Systematic persecution of Christians by the State is now almost inevitable in the West, Archbishop Charles Chaput 
of Denver has said.
Speaking [1] in Slovakia this week, Archbishop Chaput said that Christians faced “an aggressively secular political vision and a consumerist economic model that result – in practice, if not in explicit intent — in a new kind of state-encouraged atheism”.
He said that, under this new vision, religion had a place, “but only as an individual lifestyle accessory”.
“People are free to worship and believe whatever they want, so long as they keep their beliefs to themselves and do not presume to intrude their religious idiosyncrasies on the workings of government, the economy, or culture,” he said.
Freedom of worship, however, was not the same as religious freedom, which included “the right to preach, teach, assemble, organise, and to engage society and its issues publicly, both as individuals and joined together as communities of faith,” Archbishop Chaput said.
He continued: “This is the classic understanding of a citizen’s right to the ‘free exercise’ of his or her religion in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“It’s also clearly implied in Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In contrast, freedom of worship is a much smaller and more restrictive idea.”
Archbishop Chaput also asked how the “rhetoric of enlightened, secular tolerance square with the actual experience of faithful Catholics in Europe and North America in recent years?
“In the United States, a nation that is still 80 percent Christian with a high degree of religious practice, government agencies now increasingly seek to dictate how Church ministries should operate, and to force them into practices that would destroy their Catholic identity,” he said.
“Efforts have been made to discourage or criminalise the expression of certain Catholic beliefs as ‘hate speech’.”
Europe was also seeing such trends, “marked by a more open contempt for Christianity,” he added.
He referred to the raid on the Archbishop’s offices in Brussels which saw “bishops detained and interrogated for nine hours without due process; their private computers, cell phones, and files seized. Even the graves of the Church’s dead were violated in the raid”. Such actions recalled the totalitarianism of Europe’s Nazi and Soviet past.
Archbishop Chaput said: “These are not the actions of governments that see the Catholic Church as a valued partner in their plans for the 21st century. Quite the opposite. These events suggest an emerging, systematic discrimination against the Church that now seems inevitable.”
He also said that the West was now moving in the direction of that new “inhuman humanism.”
Western society, he said was “Christian by birth” and its survival depended on the endurance of Christian values.
Our core principles and political institutions were based, in large measure, he said “on the morality of the Gospel and the Christian vision of man and government”.
He continued: “We are talking here not only about Christian theology or religious ideas. We are talking about the moorings of our societies — representative government and the separation of powers; freedom of religion and conscience; and most importantly, the dignity of the human person.”
He argued that the defence of Western ideals was “the only protection that we and our neighbors have against a descent into new forms of repression — whether it might be at the hands of extremist Islam or secularist technocrats”.
Indifference to our Christian past, however contributed to “indifference about defending our values and institutions in the present,” Archbishop Chaput added.
This indifference was linked to a relativism which was now “the civil religion and public philosophy of the West”.
In practice, this lack of belief in fixed moral principles and transcendent truths, led to political institutions and language becoming instruments in the service of a new barbarism, he said.
And he added: “In the name of tolerance we come to tolerate the cruelest intolerance; respect for other cultures comes to dictate disparagement of our own; the teaching of “live and let live” justifies the strong living at the expense of the weak.”
He said that the Church’s religious liberty is under assault today in ways not seen since the Nazi and Communist eras.
Referring to comments made in the 1960s by US social philosopher Richard Weaver, an American , he said: “I am absolutely convinced that relativism must eventually lead to a regime of force.”
Weaver was right, Archbishop Chaput said. “There is a kind of ‘inner logic’ that leads relativism to repression.”