope Benedict knew, and when, about various sexual predators when he was either an archbishop or a cardinal. I am confident that the truth will emerge. I do wish to add, however, some personal observations based upon four years in the early 1990s when I worked in the communications department for the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB).

I had been fully engrossed in researching and writing a political book in 1989-90 and had not been following the news as carefully as usual. In preparation for my job interview with the CCCB in Ottawa, I spent a couple of days in a library reading both Catholic and secular newspapers and magazines. I encountered a variety of news stories regarding allegations of sexual assaults against young boys by the Christian Brothers at the Mount Cashel orphanage in Newfoundland. I found only scant coverage in Catholic papers but there was much more of it in the mainstream media. It was later discovered that when allegations began to surface in the late 1980s, the provincial government, the police and the church had cooperated in a cover-up. Eventually nine lay brothers were convicted of sexually and physically abusing boys. A commission of inquiry criticized the archbishop for not taking action and he was later to resign. I remember thinking, What is it about Newfoundland that would allow a situation such as this to occur? A more insightful question would have been, What is it about the church that allows this to occur?

I got the job with the bishops and was confronted almost immediately by a controversy involving allegations of past abuse at church schools in the town of Alfred near Ottawa, and at Uxbridge near Toronto. Some of the victims set up a picket in front of the CCCB offices in Ottawa and also engaged in a peaceful protest at an annual general assembly of the bishops. Eventually, 700 former students came forward to allege abuse. Most decided to seek mediation rather than pursuing legal options. Then allegations emerged that Aboriginal children had been physically and in many cases sexually abused at residential schools where they had been forced to attend over many decades. Catholic and Protestant churches operated the schools in partnership with the Canadian government, which saw in them a method of forcibly removing children from their homes and assimilating them into the mainstream of Canadian society. The Catholic schools were usually operated by orders such as the Oblates or Jesuits and various orders of religious sisters.

Hierarchy in denial

I found that the bishops were in denial about the sexual crimes committed by clergy and seemed incapable of making prompt and transparent decisions. The hierarchy in Newfoundland refused for months to respond to media queries about Mount Cashel, which is an eternity in media terms. The church stonewalled and a public narrative was born from which it has never fully recovered. Many of the bishops feared, and in some cases loathed, the media. They were generally older men who had received a bookish classical education and they were especially uncomfortable with television. They were much more at home with their own Catholic publications, which in many cases were house organs rather than anything resembling independent media.

When we received calls at the CCCB from journalists regarding allegations or actual criminal charges related to sexual abuse, there was rarely anyone prepared to respond to them. The rationale was that the CCCB was not a head office for the Canadian church but rather an organization to help bishops do some of the things that were difficult to accomplish at the local level - such as writing and presenting briefs to government. Bishops, according to this line of reasoning, are appointed by the pope and answerable to him, not to other Canadian bishops. We were to refer calls back to the diocese or archdiocese in question. In the case of residential schools, we were to refer queries to the religious orders. Frustrated journalists would soon call back to say they had been rebuffed or ignored when they made those calls. I was frustrated, too, and since the buck appeared to stop in Rome rather than anywhere in Canada, I began to provide journalists with a telephone number for Pope John Paul’s press secretary, a Spaniard named Joachim Navarro-Valls.

I see certain parallels between the behaviour of the hierarchy in Canada then and that of the Vatican now. Among bishops and priests, loyalty to the institution is prized above all else, even the dictates of conscience. Canadian bishops, for example, seldom if ever spoke out publicly even if they believed that the Vatican was making a big mistake in its position on contraception, or on its stubborn resistance to allow use of inclusive language in the church. This unconditional loyalty to the institution made it difficult for the hierarchy to acknowledge the innocent victims of sexual abuse because it would have been perceived as an admission of weakness and guilt, and as such a betrayal of the church.

A new and dispiriting defence also began to take hold. According to this logic, it was only a small percentage of clerics who had engaged in sexual abuse - an argument that I believe to be true. Their number, it was said, was roughly comparable in percentage terms to that of people in other occupations yet priests and the church were being singled out for much harsher criticism than those other people. I found this a most unfortunate comparison for two reasons. It played into the easy tendency to see anti-Catholicism and persecution of the church in every criticism and question, another parallel to what has recently been emanating from Rome. Secondly, the church had, throughout history, claimed that its leaders were divinely inspired and that as an institution it was perfect and could not err. Indeed, that was old theology which did not square with a much more modest tone adopted by the world’s bishops at Vatican II in the 1960s. Most Catholics today are likely more comfortable with a church which is prepared to be humbler and to admit to its weaknesses.

From Pain to Hope

To its credit, the CCCB did overcome resistance and a variety of barriers to appoint a task force investigating a wide range of issues and problems related to sexual abuse by clergy. The subsequent report, called From Pain to Hope, was issued in 1992. It provided guidelines to assist dioceses in dealing with allegations and cases of abuse, looked at better methods of screening candidates to the priesthood for sexual maturity, and recommended better training and formation in seminaries. Significantly, the task force called upon church officials to respect civil laws and collaborate fully with civil authorities in sexual abuse inquiries. This is precisely what the church had not done in virtually all circumstances previously, whether in Canada, the U.S., Ireland or Germany — and what the Vatican still seems unprepared to do even now.

The CCCB, in partnership with religious orders that had been involved with residential schools, struck another task force on that issue. There was an agonizing reluctance on the part of bishops and religious orders to admit that the church had been engaged systematically in a culturally destructive project, not to mention the sexual abuse of vulnerable children. There was also a resistance to offering apologies, although they did come eventually. Yet when it came time to provide compensation to victims, Catholics dragged the process out long after other churches were ready to agree to terms.

More shoes to drop?

I left the CCCB in 1994 and do not know how faithful the Canadian church has been in following up on its protocols and promises. In observing subsequent scandals in the U.S. and Ireland, and now at the highest levels of the church in Rome, I am struck by how little has been learned by the international church from the earlier experience in Canada. I am surprised, as well, at how little real repentance there appears to in Rome for crimes that were committed against defenceless children.

It is true that most of the assaults that we are hearing about today happened years ago. In Canada the number of new cases has fallen off dramatically, but unsettling questions remain for the broader church. Recently, attention has focused on Ireland, one of the most traditionally Catholic countries of Europe. Will there soon be another shoe to drop in Asia, Africa, or Latin America? If so, can we trust church officials to respond with transparency and with the interest of victims uppermost in mind? Let’s hope so, but given the Vatican’s performance in the past few weeks we have at least some reason to be sceptical.