Religious freedom faces a “critical challenge” in today’s society, according to one of the Vatican’s 
most influential academics.
Harvard
law professor Mary Ann Glendon, the president of the Pontifical Academy
of Social Sciences, said that, in some jurisdictions with a long
tradition of religious freedom, there were growing threats.
Professor
Glendon said: “Even in countries where religious liberty has a long and
apparently secure constitutional foundation, the suspicion of those
religious believers who claim to know truths about the human person
leads to marginalisation and even outright discrimination.”
She was speaking at the Academy’s 17th Plenary session last weekend on the topic “Universal Rights in a World of Diversity – The Case of Religious Freedom.”
The
pontifical academy members, she said, looked at the theme with “the
conviction that religious freedom goes to the very heart of what it
means to be human.”
The scholars highlighted what she called “four broad areas of threats to religious liberty.”
The first is the “standard threat”: State coercion and persecution of religious believers.
There were also threats which involved State
restrictions upon the religious liberties of religious minorities and
societal pressure on religious minorities that may or may not be state
sanctioned, but nonetheless curtails the liberties of those minorities.
Finally Professor Glendon identified the growth of ‘secular fundamentalism’ in Western countries which considers religious believers a threat to secular, liberal democratic politics.
Even
in countries with few restrictions, Professor Glendon added, “the
academy and public life often portray religion as a source of social
division, and treat religious freedom as a second-class right to be
trumped by a range of other claims and interests.”
She
noted, however, that social science “has begun to cast doubt on the
common belief — almost a dogma — in secular circles that religion is
per se a source of social division, and on the related claim by many
authoritarian governments that religious freedom must be curtailed for
the sake of social peace.”
She
said that there was an important and growing body of evidence which
showed “that the political influence of religion is in fact quite
diverse, sometimes contributing to strife, but often fostering
democracy, reconciliation and peace.
Professor
Glendon added: “Some studies indicate that violence actually tends to
be greater in societies where religious practice is suppressed, and that
promotion of religious freedom actually advances the cause of peace by
reducing inter-religious conflict.”
Professor Glendon cited studies showing that religious liberty started to decline in 2005, after a high point in 1998.
“According
to the most extensive cross-national study ever conducted, nearly 70
per cent of the world’s people currently live in countries that impose
‘high restrictions’ on religious freedom, the brunt of which falls on
religious minorities,” she said.
She
referred to the belief among some influential thinkers that society
“could get along just fine without religion, and that the more religion
was confined to the private sphere, the freer everyone would be”.
However
she said that this “faith in the ability of democracy to generate the
virtues it needs in its citizens was shaken” in the wake of various
social and cultural upheavals of the late 20th century.
She
said: “In fact, a major conclusion of this Academy’s working group on
democracy in 2005 was that democracy depends on a moral culture that in
turn depends on the institutions of civil society that are its ‘seedbeds
of civic virtue’.”
While
Professor Glendon acknowledged that no model of religious freedom can
work for every nation, this, she said, in no way implies that religious
freedom is not a universal right.
“Rather,”
she said, “it is to recognise that there must be room for a degree of
pluralism in modes of bringing religious freedom and other fundamental
human rights to life under diverse cultural circumstances.”
The
pontifical academy members examined this degree of pluralism,
acknowledging the “major difficulty” of determining “where does
legitimate pluralism end and pure cultural relativism begin.”
