Cheap Seats 2016
Cause, Effect - 08/17
By Rich Trzupek
Each of the three following statements are indisputably factual:
1) On July 26, two men who believed themselves to be devout Muslims engaged in holy war slit the throat of a Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. Jacques Hamel, aged 86, while he was saying Mass in his church in France.
2) Five days later, Antoine-Marie Izoard, a journalist with I.Media, a French Catholic news agency, posed the following questions to Pope Francis: “Catholics are in a state of shock — and not only in France — following the barbaric assassination of Father Jacques Hamel in his church while he was celebrating Holy Mass. Four days ago ... you told us once again that all religions want peace. But this holy priest, eighty-six years old, was clearly killed in the name of Islam. So I have two brief questions, Holy Father. When you speak of these violent acts, why do you always speak of terrorists but not of Islam? ... And then, what concrete initiative can you launch or perhaps suggest in order to combat Islamic violence?”
3) Pope Francis response to that question was: “I don’t like to speak of Islamic violence because every day when I open the newspapers I see acts of violence, here in Italy: someone kills his girlfriend, someone else his mother-in-law...and these violent people are baptized Catholics! They are violent Catholics...If I spoke about Islamic violence, I would also have to speak about Catholic violence.”
As a Catholic, I believe that Pope Francis is a good man and that his words and deeds are borne of good intentions. But, in this case, I believe he could not be more wrong.
The leader of my church should not avoid speaking about Islamic inspired violence because doing so would require him to speak of Catholic inspired violence. The leader of my church should speak of both, and of any and every other cause that inspires some people to take the lives of their fellow journeyers living on planet earth.
Please – please – Pope Francis: talk about Catholics who engage in violence today. The vast majority of violent Catholics in the modern world do not engage in violence because of what they believe their church teaches, but in spite of what their church teaches. When Catholics kill today, it’s invariably about domestic disputes, drug wars, criminal enterprises and other purely secular motivations. Pope Francis should call those Catholics out and declare that they not being faithful to Catholic doctrine.
Pope Francis should also be open and honest about the centuries during which our church abused its position in the world, torturing and murdering those people it believed to be a threat.
But, what Pope Francis should not, must not, do is to ignore the massive gulf that divides people who commit evil deeds in spite of their religious beliefs from those who commit evil deeds because of their religious beliefs.
Civilized societies recognize that murder is a heinous crime, no matter the motivation. Those civilized societies have tried to deal with murder using two tools: punishment and prevention. The United States and the rest of the civilized world wrestles with the degree of punishment required. Some, like me, believe that taking a life to avenge the taking of a life is immoral and we reject capital punishment. Yet, many among us who adhere to that point of view – including me – understand and respect those who believe that capital punishment can be justified. It’s a very close call.
The waters get a bit more muddied when it comes to prevention. America spends a great deal of time and treasure to identify and make more consequential certain types of aggressive, threatening behavior before such behavior might turn violent. Civil rights legislation, domestic violence prevention programs and hate-crime legislation are just a few examples of the effort that American puts into specific sources of violence prevention.
Yet, neither frightened American politicians nor the Holy Father is willing to put any effort into actively identifying the threat that Radical Islam presents to civilized society. Since we move so decisively to head off other sorts of violent threats and rhetoric, one can only assume that Pope Francis and those among my fellow Catholics who join him in choosing to apply a different standard to Radical Islam do so out of fear, not principle.
I believe it is the obligation of every Catholic, including the Pope, to identify, condemn and attempt to overcome those motivations that lead or have led persons to take the lives of other persons. Pretending that what motivates people to commit murder in the name of their religion is the same as what motivates people to commit murder in spite of their religion is not only disingenuous, it’s dangerous.
Surely Pope Francis should not condemn Islam, or any system of faith, for being inherently evil because some of its tenants differ from Catholic doctrine. At the same time, neither Pope Francis nor the rest of his/my fellow Catholics should hesitate to condemn those who attempt of justify atrocities in the name of their particular interpretation of a system of religious beliefs no matter what that religion might be.
E-mail: rich@examinerpublications.com
www.threedonia.com
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