Pope Francis in Latvia: Don’t let Christianity become an artifact

CNA Staff, Dec 2, 2020 / 03:01 am (CNA).- In the wake of several suspected Islamist attacks in France this year, President Emmanuel Macron has asked the country’s Muslim leaders to sign a “charter of republican values” agreeing to a rejection of Islam as a political movement.

According to the BBC, Macron’s proposed charter is one part of a wider government strategy to curb foreign influence and prevent violence and threats from extremists.

Macron has, since his 2017 election, emphasized support for secular government and has criticized what he calls “Islamist separatism,” encouraging the nation’s Muslims to integrate into French society. As part of legislation that Macron has introduced to tackle extremism, homeschooling would be restricted.

The charter will, among other things, state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, the BBC reports.

Members of the French Council of the Muslim Faith agreed in November to form a national council of imams, and the CFCM is set to meet with Macron this week to discuss the proposed charter. The CFCM will be charged with accrediting imams.

France is home to Western Europe’s largest Muslim minority, at around 5 million.

The debate over the charter and the “French values” it contains continues following at least three suspected Islamist terrorist attacks during 2020.

In mid-October, a Muslim student beheaded teacher Samuel Paty after Paty showed his class a cartoon depicting Muhammad.

Eyewitnesses said that suspect Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov shouted “Allahu akbar”— Arabic for “God is great”— as he murdered Paty near the middle school where he taught. The 18-year-old Russian national of Chechen origin was shot dead by police shortly after the murder.

Public schools in France held a minute of silence in tribute to Paty Nov. 2, and some classrooms held discussions on freedom of expression.

The discussions of freedom of expression led to the police investigation of at least 17 minors, one of whom is Catholic, the New York Times reported.

The justice ministry said 14 minors were interrogated in police stations or held in custody. Some of their families were questioned about their religious practices.

One 16-year-old near Marseille was arrested for continuing to listen to music on headphones during the minute of silence.

Another Islamic attacker on Oct. 29 killed three people inside Notre-Dame de Nice. Police shot and arrested the perpetrator, Brahim Aouissaoui. Aouissaoui reportedly arrived in Europe in late September, first at the Italian island Lampedusa before traveling to France.

Other attacks took place in France Oct. 29. In Montfavet, near Avignon, a man waving a handgun made threats and was killed by the police two hours after the Nice attack. Radio station Europe 1 said the man was also shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

Mohammed Moussaoui, president of the CFCM, condemned the terrorist attack and asked French Muslims to cancel their festivities for Mawlid, the Oct. 29 celebration of Muhammad’s birthday, “as a sign of mourning and solidarity with the victims and their loved ones.”

Macron introduced sweeping anti-radicalization legislation following the attacks, which is set to be debated in the French cabinet Dec. 9. Restrictions on homeschooling are among the provisions of the bill.

Other provisions of the bill include stricter punishments for those who intimidate public officials on religious grounds; extending national identification numbers— which most students in France already have— to homeschoolers to ensure that students are attending school; and a ban on sharing personal information that allows people who want to harm a person to find them, a practice known in the U.S. as “doxxing.”

The concept of laïcité, or secularism, has been a fixture of French law since 1905. At that time, the Third Republic officially established state secularism, causing a subsequent wave of anti-Catholicism, which included the end of government funding for religious schools, mandatory civil marriage, and the removal of chaplains from the army.

The principles of laïcité have evolved over the years to apply to private citizens as well as the government, and in recent decades been applied to Muslim women who wear hijabs or other religious garb in public.

During summer 2016, the Council of State, France’s highest administrative court, ruled that the burkini ban in the town of Villeneuve-Loubet “seriously and clearly illegally breached fundamental freedoms,” including freedom of belief. 

On Nov. 30 this year, the French Council of State ruled that a proposed 30-person limit on Masses and other forms of public worship is a “disproportionate” government measure and must be modified by Dec. 2.

The country’s Catholic bishops welcomed the decision Nov. 29, saying in a statement that “reason has been recognized.”

France has suffered over a dozen Islamist terrorist attacks since 2015, including a January attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a satirical newspaper, and a series of coordinated attacks in Paris during November 2015 that killed at least 130 people. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks.

Father Jacques Hamel was beheaded by supporters of the Islamic State while offering Mass July 26, 2016. Following Paty’s killing this year, religious leaders gathered at a memorial to Hamel and laid a wreath in Paty’s honor.

In England, multiple Catholic bishops have expressed concern that the government’s push for “British values” in schools, meant to counter Islamist extremism, could instead harm sincere religious believers and burden Catholic schools.

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Pope Francis speaks at the 50th annual Social Week of Catholics in Trieste, Italy, on the morning of July 7, 2024. At his arrival in the northern Italian city, he was greeted by Archbishop Luigi Renna, president of the organizing committee (R), and Cardinal Matteo Maria Zuppi, president of the Italian bishops’ conference (L). / Daniel Ibanez/CNA

Rome Newsroom, Jul 7, 2024 / 08:06 am (CNA).

Pope Francis on Sunday urged Catholics to share their faith in the public square, and to combat political polarization by supporting person-centered democracy.

“Let us not be fooled by easy solutions. Let us instead get passionate about the common good,” he said at a Catholic conference on democracy in the northern Italian city of Trieste July 7.

Francis participated in the last morning of the 50th Social Week of Catholics, an annual meeting of the Catholic Church in Italy aimed at promoting the social doctrine of the Church. The theme of the July 3-7 congress was “At the Heart of Democracy: Participate between History and the Future.”

In his speech, the pope spoke strongly of the importance of democracy — encouraging participation over partisanship, and comparing ideologies to “seductresses.”

“As Catholics, on this horizon, we cannot be satisfied with a marginal or private faith,” the pope said before around 1,200 conference participants at the Generali Convention Center. “This means not so much to be heard, but above all to have the courage to make proposals for justice and peace in the public debate.”

“We have something to say, but not to defend privileges. No. We need to be a voice, a voice that denounces and proposes in a society that is often mute and where too many have no voice.”

“This is political love,” Francis underlined, adding that “it is a form of charity that allows politics to live up to its responsibilities and get out of polarizations, these polarizations that impoverish and do not help understand and address the challenges.”

The Social Week of Catholics congress was held in Trieste, a port city located on a narrow strip of Italian territory in the country’s far northeastern point, bordered by the Adriatic Sea and Slovenia.

Pope Francis arrived in Trieste by helicopter from the Vatican in the early morning July 7. After addressing congress delegates from across Italy, he met briefly with representatives of other Christian traditions and with a group of immigrants and people with disabilities.

The pope then celebrated Mass for an estimated 8,500 Catholics in Trieste’s Unità d’Italia Square before again boarding a helicopter to return to the Vatican.

In speaking about the Christian vision of democracy, the pontiff quoted a 1988 pastoral note from the Italian bishops, which said democracy is meant, “to give meaning to everyone’s commitment to the transformation of society; to give attention to the people who remain outside or on the margins of winning economic processes and mechanisms; to give space to social solidarity in all its forms; to give support to the return of a solicitous ethic of the common good […]; to give meaning to the development of the country, understood […] as an overall improvement in the quality of life, collective coexistence, democratic participation, and authentic freedom.”

“This vision, rooted in the Social Doctrine of the Church,” Pope Francis said, applies “not only to the Italian context, but represent a warning for the whole of human society and for the journey of all peoples.”

“In fact, just as the crisis of democracy cuts across different realities and nations, in the same way the attitude of responsibility towards social transformations is a call addressed to all Christians, wherever they find themselves living and working, in every part of the world,” he added.

The pope also emphasized the importance of combating a culture of waste, as exhibited by a self-referential power “incapable of listening and serving people.”

He recalled the importance of the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity and condemned a certain attitude of “welfare-ism” that does not recognize the dignity of people, calling it “social hypocrisy.”

“Everyone must feel part of a community project; no one must feel worthless,” he said.

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‘Synodal Way’ flags fly in front of the Congress Center Messe Frankfurt in Germany. / Max von Lachner/Synodal Way.

Frankfurt, Germany, Feb 4, 2022 / 11:57 am (CNA).
Participants in the German Catholic Church’s “Synodal Way” voted on Friday in f… […]