The Suffering of Chen Guangchen – his exit to the U.S. and the challenge he poses to China, the USA and the UK

Posted by David Alton on May 18, 2012

The world’s attention has recently been focused on the plight of Chen Guangcheng, the blind civil and human rights activist. Chen was jailed for four years after challenging China’s one child policy.
After his release Chen was put under house arrest. Then, in unwitting imitation of The Shawshank Redemption, last month Chen scaled a wall, took to his heels and – after a drenching in a river and numerous wrong turns – navigated himself to where, He Peirong, a well known blogger, was waiting for him. She drove him for eight hours to Beijing and has since been arrested.

In the capital Chen sought sanctuary in the US Embassy, who then brokered a deal with the Chinese and delivered Chen to a hospital unit. A series of dramatic twists and turn finally ended with the welcome news that Chen has been allowed to leave China and fly to the Unites States. Meanwhile, the corrupt and violent officials in Linyi, where Chen was tortured an imprisoned, have been tightening the noose around his extended family.

Indicative of Chen’s widespread following, China have obliterated references to Chen and even censored the word Shawshank from internet searches. Young Chinese have taken to wearing dark glasses – emblematic of Chen – and bloggers have been breaking firewalls to tell Chen’s story.
Chen’s case had grabbed China’s imagination posing a real problem for its Government and those of the US and the UK too.

In an editorial The Economist, underlined the ramifications of what Chen has done: “ At rare moments the future of a nation, even one teeming with 1.3 billion souls, can be bound up in the fate of a single person” Chen “matters enormously to China’s future.”

Chen is not a political dissident and does not denounce the country or its leadership. He is a true patriot, in tune with the masses, and dangerous because he has won the people’s respect and their hearts. One day Chen Guangchen will be celebrated in China as a national hero.

Chen’s fate challenges China’s attitude towards human dignity but he challenges the US, too.
If it had emerged that the Americans had removed Chen from safety, failing to secure safe passage for him and his family, it would have cast serious doubts on American diplomacy. The US would have been humiliated and it would have signalled a troubling shift in super power relations.

Chen’s case reminded me of the Siberian Seven – seven Christians who for five years, from June 1978 until June 1983, took refuge in Moscow’s American Embassy. Their story began in 1917 at the time of the Russian Revolution when they were exiled to Siberia. For decades they suffered persecution and violence and were branded traitors.

In 1983 President Reagan and Vice President George Bush Snr. got them out of their 5 foot by 18 foot embassy sanctuary. Visas were secured and they settled in the USA.

In 1981 I had become involved with the case. It led to the formation of the Jubilee Campaign. Their story gave global attention to the crushing of religious liberties in the Soviet Union and became a wake-up call to the world.

Chen’s story – and the stand he has taken against coercive population policies – will act as a similar catalyst, shining the spotlight on an inhumane policy which many in China have begun to question.

Hillary Clinton, and Barrack Obama, will not find it easy to bask in the reflection of Chen’s courage – both have been supporters of the reproductive rights lobby and of population control. In 1995, Mrs.Clinton participated in the Beijing Women’s Conference – a notorious conference of political elites, marked by the absence of a single Chinese woman who had suffered under the one-child policy – a policy not even alluded to during its deliberations.

Women’s rights, human dignity and family freedom is, of course, what Chen’s case is all about.

And here is the rub for the UK, which has aided and abetted the very policies which led to Chen’s incarceration after he exposed the 130,000 forced abortions in Shandong Province.

Over three decades British aid has been diverted into coercive population policies. Money given to UNFPA and IPPF has been channelled to the Chinese Population Association. They implement China’s one child policy – a policy which makes it a criminal offence to be pregnant; a policy which makes it illegal to have a brother or a sister. On one memorable occasion, after challenging this obscenity, a British Cabinet Minister swore at me and showed me the door.

This policy, which Chen challenged, and received rather more than verbal abuse, has led to an estimated 400 million babies being aborted or killed through infanticide; a gendercide policy which favours the birth of male children so that one out of every six girls is aborted or abandoned – leading to some 40 million “missing” women. It has skewed the population balance with around 120 male babies for every 100 girls.

The policy has also distorted the balance between young and elderly people with catastrophic social repercussions. Sex trafficking and crime has proliferated; women have become commodities; trafficking leads to the sale of girls as child brides. Little wonder that 500 despairing Chinese women take their own lives every single day.

China is a huge country and it would be wrong to assume that the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, or senior officials, approve of the barbarism of regional Communist Party officials.

Chinese people are some of the most cultivated people in the world, and there is much about today’s China which fills me with deep admiration, but the treatment of Chen and his wife and the behaviour of its provincial officials underlines the continuing challenge of matching extraordinary economic progress with the enhancement and protection of human rights. We have not heard the last of Chen Guangchen and can thank God that he now has the freedom to speak for millions without a voice.

By courageously exposing egregious violations, coercion, and eugenics this remarkable Shawshank has caught the public imagination. What an irony that it has taken a man with no sight to see that to which we have shamefully closed our eyes.

The Tyburn Lecture – May 9th 2012

Posted by David Alton on May 10, 2012

The Tyburn Lecture, May 9th 2012.

David Alton: “What Price Faith?”

The prophet Isaiah reminds us that you should never forget “the rock from which you are hewn.”

And in the Book of Deuteronomy we are told to “remember the days of old; consider the generations long ago; ask your father to recount it, and your elders to tell you the tale.”

Knowing who we are and knowing our personal and family story is one of the reasons why the New Testament contains a detailed genealogy through which Jesus traces all his forbearers.

Knowing who you are and cherishing your community’s and your family’s narrative is an essential part of everyone’s make–up. Knowing who you are gives self knowledge, security and confidence; the absence of this knowledge sows seeds of insecurity and instability.

The Oracle at Delphi offered the wise advice to the Lydian King Croesus, “Know thyself and you will know how to live.” The deep desire to know the rock from which we were hewn undoubtedly explains why television programmes such as “Who do you think you are?” and genealogy sites are so popular.

The importance of knowing your story – who you are – the rock from which you are hewn – is not a new urge or a need identified by modern psychiatry.

Central of the Jewish community’s celebration of Pesach, or Passover, is a 3,300 year-old ritual which involves a child questioning an adult about the Jewish story – the Haggadah. It is a story which Jews say begins with the bread of affliction and ends with the wine of freedom.

It is a loving act of remembering and through more than a hundred generations of Jews have handed on their story to their children.

The word Haggadah means “to relate, to tell, to expound.” But it also means “to bind, to join to connect”.

The old story binds one generation to the next; connecting past with future; and joining people of the present with their community throughout the world and throughout time; and above all, the telling of the story honours the presence of God in the affairs of mankind.

Being deprived of your story is a most serious deprivation.

Self evidently, there are many forms of material deprivation, and this is a tough time to be young and leaving school.

My generation used to agonise over the prospect of a nuclear war; this generation agonises over the lack of economic security, especially the lack of jobs.

But, in many respects, a far worse deprivation is the loss of identity experienced by so many young people today. I think of the 800,000 children who have no contact with their fathers. All too frequently there is no longer a father or an elder to tell the tale of their family or to explain their community’s history to the rising generation.

Consider also the effect on children who will deliberately be denied knowledge of their biological origins.

I strongly opposed the last Government’s decision to allow any two people to be listed as the parents of a child on the child’s official birth certificate. This was a classic example of how, instead of placing a child’s interests first, we treat them like accessories.

Biologically these men and women are not the child’s parents and the State has no business collaborating in a lie. Straightforwardly, this deceit is simply identity theft.

As if all of this were not bad enough, consider the gravest deprivation of all – the loss of religious identity and the loss of faith.

This, too, as I will argue tonight, is also a consequence of a combination of the breakdown of strong family and community life along with the deliberate actions of the State.

There is nowhere better to make the case for knowing the story of our faith – and recalling the price which has been paid for our right to practice and to share our faith and the things which we believe about the dignity of the human person made in God’s image– than Tyburn.

From the crucifixion of Christ Himself, to the stoning to death of Stephen; from the execution of Peter, Paul and the early disciples, to the deaths of maybe as many as 100,000 people at the hands of emperors such as Nero and Diocletian; to the executions of Penal times and the mass murders of the bloodied twentieth century – when more people lost their lives for their faith than in all the previous centuries combined – we have a precious narrative entrusted to us and which must be passed to those who follow.

This is sanctified, holy ground: As T.S.Eliot wrote of the murder of St.Thomas a Becket in Canterbury Cathedral:

“Wherever a saint has dwelt,
Wherever a Martyr has given his blood for Christ,
There is holy ground,
And the sanctity shall not depart from it.”

And, on this ground, just yards from where we are gathered, between 1535 until 1681, 105 Catholic men and women gave their lives for their faith – a sacrifice which paved the way for the religious freedoms and liberties which we enjoy today, and which, too often, we take for granted.

I do not believe in theocracy and would go to the scaffold myself for the principle that a man must be free not to believe in God. Paradoxically, the new ideology of angry atheism would, however, deny to believers the right to pray in a public place; to preach openly what they believe; or even the right to wear a necklace bearing a cross.

In Britain the principle challenge to Christianity is a combination of this Dawkins/Hitchens school of angry atheism and the more insidious threat of the sheer indifference of those who don’t know what it is they have rejected; who don’t know their story.

The late Christopher Hitchens, author of “God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” claimed that religion is “the main source of hatred in the world”. Dawkins asserts that the crimes committed by Stalin and Hitler were not attributable to their atheism but because they were able to manipulate people’s religious sentiments.

Alexis de Tocqueville better understood human impulse and the nature of evil when he argued with passion that religion is central for the upholding of freedom itself. All who love liberty should “hasten to call religion to their aid, for they must know that the reign of freedom cannot be established without that of mores, not mores founded without beliefs.”

Be clear, when we fail to reappropriate and tell the story of those who gave their lives that we might be free to believe; when we fail to locate the Tyburn story in today’s continuing worldwide struggle for religious freedom, we create freedom without mores – and whether it is in the culture of the City of London or the new rampant materialism of China, freedom without mores has disastrous consequences.

Suppression of religious belief simultaneously dishonours memory and in robbing our children of their own story we rob them of their identity.

Sharmi Chakrabarti, the admirable Director of Liberty, put the same thought into the domestic context when she said that “The Christian’s right to wear a cross must be defended as fiercely as any other religious liberty….the struggle for religious freedom has been strongly connected with the struggle for democracy itself.”

And Amnesty International is right when it asserts that: right

“The right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion is a fundamental component of the universal and indivisible human rights framework that applies to all people everywhere, as laid out in international law.”

“Restrictions on religious freedoms, as well as other freedoms including social, cultural and linguistic freedoms, can often lead to other human rights violations such as the imprisonment of prisoners of conscience or even death”

We must be clear about that struggle and the interconnectedness of history with the present day, and the interconnectedness of the banning of a person’s right to wear a cross with the most vicious forms of discrimination and persecution. The Tyburn story is a story has great application in our own times.

The first recorded execution at Tyburn occurred in 1196 when William Fitz Osbern – a populist leader of London’s poor – was seized at the church of St Mary le Bow and was dragged naked behind a horse and hanged.

Four hundred years later the public execution of Catholics began. The first martyrs of the Protestant Reformation – St John Houghton and his four companions – were executed together at Tyburn on 4 May 1535. In June, John Fisher and in July, Thomas More, would be executed outside the Tower of London.

Two years later, the focus shifted back to Tyburn when, in 1537 Nicholas Tempest, one of the northern leaders of the Pilgrimage of Grace – the king’s own Bow bearer of the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire, close to where I live – was hanged on the orders of Henry VIII, whose death did not signal the end of Catholic persecution.

In 1571, during the reign of Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth I, the Tyburn Tree was erected – allowing three condemned people to be hanged at once.
Among them were the 105 Catholic men and women Tyburn martyrs. They included Edmund Campion (1581), Robert Southwell (1595), Anne Line (1601), John Southworth (1654); and the last of the martyrs, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of all Ireland, Oliver Plunkett (1681).

Tyburn’s is a poignant and disturbing story of immense cruelty and barbarism; it is a story of a perverted legal system; and it reminds us to what intolerance, the crushing of conscience, and what Thomas More described as the breaking of “the unity of life” inexorably leads.

The story of Tyburn is not a story calling for revenge or to be used for the stoking of old hatreds but it is an instructive story which the elders fail to tell their children at their peril.

As Edmund Campion stood on the Tyburn scaffold, he famously prayed that the day would come when he and those who were sending him to his death would meet in heaven:

“I recommend your case, and mine, to Almighty God, the Searcher of hearts, to the end that we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.”

Our faith teaches us to forgive but until we meet in heaven we are not commanded to forget.

The Tyburn story must never be forgotten because the moment a nation slips into collective amnesia it risks repeating the old mistakes. Never again happens all over again.

Tyburn’s is an instructive and inspiring story which must be told because of the courage, heroism and virtue which it represents. It must be told because of the high price which was paid. We all know that when a faith is worth dying for, it is worth living for.

I am always struck by the effect which the gruesome spectacle of Tyburn and the bravery of the Catholic martyrs had on their compatriots.

Even as Campion was being racked and interrogated at the Tower, Philip Howard, 20th Earl of Arundel, was observing Campion’s ordeal and being strengthened in his own faith – and which would lead, in turn, to his death in the Tower.

As Campion stood on the scaffold facing his executioner his blood splattered onto the young Henry Walpole, a graduate of Peterhouse, Cambridge. Walpole was sufficiently inspired to give up his law practice, to become a Catholic, a Jesuit, and in 1595, like Campion, to be hanged drawn and quartered – in his case at York. What price faith?

In its wider historical context the Tyburn story calls to mind questions of justice: the continuing use today in many jurisdictions of the death penalty; the case for restorative justice; and temptation to incarcerate or execute opponents rather than address the reasons for their dissent.

And beyond the sacrifice, what are the links between the Tyburn tree and events around the world today?

In 2011 speaking in Westminster Hall, where More, Campion and others were tried, Pope Benedict XVI said that “the difficult dilemma which faced More in those difficult times was the perennial question of the relationship between what is owed to Caesar and what is owed to God.”

Benedict said that it had ultimately come down to a question of conscience for the man who asserted he was “the King’s good servant, but God’s first.”

Remaining faithful to conscience and faith are not theoretical issues if you live in one of the 16 countries listed last month by the United States Commission on International religious Freedom. In each of these countries people of different faiths – from Baha’is to Sufi Muslims – are being persecuted for their beliefs. Uniquely, the only group to be persecuted in each and every one of the 16 countries is Christians.

In the 16 countries of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, North Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, China, North Korea, Burma, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Vietnam some of the most egregious examples of violations of human rights and religious liberties occur. But they are no means alone. The Pugh Foundation says that 70% of the world’s 6.8 billion people face moderate to severe religious persecution. Religious freedom in many countries is a vanishing right and minority faith communities are disappearing with that right. Closer to home, two Scottish midwives were recently told by the courts that they had no right to refuse to take part in the ending of a life of an unborn child though abortion. What price faith? What price conscience?

Article 18 of the 1948 United Nations Declaration on Human Rights insisted that “Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.”

Today, Article 18, the right to religious freedom, thought and conscience, is honoured in its breach rather than in its observance. And these violations occur with barely a passing murmur of protest or coverage in our media.

Within the last week 21 Christians were killed and 22 wounded in attacks during worship services at a church and university in Northern Nigeria. The north-south conflict is reminiscent of Sudan – when 2 million, mainly Christian people, were killed, Christian pastors have been beheaded by Boko Haram who openly say their interim goal is “to eradicate Christians from certain parts of the country.”

And now, in Sudan, a new genocidal campaign against Christians has been launched in the Nuba Mountains and South Kordofan by Khartoum’s Sharia regime.

The ancient churches in the Middle East have been under unprecedented and relentless escalating attack. I’m often struck by the story of the Palestinian Christian who would reply to the ill-informed question from westerners, “When did your family become Christians?” “About 2,000 years ago”. Pope Benedict has said: “Churches in the Middle East are threatened in their very existence”.

The European Union of Human Rights Organisations says that more than 100,000 Coptic Christians have left Egypt during nine months last year. This quotation is from its director:

“Copts are not emigrating voluntarily; they are coerced into that by threats and intimidation of hard-line Salafists, and the lack of protection they are getting from the Egyptian regime”

The hoped for changes anticipated in the Arab Spring have simply evaporated as liberal and democratic forces have largely been usurped by Salafists and others intent on imposing Sharia law – intolerant of non-adherents.

Think of the execution of Christians in Iran – murdered because they changed their faith. There are now hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have become Christians. Are they all to be sentenced to death?

In Pakistan, it is just over a year since Shahbaz Bhatti, the country’s courageous Catholic Minister for minorities was murdered. He is fast becoming the unofficial patron saint of religious liberty.

There are just 1.5 million Christians in Pakistan (3% of a population of 172 million). Bhatti had attempted to put into practices the principles of the founding father of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who argued for religious toleration and respect. Bhatti said that his stand “would send a message of hope to the people living a life of disappointment, disillusionment and despair” adding that his life was “dedicated to the oppressed, the down trodden and the marginalized” and to “the struggle for human equality, social justice, religious freedom and the empowerment of religious minorities’ communities.”

Following Bhatti’s murder, Pope Benedict prayed that “I ask the Lord Jesus that the moving sacrifice of Shahaz Bhatti may arouse in people’s consciences the courage and commitment to defend religious freedom and human dignity.”

I genuinely am staggered at our indifference to the deaths of men like Shahbaz Bhatti and Iraq’s Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, whose body was discovered in a shallow grave – one of an estimated 600 Iraqi Christians murdered as their churches have been bombed and desecrated. Hundreds of thousands have fled – many to Syria – where the horror is being played out all over again. Christian sources in Kirkuk say:
“The attacks on Christians continue and the world remains totally silent. It’s as if we had been swallowed up by the night”. Remember the admonition of Dr. Martin Luther King who said:
“In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends”.

When you think of modern martyrs dying for the faith, think, too, of China and North Korea – a country which I have visited four times and where no priest has been permitted in sixty years. In 1845, St Andrew Kim, the first Korean-born priest aged just 25 was arrested, stripped and decapitated – one of 8000 Korean martyrs. And the suffering continues as we speak.

The United Nations estimate that between 200,000 and 300,000 people are held in gulags and some of you will have seen the recently published harrowing account by Shin Dong Hyok of his “Escape from Camp 14.” Shin, who born in the camp saw his mother and brother executed and he was with me in London two weeks ago.

I have spoken in North Korea’s one permitted Catholic Church and seen the resilience of a community outlawed since 1953.

As if to underline the durability of faith when, 60 kilometers north of Pyongyang, I asked if there were any churches in the town of Anju I was told “no, they were destroyed in the war, but the believers meet in the rubble of the Catholic church every week.”

They had been doing that for the past sixty years without priests or sacraments. What price would you attach to faith in those circumstances?

In neighbouring China an estimated 250,000 Christians have been martyred since the Nestorians first introduced the Gospel in the seventh century.
Nine hundred years later Matteus Ricci and the Jesuits endured enormous hardship and risk in the service of the same Gospel.

From the earliest times Christians in the Far East have suffered grievously for their faith. In the twentieth century, between 1900 and 2000 more Christians were killed in China than in all the other countries of the world combined.

When I first visited China in 1981 I was taken to a piece of waste land in Shanghai and, as dusk came, at the barred window of a small apartment, the bishop Shanghai appeared and gave a blessing. Bishop Kung spent 30 years in prison or under house arrest. What price can you put on his faith and the endurance of the Catholic community in China?

As real evidence of the truth of Tertullian’s adage that “the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church”, it is a fact that, before this twenty first century is out, in terms of numbers, more Christians will be living in China than in any other nation.

In considering the plight of Christians in the Far East reflect for a moment on an ancient Chinese story about a man named Bian. He lived around 500 years before Christ.

One day Bian found a large stone. It was actually an unpolished piece of the precious and highly valued stone, jade. Bian was so excited by his discovery that he resolved to present the unpolished stone as a gift to the Emperor of China.

Unfortunately for Bian, when he received it the Emperor saw nothing except a large stone with its rough and disfigured surfaces.

Believing that Bian as trying to make a fool of him the Emperor angrily ordered Bian’s left foot to be amputated.

The Emperor died and Bian tried again – presenting the large stone to the new Emperor. Once again, the potentate reacted angrily, and seeing only the exterior of the unpolished stone, he ordered that Bian’s right foot should also be amputated.

Now a third emperor ascended the throne. The cruelly mutilated Bian asked to be brought to the Palace. For three days and nights he lay outside, clenching the jade in his arms.

This new emperor, exasperated but also intrigued, sent one of his courtiers to investigate and then ordered that the stone be polished to see what it concealed. This was when they discovered a stunning and beautiful jade hidden beneath the rough and ugly exterior.

It has been suggested that the badly used Bian and his jade is not unlike the grievously misused and persecuted Christian communities of the Far East.

After much suffering and the disfigurement of these believers, the beauty of what is concealed is being revealed and at last being valued even in previous atheistic dictatorships. China, especially, with its rampant unfettered materialism replacing the ravages of Maosim desperately needs the Christian church and the hidden beauty represented by Bian and his jade.

The sacrifices which Catholic missionaries made to plant the seeds of faith in these remote and far away places – just like the sacrifices made here at Tyburn – is a direct response to Jesus’ great commission – it gives meaning to the Catholic Church’s central claim – to be universal. And it has always accepted that suffering and martyrdom may be the price which has to be paid. Campion was right when he said that the price had been reckoned and that if the enterprise was of God – Auctore Deo – it would not fail:

“The expense is reckoned,
the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood.
So the Faith was planted: so it must be restored.”

When I think of the reckoned price of Tyburn and God’s enterprise in our world today, I think of some of the men and women I have met since I helped establish the Jubilee Campaign for religious liberty in the 1980s.

I think of the bishop I met in the Ukraine – Pavlo Vasylk – and Ivan Gel, the lay Chairman of the Committee for the defence of the Greek Catholic Church. Between them they had served nearly 40 years of prison sentences.
The Bishop’s chaplain had been sent to Chernobyl to clear radioactive waste, without any protective clothing – as a punishment for celebrating the liturgies in the open.

I think of the elderly villager in Nepal who had walked for two weeks to give me his first hand account of how he had been brutally beaten after refusing to renounce his faith; the nun who had been put in the stocks; or the Indian nun in Orissa who was raped in an orgy of violence.

I think of some of the other people and places which I have visited:

the bishop in Sudan who showed me what had been his home, church, school and clinic – all obliterated by Sudanese bombers; the great Romanian bishop, Cardinal Todea, who had languished for years in Communist prisons; the Orthodox dissident, Alexander Ogorodnikov, who was kept in solitary confinement in a Soviet jail because he had a organised Christian renewal movement; Lech Walesa and his Polish Solidarity workers, the inspiration of the Cardinal Archbishop of Krakow, the future Pope John Paul II; the Assyrian and Chaldean Catholics hanging on by their fingertips in South East Turkey; and the dignity of the Karen Christian tribes people in Burma; and many others enduring their own versions of Tyburn in this inhospitable world for Christians.

The answer to the question “what price faith?” – the subject of tonight’s lecture – s to be found in these people and in these places. So much of what we take for granted or contemptuously reject they treasure and preserve in their hearts. These are today’s Tyburn martyrs. We must treasure and pass on our own story but never neglect to apply it in our own times too.

In March, and appropriately enough, speaking in Cuba’s Revolution Square Pope Benedict reminded us of two things:

First that religious freedom solidifies society :

Strengthening religious freedom consolidates social bonds, nourishes the hope of a better world, creates favourable conditions for peace and harmonious development, while at the same time establishing solid foundations for securing the rights of future generations.

And secondly that:

Anyone who acts irrationally cannot become a disciple of Jesus.
Faith and reason are necessary and complementary in the pursuit of truth. God created man with an innate vocation to the truth and he gave him reason for this purpose. Certainly, it is not irrationality but rather the yearning for truth which the Christian faith promotes.

On the Western wall of Westminster Abbey there are some statues of modern martyrs. First among them is the Franciscan Polish priest, St.Maximilian Kolbe

In February 1941, when the Nazis promised him that they would permit him to continue his work so long as he made no social comment and did not speak out against them, and so long as he restricted himself to religiosity and pietism, they would leave him alone. He responded by stating in words which sent him to Auschwitz:

No one on the world can change truth.

He insisted that when we had found truth we had to serve it because

of what use will be the victories on the battlefield if we are defeated in our innermost personal selves?
Kolbe chose the defining battle ground. It is a battle between a religious faith which pits good against evil and truth against lies. And the defence of truth implies sacrifice; it will always require a price to be paid.

Let me end:

Our task must be to assert the importance in all places of rooting religious freedom in the dignity of the human person. The claim for religious freedom is a universal one, securing the freedom of all people of conscience-Christian or not-to embrace the religious belief of their choice.

In turn, the elevation of religious freedom brings great bounty to society in the working out of charitable endeavour and the deepening of the common good. Perhaps-in the context of the challenges to which I have referred-this Governments should be seized by this other important reason for promoting freedom of religious belief.

In 1965, the Second Vatican Council, in its great declaration on religious liberty, Dignitatis Humanae forcefully set out the case for religious freedom. It includes this telling admonition to lawful authorities:

“A society which promotes religious freedom will be enlivened and enriched; one that doesn’t will decay”.

As Edmund Campion journeyed from Rome’s Venerable English College he knew what fate awaited him but he loved his country and knew that without its historic faith it would decay.

He came to tell them their nation’s story. And in our own times, and in different ways, the elders must tell the children their story.

More than that, we who have voices must be prepared to use them and our freedoms to speak for those who have none – and who face the ordeal of Tyburn each day of their lives: “In the end” as Dr.King said “we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

Ends.

David Alton (born 1951) was a Liberal and then Liberal Democrat MP for constituencies in Liverpool 1979-1997 and was for a while Chief Whip of his party in the House of Commons. In 1997 he became a member of the House of Lords as Baron Alton of Liverpool, where he has sat as an Independent, having left the Liberal Democratic Party because it replaced the right to conscience on the issue of abortion with party policy. In the early 1990s he helped to found the Movement for Christian Democracy. Alton is especially known for his pro-life stance and in the Commons introduced a private member’s bill to stop late abortions. He was also foremost in opposing the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act of 2008 and has been active in campaigning against the legalisation of euthanasia. Earlier this year he successfully led a parliamentary campaign to assist victims of mesothelioma. Alton has always devoted attention to international questions (in 1987 he co-founded the lobby group for human rights, Jubilee Campaign) and in recent years has focused, for example, on the persecution of Christians and human rights abuse in such countries as North Korea (he is chairman of the British North Korea All-Party Parliamentary Group), South Sudan and Egypt. Appointed Professor of Citizenship at Liverpool John Moores University in 1997, where he founded the Foundation for Citizenship and chairs the Roscoe Lectures, Alton is also an academic and author, and has written on political issues and aspects of faith. Amongst his publications we may list Citizen Virtues (1999), an exposition of his views on citizenship in contemporary society; Pilgrim Ways (2001), a description of his personal visits to Christian pilgrimage sites; Euthanasia: Getting to the Heart of The Matter (with M. Foley, 2005); and Abortion: Getting to the Heart of the Matter (with M. Foley, 2005). An active speaker and lecturer in Great Britain and abroad, he is a Knight Commander of the Order of St.Gregory. Full biography at:

www.davidalton.net

Links: Text: Lord Alton gives Tyburn Lecture on ‘What price faith?’ http://www.catholicnews.com/”>Text: Lord Alton gives Tyburn Lecture on ‘What price faith?’
http://www.catholicnews.com/

Chen Guangchen – the courageous blind man who sees with clear sight that which the world has failed to see

Posted by David Alton on May 9, 2012

Chen Guangcheng is the blind self-taught human rights lawyer who has opened the eyes of the world to China’s one child policy. Chen has courageously exposed egregious violations of human rights which for decades world leaders have chosen not to see and which western governments have aided and abetted.

That Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been drawn into the dramatic events surrounding Chen over the past fortnight – his escape from house arrest, his temporary sanctuary in the American embassy in Beijing, his subsequent transfer to a Chinese hospital, and accusations that he has been betrayed as Hilary Clinton left beijing without him - only underlines Chen’s extraordinary story.

As these events were unfolding Secretary Clinton was due to arrive in Beijing and she must have been reflecting on the remarks she had made in the same city, in 1995, at the fourth Women’s Conference that “women’s rights are human rights” – a conference of political elites, notoriously marked by the absence of a single Chinese woman who had suffered under the one-child policy; a policy not even alluded to during its deliberations.

Be clear, the one child policy makes it a criminal offence to be pregnant; it is a policy which makes it illegal to have a brother or a sister.

It is a policy which has led to an estimated 400 million babies being aborted or killed through infanticide; a gendercide policy which favours the birth of male children so that one out of every six girls is aborted or abandoned – leading to some 40 million “missing” women.

It is a policy which has skewed China’s population balance. The Economist reported that in one province, Guangdong, there were 119 male babies for every 100 girls. Ten years earlier, the ratio was a shocking 130.”

The policy has also distorted the balance between young, middle-aged and elderly people with catastrophic social repercussions. Sex trafficking and crime has proliferated; women have become commodities; trafficking leads to the sale of girls as child brides. Little wonder, then that according to World Health Organisation statistics, China is the only country in the world where more women commit suicide than men.

500 women take their own lives every single day .

What was the Clinton slogan? – “women’s rights are human rights.”

Despite knowing about the nature of these policies one of President Obama’s first acts on coming to office was to reverse the 2001 decision to withhold US funding from the United Nations Population Association (UNFPA) and to immediately pledge $50 million. For decades, and without a break, Britain has been doing the same, with the support of all three political parties – unctuously saying it doesn’t support coercion while it has poured millions of pounds into the UNFPA and International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF).

I have campaigned against this policy since the 1980s – and both in the Commons and the Lords have initiated debates; tabled questions; moved an amendment calling for the ending of such financial support; and seen Ministers and Secretaries of State – in one case being sworn at by a Cabinet Minister for my trouble.

The meeting turned sour after I pointed out that the Chinese Population Association (CPA) is a full member of IPPF and that like UNFPA who had channelled funds into the CPA which would have been better used for development and the relief of poverty.

In 1994, in a Commons debate I said: “I am utterly mystified as to how anyone could watch Channel Four’s, “The Dying Rooms”, or last year’s BBC programme, “Women of the Yellow Earth”, and still offer a defence of the payment of £100 million of blood money over the past decade.”

“The Dying Rooms” followed BBC2’s “Women of the Yellow Earth”. Both highlighted how forced abortion, forced sterilisation and the forcible fitting of IUCDs for women had been commonplace in China since the one-child policy was introduced in 1980.

Brian Woods, the director of “The Dying Rooms” wrote about his harrowing visit to a number of orphanages in China at that time. He said:

“Every single baby in this orphanage was a girl … the only boys were mentally or physically disabled. 95 per cent of the babies we saw were able-bodied girls”.

He also said:

“The most shocking orphanage we visited lay, ironically, just twenty minutes from one of the five star international hotels that herald China’s emergence from economic isolation”.

Successive British Governments repeatedly say they do not support coercion while the CPA officials say their declared aim is to “implement government population policies”. Quin Zinzhong, a Minister who oversaw that policy, said:

“The size of the family is far too important to be left to the couple. Births are a matter of state planning”.

In one province the slogan,“It is better to have more graves than one more child”,has been used.

In Parliament I cited Mrs.Gao Xiao Duan, one of the officials who ran a centre for forced abortions. She wept as she recalled when “a baby of nine months gestation” – born above the permitted quota “had poison injected into its skull and the child died and was thrown into a trash can.”

I cited Amnesty International’s report of a baby born, above the permitted quotas, drowned at birth in Hebei Province and The Sunday Times report of a man tortured to death in Hunan after refusing to reveal the whereabouts of his pregnant wife. Jin Yani was nine months pregnant when five officials pinned her to her bed and injected her with saline solution. The loss of blood nearly killed her – and, terrified, she went into hiding.

Harry Wu, the human rights activist who was imprisoned in China for many years, described the realities on the ground:

“In Communist China, grassroots PBP cadres”–that is, planned birth policy cadres–“are stationed in every village. Those communist party and government cadres are the most immediate tools for dominating the people … They must watch every woman in the village, their duty being to promptly force women violators to undergo sterilization and abortion surgeries … PBP is targeted against every woman, every family”.

And what have the international agencies had to say? The former executive director of the UNFPA, Nafis Sadiq, remarked:

“China has every reason to feel proud and pleased with its remarkable achievements in family planning policy . . . Now China could offer its experiences and special experts to other countries

It was against this background that I was, therefore, deeply moved in 2005 to read the story of Chen Guangchen, who had been arrested after attempting to file a class action suit on behalf of women in China’s Shandong province.

I have campaigned for Chen ever since he was arrested in 2005, regularly raising his case in Parliament and with Ministers.

Two years ago, while Chen was still in prison, I met with Chen’s lawyers in Beijing and spoke to his wife by telephone. In 2009 at the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, I met with China’s Special Representative on Human Rights, Dr Shen Yongxiang and among issues I raised was the case of Chen Guang Chen, whom I told him would one day be regarded as a national hero.

The chronology of events leading to Chen’s incarceration began in March 2005 when he learned from villagers that officials in Linyi, a city in Shandong province, had subjected thousands of people trying to evade restrictive population control laws to late-term forced abortions, midnight raids, beatings and compulsory sterilization.

Chen, a self taught or “barefoot lawyer”, then began his own investigation into the allegations.

In June 2005, he filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of 130,000 women who suffered forced abortions and sterilizations lawsuit in Shandong, and travelled to Beijing to discuss the case with legal scholars, lawyers and foreign journalists. Soon after, the lawsuit was rejected.

Then, in August 2005, local officials imprisoned Chen and his immediate family in their home and shut off all outside communication. In September Chen escaped but was apprehended in Beijing and returned to Linyi. When he tried again to escape in October, local authorities failed to protect him against beatings by civilians apparently working in connection with the police to help enforce his isolation.

On June 21, the Yinan County People’s Procuratorate approved Chen’s arrest.

That same day, Chen’s lawyers, Li Jinsong and Zhang Lihui, were able to visit him, but from then on, authorities escalated the pressure to deny access to defence witnesses and materials for all the lawyers and activists involved. Next, police officers took lawyer Li in for questioning. Unknown assailants beat three other lawyers defending villagers jailed for supporting Chen – one of whom I have met. He said he had been left for dead. Police officers first looked on as the cameras of the villagers’ lawyers were smashed, then took them in for questioning.

When Li Jinsong and Li Subin, another member of Chen’s legal team, tried to visit Chen’s wife on June 23, they were stopped and beaten by guards. The following day, all the lawyers involved returned to Beijing. Li Jinsong and Li Subin tried returning to Shandong on June 27, only to be harassed again while the police again stood by. Some 20 men overturned the lawyers’ car and police took Li Jinsong in for questioning once again.

Chen was brought before a Star Chamber and imprisoned four years on the trumped up charge of obstructing traffic and damaging a police vehicle.

Of the charade of a legal process Sophie Richardson, deputy director of the Asia division of Human Rights Watch said:

“When Chen tried to make proper use of China’s legal system, the response wasn’t due process. It was house arrest, physical abuse, and then ‘disappearance’ by local authorities. His case is a textbook example of how little the rule of law really means in China.”

I asked Dr.Shen whether China’s Government truly believed that a blind man could have inflicted such damage on the combined might of the Republic of China’s law enforcement agencies: damage such as to warrant four years in prison.

Damage? No. Danger? yes.

Time magazine understood the effect of Chen’s bravery when, in 2006, they named him as one of 100 most influential men in the world.

In prison, Chen was tortured and denied medical treatment. When I met his lawyers in Beijing they told me that he had been put in a cell with eighteen other prisoners. Those inmates were told not to converse or make contact with Chen.

Chen was also denied medical treatment and for many months his wife was prevented from visiting him. If he had been willing to withdraw his complaints and repent, Chen could have secured early release, but this extraordinary principled and courageous man refused to be cowed or to recant.

After his release in 2010 he was kept under house arrest, along with his wife and six-year-old daughter. Guards constantly harassed them. A strictly enforced decision was made by the Shandong authorities to put his home out of bounds to visitors. No one was then permitted to speak to Chen or visit him. He and his wife were been confined to their quarters and only his seventy six year-old mother-in-law has been allowed to enter and leave, bringing occasional provisions.

That all changed when a video was smuggled out of his home. In the recording – which was secreted beyond China thanks to a Chinese official who is outraged by Chen’s treatment and was made available on You Tube, and seen by millions – Chen detailed his degrading treatment and appalling denial of his basic human rights. At the end of the You Tube video Chen says “We the sons and daughters of our great nation should have the courage to defeat our own fears.”

Referring to his transfer from the Shandong jail to his home he said:

“I was in a small prison and now I am in a larger prison.”

Twenty two agents constantly monitored him and devices were installed in adjacent properties to jam his mobile phone signal. Their home was under constant surveillance – by 66 security officials.

A local source told news agencies that “They cannot move from bed, and they have not been allowed to go to hospital.”

Chen’s house arrest finally came to an end last month when He Peirong, better known by her screen name Pearl, assisted Chen’s escape.

In what seemed like a scene from The Shawshank Redemption, Chen literally climbed over a wall, took to his heels and despite falling into a river and taking numerous wrong turns navigated himself to where He Peirong was waiting for him – and she drove him for eight hours to Beijing. She has since been arrested. Shawshank has been placed on the list of words censored from internet searches. And have a though for Chen’s wife and family. His wife, Mrs Yuan, once remarked: “I tell you, the darkness of the society is way beyond your imagination.”

China is a huge country and it would be wrong to assume that the Chinese President, Hu Jintao, or senior officials approve of the barbarism of regional Communist Party officials. But, equally, their failure to take action against those responsible and ignore the issues raised by Chen Guangchen they will inevitably damage China’s reputation.

Chinese people are some of the most cultivated people in the world, and there is much about today’s China which fills me with deep admiration, but the treatment of Chen and his wife and the behaviour of its provincial officials underlines the continuing challenge of matching extraordinary economic progress with the enhancement and protection of human rights.

Chen’s case is uncomfortable for China and the West – especially for Hillary Clinton and Brack Obama in the run up to an election. But it is a time of change for China as well. The US election will coincide with China’s 8^th Communist Party Congress when Vice President Xi Jinping will succeed Hu Jintao.

Even if a formula is now found to allow him to travel abroad with his family – perhaps to study – and which would at least show welcome compassion – this remarkable Shawshank has caught the public imagination and blown open a policy of coercion and eugenics. It also exposes the shameful collaborative role played by America and Britain in aiding and abetting the heinous violations of human rights which Chen has set himself against. And it has taken a blind man to see that to which we have shamefully closed our eyes.

See Ann Farmer’s blog:

http://my.telegraph.co.uk/chestertoniann/chestertoniann/125/china-the-problem-of-human-rights/

Phyllis Bowman – requiescat in pace – A friend in high places

Posted by David Alton on May 7, 2012

I’m really going to miss the short sharp message: “It’s Phyllis; it’s urgent; ring when you can.” It was always urgent and it always elicited a response as soon as I could.

Invariably she would be calling about the latest issue to vex the pro life movement’s most assiduous campaigner: an MP was proposing the further liberalisation of our abortion laws; a report highlighting new evidence on the physical or psychological effects of abortion on women; a Select Committee recommending more experiments on human embryos and animal-human hybrids; or Dutch-style euthanasia laws being wished upon us by a member of the House of Lords.

For Phyllis Bowman there was always one more battle to be fought; one more life to save; one more mind to change; one more letter to send; one more volunteer to encourage; one more campaign to plan.
This week’s news of Phyllis’ death was not unexpected. She has been ailing for quite some time. And our thoughts now will be with Jerry – her beloved husband.

But even up until the last couple of weeks of her life she had been dictating letters from her hospital bed and giving Right to Life – which she founded in 2003 – its instructions and marching orders. Reliant on her oxygen machine, telephone conversations would be interrupted as she inhaled, caught breath, and proceeded with what she had been saying.

Jewish by birth, the then agnostic Phyllis was initially in favour of abortion. But when she saw its effects on women and their unborn children she changed her mind. Later she became a Catholic – and every day would be interrupted by her recitation of the Angelus and by knocking on the door of heaven with her novenas and prayers for the unborn.

One or the more amusing memories I recall was when we went to see the late Robert Maxwell, owner of The Daily Mirror, to protest at one-sided coverage. Before he joined us, Phyllis, herself a onetime Fleet Street journalist, took the precaution of sprinkling the place with holy water which emerged from her handbag.

Phyllis Bowman DSG – Dame of St. Gregory – is one of a band or remarkable women who will always be celebrated for their causes: Elizabeth Fry, Cicely Saunders, Florence Nightingale, Dorothy Day, Mother Teresa and Sue Ryder all spring to mind.

As the prolife movement’s supreme protagonist and organiser for half a century she also had much in common with Emmeline Pankhurst.

Listening to Pankhurst describe her first visit to a workhouse in Manchester you can hear the same sense of indignation at the crushing of human dignity debasement of life which would pour forth from an angry Phyllis Bowman:

“The first time I went into the place I was horrified to see little girls seven and eight years old on their knees scrubbing the cold stones of the long corridors…the babies are very badly protected … These poor, unprotected mothers and their babies I am sure were potent factors in my education as a militant.”

The potent factors in Phyllis Bowman’s education were the industrial scale abortion of babies which followed the enactment of the Steel Bill, the 1967 Abortion Act.

For years Phyllis Bowman has argued that successive Governments have refused to look at the effects of contraceptive pills and abortion on women’s health; at the physical and psychological damage caused by abortion and possible links to cancer. Above all she hated the cover up.

These are taboo subjects for Health Ministers and powerful vested interests in the reproductive rights lobby and pharmaceutical industry have dominated the debate.

Beyond the concealment are the dreadful things we do know and which should stir our consciences as they stirred hers:

On the very day Phyllis died, reports emerged from South Korea that customs officials had discovered thousands of pills filled with powdered human baby flesh; news from China about Chen Guangchen, the blind human activist, who served 4 years in prison for exposing the forced abortion of 130,000 women; while reports from the UK revealed shocking new statistics about the number of IVF babies who are born with disabilities – from a country which permits 600 abortions daily and the abortion of disabled babies up to birth.

Ever prescient, months ago Phyllis Bowman wrote:

“Although we know that the incidence of disability is higher in IVF babies, no research has ever been conducted to find out what other consequences there might be: it could be generations before we find out anything. The powers that be have never bothered to do any long-term investigations.”

She was withering, too, about the hype generated about cures for every ailment known to man which, all dependent on the sacrifice of millions of human embryos:

“The very reason the scientific world wanted to get its hands on embryonic human beings was to cannibalise them. Their claims of miracle cures became more and more extravagant in order to blind the public. Newspapers and politicians lapped up their stories without ever checking the facts.”

Phyllis the former journalist was disdainful of sloppy reporting and contemptuous of those who manipulated frightened or sick people with distorted claims. Ever vigilant in hammering home the truth she deployed encyclopaedic knowledge of what had gone before. As Parliament legislated to permit the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos she remarked:

“Even today, the scientists involved in embryo production make exactly the same promises: their work will find cures for the incurable. Yet, in the last 23 years, the relentless and destructive experiments on human embryos have produced not one treatment or cure of any disease.”

Pointing out that the cures are coming from adult stem cells, she said: “stem cells developed from adult skin or other tissue or from umbilical cord blood can all be done without any controversy or any form of abusive treatment of human life.”

She was also passionate about Parliament itself – and understood politics. She was spot on is identifying the drift towards new euthanasia laws being introduced by stealth, not by Parliament, but by the judiciary:

“We have to be quite clear. We are facing a constitutional crisis: the judiciary seeking to take over from the legislature. It is not only a matter of euthanasia it is a question of whether Parliament will sit back and let the judiciary trample over the primacy of Parliament.”

Phyllis Bowman took a lot of hits over the years. This diminutive figure appeared frail but was made of steel. In 1979, after my election to Parliament she told me how four years earlier, when James White had challenged the abortion laws her office was broken into several times and “we had to take turns of sleeping on the office floor to protect our equipment throughout the summer months, because we were broken into so often.”

On another occasion – during the debates on the Enoch Powell Bill on Embryo Research “we had our office smashed up so badly that the BBC actually made it the first item on their evening news programme.”

It’s no secret that almost since the start there have been serious divisions within the pro life movement. At times it broke her heart – and her language could be choice and often unprintable when it came to those she held responsible for the divisions!

The best memorial to Phyllis Bowman’s memory would be for the rising generation to build on her considerable legacy and to make the right to life the supreme question of the times.

And we’re now going to have a friend in high places. May she Rest In Peace.

—————————————————————————————————————————-
One of the new generation of pro life activists, Robert Colquhoun, interviewed Phyllis last year. To hear the interview go to:
http://loveundefiled.blogspot.co.uk/2011/01/interview-with-phyllis-bowman-of-right.html <a title=

http://www.thecatholicuniverse.com/news/50-uk-and-ireland/1578-death-of-pro-life-campaigner-phyllis-bowman

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/05/07/campaigner-who-led-struggle-against-abortion-for-over-40-years-dies-aged-85/

2012 Audio and Powerpoint Presentation on Religious Pesecution Worldwide – the pain of the suffering church.

Posted by David Alton on May 7, 2012

Audio of the Pain of The Suffering Church – Easter 2012.

http://lordalton.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/celebrate-ilfracombe-2012-david-alton-the-pain-of-the-suffering-church-full-file-c1218.mp3

http://davidalton.net/2012/04/05/the-pain-of-the-suffering-church-celebrate-conference-april-2012/

The remarkable Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia

Posted by David Alton on May 4, 2012

I recently met Jimmy Wales, the remarkable man who launched Wikipedia in 2001. For anyone who may not have used Wikipedia – and there can’t be many internet users who haven’t– Wikipedia is a free open content internet encyclopaedia which has transformed access to information. Unsurprisingly, given that 500 million people visit Wikipedia each month, Time magazine listed Wales as one of the world’s most influential people.

In promoting transformative educational progress and in democratizing access to knowledge and information Wikipedia has become one of the most important egalitarian tools on earth. If there is truth in the old saw that “knowledge is power” Jimmy Wales has succeeded in putting power into the hands of millions of people.

In many respects the way in which Wikipedia works bears an extraordinary resemblance to the social teaching of the Catholic Church. It divests power from a central authority to the lowest possible level – subsidiarity; it demonstrates solidarity by reaching and enabling socially disadvantaged and remote communities; it shares the gift of a holder of privilege with those who are without; and, as a not-for profit charity, it works for the common good. It also believes that its raison d’être is to seek and uphold truth.

Another similarity with the Catholic Church is that Wikipedia is global in scope and there is also an echo of the belief found in the Acts of the Apostle that “everything should be held in common.”

Wikipedia’s original inspiration was to ensure every person on the planet is provided with free access to the sum of all human knowledge. Jimmy Wales’ inspired philosophy is a belief in open sharing not cost sharing. These days he holds the “community founder” seat on Wikipedia’s Board.

There’s a big difference between Wikipedia and social networking internet sites such as Facebook (with 845 million active users) or Twitter, and Wikipedia isn’t YouTube.

It’s not there to generate money for its owners and, although they have an annual campaign for donations, Wikipedia don’t make constant demands for funds or bombard you with commercial sponsors. Nor, unlike the proprietors of Facebook, do they boast that they own the biggest data base in the world, worryingly acquiring and exploiting personal information which instead of insisting that they hold in trust, they have the temerity to claim they own.

Wikipedia is free as in “free speech” but not free as in free-for-all. It is run as an open community but it isn’t anarchy. It has hundreds of pages – a catechism -setting out is governance and rules and it has complex social structures.

It is a fascinating mixture of consensus and neutrality. In deciding how entries will appear on the site it encourages dialogue to find agreement when there is disagreement it has process to mediate and arbitrate, including rights of appeal. It has some elements of a democracy, with occasional votes and some elements of plutocracy, with its leaders and its administrators, ultimately determining what appears if there is controversy or conflict about an entry. Jimmy Wales is the final appeal – and says that “like a Constitutional Monarch I am there as the final line of defence.”

Wales also says that the Arbitration Committee sees itself as police not judges – and their transparently regulated approach becomes a mixture of consensus and control. It rarely leads to a final appeal. The last time he used his veto was in 2010 on the issue of child protection. Some users of Wikipedia had argued for free speech over the issue of paedophilia. Wales insisted and ruled that it was Wikipedia policy that such material should not appear, and it doesn’t.

Although he insists that the site should be a mirror of society there clearly have to be safeguards and ways of preserving neutrality. Deciding what is a neutral point of view also has its own hazards.

In describing events in the Middle East, for instance, Palestinians on the West Bank might call it a massacre while Israelis would say it was a response to terror. Wikipedia’s role is not to decide which it is but to allow both points of view to appear, to facilitate dialogue and to assist the search for truth.

Jimmy Wales says that where there are clear counter points of view or competing narratives the problem generally resolves itself while the bigger problem “is when the only viewpoint is that of a 26 year old white computer programmer. It could be very limiting.”

He says that in any controversy it’s not Wikipedia’s job to take sides; it needs to understand what the debate is about; to understand what all sides have said and why they have said it; and then to moderate it.

He describes a visit to Taiwan and how a student who had been brought up in a very nationalist home thought that all mainland Chinese were mindless robots, controlled by the Communist Party, but through reading the entries about China on Wikipedia he had come to see Chinese differently.

It’s not entirely trouble free or bound to lead to reciprocity. Wikipedia was banned for several years in China and, although finally given access, a firewall removes entries of which the Party disapproves – references to Tiananmen Square, Taiwan, Falun Gong, the Dalai Lama and Tibet, for instance. But 300,000 entries are now permitted. Gradually China will come to see that it should not fear access to knowledge and will, in any event, ultimately fail to control access to it.

Wikipedia’s moderating and enabling role clearly has a role in peace making, in changing attitudes and in assisting reconciliation.

Wikipedia reaches an ever increasing number of people – currently around 500 million people each month. It is the most linguistically diverse web site on the internet with over a million articles in English, German and Dutch and less spoken languages are increasingly being translated. Swahili, for instance, now has 30,000 articles. Nothing like this ever existed before.

The opportunities for learning and education – allowing people in remote places to leap-frog their lack of educational opportunities are enormous. Ten years ago virtually no Nigerians had internet access, Today 29% of Nigerians are now connected. The size of the Wikipedia entries in Yoruba has grown at the same pace. Out in Turkana – in a remote corner of Kenya – I saw Wikipedia being used by people who previously had little or no access to books or libraries.

The exponential and explosive growth of the Internet means that none of us can ignore it.

By 2016 there will be 3 billion internet users – almost half the world’s population and mobile connections will account for four out of five connections. It is a part of most people’s daily lives. To take its message to the world – and especially the younger generations – the Catholic Church needs to understand and utilize the Internet. In using it to facilitate discussion, dialogue, and understanding, it could do worse than take a page out of Jimmy Wales’ remarkable book called Wikipedia.

Truth, Justice, Charity, Liberty in a Globalised World – Paper given at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Vatican City, during a symposium in anticipation of the 5oth anniversary of the publication of Pacem in Terris

Posted by David Alton on May 4, 2012

http://davidalton.net/2012/05/04/pacem-in-terris-and-the-tranquillity-of-order/

Truth, Justice, Charity and Liberty in the Globalised World
Rome, April 2012

THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Vatican City
XVIII PLENARY SESSION (27 April – 1 May 2012)
Professor the Lord Alton of Liverpool KCSG

On April 11th, 2013, we will celebrate the official publication of Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, Pacem in terris: On Establishing Peace in Truth, Justice, Charity and Liberty. It is sometimes described as Good Pope John’s last will and testament to the Church; sometimes as the Pope’s letter to the entire world. This anniversary has particular significance for me because as a boy, in 1963, I came to Rome with my school – a brand new Jesuit Grammar School named for the English martyr, Edmund Campion – and, in St.Peter’s, in front of Pope John, we sang “Faith of Our Fathers.” Today, we commit ourselves to retelling the story of our faith in these new times.

Each word in the title of this talk warrants an exegesis commanding an entire conference, let alone a brief paper.

I hope, therefore, that you will permit me the luxury of taking each term at its most general and commonsensical: truth is saying of a thing what it is; justice is fairness; charity is giving of one’s self for others; and liberty is freedom from oppression. All are universal concepts requisite to the pursuit of the Common Good.

I am not going to use my time today to furnish you with an exhaustive defence of these statements or to set out the endless libraries of relevant academic analyses and arguments. Rather, I hope to address you from the vantage point of a politician who has had been privileged to witness first-hand, and from the local to international scale, some of the challenges posed by globalisation to truth, justice, charity and liberty as properly conceived, and to set out some ways in which we might approach those challenges.

The Character of Globalisation and Some of its Problems

Globalisation as Interdependence – the Balance of Local and Universal Interests

I began my career working in deprived inner city communities. That experience nurtured an ingrained suspicion of vast or over-weaning centralised institutions and bureaucracies which accrete powers to themselves.

Where globalisation – a term coined by American educationalists in the 1930s but became popularised in the 1980s1 – implies centralisation I am antagonistic towards it; where it means “the phasing out of the nation state” and its replacement by remote or unelected elites, or homogeneity through imposed values, I feel the urge to resist it; where it implies interdependence I would want support it.

In 350 BC, writing in the Politics, Aristotle emphasised the duty of every citizen to be a participator in the common life. He claimed that by nature every human being is a political animal and none should be like

Solitary pieces in a game of chequers.2

Simply, man cannot escape the fact that he is a social, interdependent being.
True participators must remember their inter-connectedness, seeking the good of the city as a whole, yes, but, if you’ll pardon the cliché, they should never forget to stay in touch with their roots.

Mahatma Gandhi understood the importance of this when he remarked that

To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.3

Speaking about American politics, a former Congressional Speaker, Tip O’Neill once remarked that in the final analysis

All politics is local.4

It’s helpful to remember this when globalisation seems to equate to remote centralisation and threatens to enshrine universal privileges that are to the detriment of local needs or undermine diversity.
Rather than falling prey to a false dichotomy between the local and universal – a mistake so often the catalyst for political conflict, Aristotle’s value of interdependence should here be writ large and sought on a global scale. The “local” needs the “universal” and vice versa. Without the universal, the local may lose sight of the obligations to its fellow man, and runs the risk of relativising its moral system to its own locality and exclusive interests.

Equally, the “universal” needs the “local”, without which its ontology is sterile and without appropriate practical application.

We ought not to undertake the folly of attempting to resolve the tension between these two polarities. Rather we ought to try to live with the tension in order that it might be generative. Rather than an either-or, winner-takes-all battle to the death between local and universal, we should aim to strike that balance, favouring a ‘both-and’ approach which bears fruit by means of the creative tension between the two aspects.

In the context of globalisation, the trend seems often to be towards “universalisation” rather than the nurturing of a “creative tension”, bringing with it a style of politics that is unbalanced and forgetful of its roots. When politicians forget to walk the streets, to engage in the issues which affect people, to live in the communities and regions they represent, or put self aggrandisement before the duty to serve, it compounds alienation and the dislocation of politics and people.

Yet, equally, any politician who becomes preoccupied with “the narrow” or whips up localised fears or prejudice or who does not see the connection between the local and what is national and universal is equally at fault.

Globalisation and Scale: as if people mattered

With the universalising tendency comes institutional and ideological “bigness”. But, as articulated by the British Catholic economist, E.F.Schumacher in his 1973 critique of western economics, seeing the Big Picture does not need to contradict the belief that Small is Beautiful5.

Schumacher was one of the first to examine the phenomenon of globalisation, arguing that with appropriate decentralisation there could be smallness within bigness.
How comfortably this sits with the Catholic concepts of subsidiarity, solidarity, human dignity, and utter respect for God’s creation – where the man made in the image of God – imago Dei – always takes precedence over ideologies and systems.

Subsidiarity is enjoying a recent resurgence in popularity in European democracies, especially my own, where the government has incorporated something that seems very much like subsidiarity in to its flagship policy, but has named it localism.

Subsidiarity as we all understand it was developed by Oswald von Nell-Breuning, a German Jesuit theologian, whose thinking was pivotal in the publication of Quadragesimo Anno (1931) by Pope Pius XI, and whose writing was banned by the Nazis. As many of you will have heard many times, subsidiarity affirms that however complex a task may be, or however far reaching, it should be undertaken at the most local level possible.

In an increasingly globalised world where vast corporations have more wealth and power than many nation states, how much do we need our economies tempered by this principle, which hard-wires institutions against compulsive centralisation? The contrast with totalitarian and authoritarian societies – which subjugate the individual and these mediating structures to the State – could not be greater.

Globalisation and the Crushing of the Human Spirit

To be Catholic is to be global. The word means “according to the whole”, and in every generation the Church’s adherents have sacrificed their lives to live out the Great Commission from Jesus to go out to all the nations of the world and to baptise all people in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Matthew: 28, 16-20). Worldwide there are two billion Christians. The onus is universal – it applies to all those who accept Him – and it expected to be lived out universally: “all nations”.

Yet, in 2012, in the top 16 countries responsible for the most egregious and systematic violations of religious freedom, listed by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, persecution of Christians occurs in every one of those nations. This signals how malign and hostile the global environment may be and also, despite our “interconnectedness”, how indifferent we frequently are to those who reside with us in the household of faith.

In Dignitatis Humanae (Declaration on Religious Freedom, on the right of the person and of communities to social and civil freedom in matters religious, promulgated by Paul VI, December, 1965) the Council fathers set out the terms on which Christians may remain true to the central belief and calling of universality – eschewing violent proselytism and theocracy and insisting on respect and tolerance while firmly asserting the right of Christians to worship freely and to proclaim their beliefs.

The Second Vatican Council speaks audibly to a generation which is witnessing in the United Kingdom heavy handed intolerance involving attempts to ban the saying of prayers on public occasions to the banning of the wearing of a cross; to the imprisonment and “re-education” of Chinese Catholic bishops and the execution of converts to Christianity in Iran. Wherever it occurs, this is the crushing of the human spirit. It also diminishes those who do it and robs society of something which can be virtuous and inspirational.

Speaking, appropriately enough, in Cuba’s Revolution Square (Homily, March 2012) Pope Benedict reminded us of two things:

first that religious freedom solidifies society :

and secondly, that we must beware of intolerance and prejudice in our own lives:

there are those who wrongly interpret this search for the truth, leading them to irrationality and fanaticism; they close themselves up in ‘their truth,’ and try to impose it on others. These are like the blind scribes who, upon seeing Jesus beaten and bloody, cry out furiously, Crucify him! ( Jn 19:6). Anyone who acts irrationally cannot become a disciple of Jesus. Faith and reason are necessary and complementary in the pursuit of truth. God created man with an innate vocation to the truth and he gave him reason for this purpose. Certainly, it is not irrationality but rather the yearning for truth which the Christian faith promotes.

This yearning for truth is the antithesis of homogenisation that implies a one size fits all vacuous western modernity to be imposed throughout the world. In Catholic thought, subsidiarity and universality sit happily alongside one another; so do reason and faith – the domains of secular rationality and religious conviction. These domains are interdependent and to be civilised we need them both.

Globalisation, Personalism and Communitarianism

At the heart of all our concerns must remain the inalienable and inviolate dignity of the human person.

Whether it is an international supra organisation, a multi-national corporation or a nation state, there remains a duty not to derogate autonomy from the human person, from their family or from the many small and intermediate communities – such as the Church or voluntary organisations – which are the web and weave of society. Jacques Maritain’s ideas on personalism, as expressed in Christianity and Democracy6 should be read alongside the more recent communitarian writings of Amitai Etzioni and political philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre, who argues that moral and political judgements – virtue ethics – will shape our actions as moral agents and determine the shape of our communities.

In Dependent Rational Animals (1999), MacIntyre asserts that human vulnerability and disability are the central features of human life, and that Thomistic virtues of dependency are prerequisite if individual humans and their communities are to flourish as they pass from immaturity to maturity. MacIntyre says: It is most often to others that we owe our survival, let alone our flourishing … It will be a central thesis of this book that the virtues that we need, if we are to develop from our animal condition into that of independent rational agents, and the virtues that we need, if we are to confront and respond to vulnerability and disability both in ourselves and in others, belong to one and the same set of virtues, the distinctive virtues of dependent rational animals7

Mary Ann Glendon in Rights Talk provides a prescient critique of a society where individual autonomy and selfishness has eclipsed communal duties and the service of others. She describes:
…its penchant for absolute, extravagant formulations, its near-aphasia concerning responsibility, its excessive homage to individual independence and self-sufficiency, its habitual concentration on the individual and the state at the expense of the intermediate groups of civil society, and its unapologetic insularity, not only does each of these traits make it difficult to give voice to common sense or moral intuitions, they also impede development of the sort of rational political discourse that is appropriate to the needs of a mature, complex, liberal, pluralistic republic.8

Globalisation and Economic Justice

In the colonial empires we saw early examples of economic globalisation and since the nineteenth century we have seen many trade barriers dismantled. The formation of Europe’s Common Market, after the Second World War, was based on the removal of economic and trade barriers. At times of high unemployment, or during economic downturn, the attractions of globalisation and the easy entry of imports manufactured by exploited workers paid a fraction of those in the importing nation – and who are employed by corporations which have moved their activities to capitalise on lower wage regimes – reveals the less desirable side of a globalised economy.

Globalisation brings with it more migration and dislocation of populations. Where this leads to the return of earned income as receipts to families left behind – I think of Poland –it can help build an economy; where it leads to trafficking and new forms of bonded labour and global slavery, it is an anathema.

When globalisation reduces tariff barriers and stimulates the global production and trade in goods and services, and combats distorting factors such as import quotas and export fees, it appears compelling. Undoubtedly it has stimulated the economic development of many Asian economies – spectacularly in countries such as China and India. In 2009 china overtook Germany as the biggest exporter of goods in the world. But China and India also still remain home to some of the most appalling poverty in the world.

The benefits of globalisation have too frequently been over-hyped while some of the disadvantages have been ignored. Globalisation seems pretty irrelevant if you live in the DRC, North Korea, Burma, Nepal, Rwanda or South Sudan – all of which I have visited -and many remain unconvinced that countries whose main exports are agricultural goods will ever be beneficiaries. Investor rights can be made central stage while people’s interest become incidental or secondary.

Globalisation and Charity

Advances in agricultural development, communication and transport have presented the international community with extraordinary charitable opportunities. Never before has it been so possible to distribute the earth’s plenitude in solidarity. But those opportunities carry with them an awesome burden of responsibility.

In 1840 the Jesuit, Luigi Taparelli articulated the phrase “social justice” in his work Saggio Teoretico di Dritto Naturale Appoggiato sul Fatto (Theoretical Wisdom of Natural Law based on Fact).9

He was interpreting Aquinas but the concept is rooted in Scripture. Jesus could not be clearer when he tells us that “Whatever you have done for the least of my brothers, you have done to me” (Matthew 25:40). Never forget that religion is the single most important factor in giving: in the United States 85% of giving comes through charities inspired by their religious faith. In Europe, our great universities, schools, hospitals and modern hospices and many charitable foundations were created through Christian impulse.

We must never lose sight of the risk that the institutionalisation and internationalisation of charity poses to an authentic understanding of caritas, which cannot be compartmentalised or made in to an abstract, impersonal transaction between bank accounts. Something further from authentic Christian self-gift could barely be conceived.

Pope Benedict’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est,10 is a rhapsodic call to arms – urging us to give from the depths of our being and to be utterly focused on the common good and develop a spirit of service, and servant leadership, telling us that“ the heart sees where love is needed, and acts accordingly” (Section 31(c)).

“Love grows through love”; (Section 18); “Love of God and love of neighbour are inseparable, they form a single commandment “(Section 18); and he insists that: “Love needs to be organised if it is to be an ordered service to the community”. (Section 24)

We need to carefully assess how international institutions measure up to such criteria. It would be a serious oversight in such a discussion on globalisation to fail to mention that contemporary charitable giving can be deeply problematic. We need to ask ourselves a few pertinent questions: for instance, by what criteria are we to ensure that those in most need are helped?

In her compelling book on the subject11 one African woman, Dr. Dambisa Moyo, who worked for the World Bank and at Goldman Sachs, in the debt capital markets and as an economist in the global macroeconomics team, questions the dependency culture which has been created by many global development programmes.
International institutions should exercise caution before contributing to what the Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc, described as “The Servile State”12

Ask also, what role do international institutions have to play in discerning which causes to donate to? How ought we to ensure the efficient and equitable transmission of goods?

Nor should we lose sight of the distinction to be drawn between charity and obligation. For example, the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of elderly people is one of the United Kingdom’s greatest scandals; and the thought that they should become dependent on handouts from charities is nothing short of obscene.

One of the most shocking statistics about contemporary Britain is that an estimated 1 million elderly people do not see a friend of a relative or a neighbour during the course of an average week.

Toxic loneliness and isolation will be the curse of the 21st century. Where family structures have broken down the wider community has a duty of care; this goes beyond charitable giving. This is how a just society must function.

Pope Benedict XVI, insists that social teaching must

“help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just. The Church has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy, without which justice cannot prevail and prosper” (Section 28, Deus Caritas Est)

In an age where hundreds of millions in aid are pledged to developing countries in pursuit of the aggressive “family planning” programmes of supra-national institutions who happen to be controlling the budgets, these words drive home the importance of the place of the Church’s voice in the international conversation. Without it, charity runs the risk of becoming devoid of meaning or, at worst, an excuse for the proliferation of malign ideologies.

Globalisation and Truth

So, to what do we have recourse when the path of this universalisation, this globalisation, seems to be progressing negatively in whatever permutation it is manifested? We must be careful not to emulate the soldiers in Vietnam who burnt down the villages, thinking it would help to free the people.
A Christian ought to respond that it is knowledge of the Truth that enables us to construe properly the meaning of justice, charity and liberty, and that such knowledge is attained by the light of human reason and Divine Revelation: “the truth will set you free” (Jn: 8.32).

Some might contend that the prospect of living a political life faithful to the Truth of the Gospel is simply impossible in a confused world where subjectivity and relativism reign supreme. No doubt it is extremely difficult and will certainly entail sacrifice. Yet too often we allow its seeming impossibility to mask cowardice or the temptation for a quiet life.

This is the defining battle ground between a religious faith which pits good against evil and truth against lies. And the defence of truth implies sacrifice; it will always require a price to be paid.

Just over a year ago, Pakistan’s brave Catholic Minister for Minorities was gunned down by Taliban assassins. Shahbaz Bhatti once said:

I want to share that I believe in Jesus Christ, who has given his own life for us. I know what is the meaning of the cross, and I am following the cross, and I am ready to die for a cause.13

In February 1941, when the Nazis promised St.Maximilian Kolbe that they would permit him to continue his work so long as he made no social comment and restricted himself to religiosity and pietism, he responded by stating in words which sent him to Auschwitz:

No one on the world can change truth.14

He insisted that when we had found truth we had to serve it because
of what use will be the victories on the battlefield if we are defeated in our innermost personal selves?

As Pope Benedict remarked during his recent visit to Cuba (Homily March 28th 2012) we must be prepared to act like the three young men, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abed-Nego (Daniel 3) who “defied the order of the king” preferring “to face death by fire rather than betray their conscience and their faith”.

Echoing Kolbe, the Holy Father concluded:

“Each human being has to seek the truth and to choose it when he or she finds it, even at the risk of embracing sacrifices.”

Not everyone will be required to give their life for their beliefs but as Blessed John Henry, Cardinal, Newman, perceptively observed:

“Good is never done except at the expense of those who do it : truth is never enforced except at the sacrifice of its propounders.” 15

Globalisation and Relativism

Relativism is a doctrine which rejects fundamentally the notion that human action is, can or should be universal; it is a doctrine which dethrones truth.

We can draw some hope that relativism is, at root, incompatible with Globalisation. Globalisation needs universalising forces in order to exist.

That there exists some shared value that ought to be universalised is presupposed.

This exposes the deception of many of those who appear to champion relativism while playing a part in a Globalising institution.

The creed implemented by such institutions can never be your-truth-my-truth relativism – that would defeat their reason for existence entirely. Rather, a new and occasionally terrifying moral hierarchy is being promoted which sees its task to aggressively secularise and homogenise, and all under the guise of tolerance. G.K.Chesterton amusingly quipped that

Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions.16

But beyond the humour is a serious warning about the danger of pitting the admirable quality of tolerance against the repudiation of Truth.

This, I believe, is what the Holy Father is getting at when he speaks of the dictatorship of relativism.

Nowhere is this the case more emphatically than with international organisations that are attempting to enshrine the killing of the unborn as a universal human right, even going as far as withdrawing aid from countries that do not accept their presuppositions about life in the womb.

In the domestic context, in a country like the United Kingdom, this has led to seven million abortions; to gender abortions; to the eugenic abortion of disabled babies; to calls by ethicists to permit “after birth abortion” (infanticide); to the destruction of millions of human embryos for experimental purposes; to therapeutic cloning of human embryos; to the creation of animal-human hybrid embryos; and, at the other end of the human spectrum, to the inevitable calls for euthanasia – with one of Britain’s leading philosophers claiming that people with Alzheimer’s are too great a financial burden both to their families and the State.

Depending on the circumstances and the situation, the belief that personal autonomy and mere choice trump all other considerations has led to infinite permutations and amendments to the Sixth Commandment. There is no right way, no correct way, just my way.

This is the real fault-line which will determine whether Globalisation is a force for good or evil. It is a fight between absolutists. The task of local and international politics is to ascertain whether the absolute values that are being promoted are harmonious with the Common Good of all mankind.

We see the gospel as public truth and that it commands our commitment, superseding all other commitments.

Our belief is that the Common Good is shaped by the universal Truth of Jesus Christ – who is Truth incarnate and whose Truth remains in His Body, the Church. How essential it is that today’s Christian politicians grasp that this fact is central to their vocation:

Concluding Remarks

It is with precisely this conviction about the nature of the Truth that we can reject a system that fails to afford justice, charity or liberty to the most vulnerable in society as utterly devoid of credibility.

If Christ’s truth is universal and living it is what man was made for then the success or cataclysmic failure of the progress of Globalisation hinges upon the influence of Christians – or those advocating values compatible with Christ’s teaching – in the public square, locally, nationally and internationally.

To this end we all need to be more religiously literate: and those called to political life need continuing formation and the sort of fraternal global support, contact, friendships and encouragement provided by organisations such as the International Catholic Legislators Network (ICLN) and Pontifical Academies.

Along with our own formation, and the cure of souls, our most formidable allies in the new evangelisation will be the cultivation of a love of learning and a love of society. Faith and reason are always happy companions. We must treasure the rich deposit of faith with which we have been entrusted; know who we are; and stand for truth – it’s enough.

Happily, many of the international rights instruments in existence enshrine principles with which Christians can engage favourably as they arise from Christian philosophy. I am thinking particularly of individual human dignity and equality – values so utterly revolutionary when preached by Christ.

Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful is subtitled Economics as if People Mattered (ibid). This makes perfect sense for those of us whose starting point is that man is “imago Dei” – that each person is unique and of infinite worth because he is crafted in God’s very image. For that reason alone he matters a great deal.

It is up to those who believe in Christian Truth to prevent these principles from becoming distorted in their varying interpretations.

The great Christian apologist, C.S. Lewis brilliantly expressed this belief when he said:

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality. In fact, of course, we all do believe that some moralities are better than others.17

So, we are called to be more than savages.

Where globalisation implies conformity rather than diversity; standardisation rather than difference; over-arching rather than empowering; it should be strenuously resisted.

Where globalisation opens up personal communication and connectedness and enables free speech and human rights to prosper – through the internet for instance – it should be welcomed; but it would be foolish to pretend that these same tools can’t be used to poison minds or to bolster tyranny. Today, a lie is half way round the world before you have had time to wipe your brow.

Where globalisation is indifferent to authentic Truth, Justice, Charity or Liberty or tramples on these concepts in the name of a false liberalism or shallow Western modernity it should be opposed.

Where is promotes new forms of co-operation and co-existence it should be embraced. Where it sides with private power systems, rather than social solidarity – that other great principle of Catholic Social Teaching – it should be exposed.

Where it seeks cultural homogenisation – an invented “one world religion” for instance, which would ban all others; or seeks to standardise language; or to impose the same popular culture; or to countenance only an academically mediated or politically approved form of Christianity; then diversity, respect for difference, and plurality should be advanced instead. Being serious about your own faith is good for other faiths and a vibrant public culture needs diverse voices which know what they believe.

We can take one of two paths.

One would be to emulate Pilate, who infamously asked: what is truth? We, too, can pretend that truth does not exist; avoid asking the question or hearing the answer; and say the responsibility for everything – from abject poverty to industrial scale abortion – belong to someone else.

Pope Benedict suggests that Pilate’s implies that:

…man is incapable of knowing it or denying that there exists a truth valid for all. This attitude, as in the case of scepticism and relativism, changes hearts, making them cold, wavering, distant from others and closed. They, like the Roman governor, wash their hands and let the water of history drain away without taking a stand.18

The alternative is to take the risk of discipleship, attempting to follow in the greatest tradition of all, walking hand-in-hand with some of the great men and women who are central to our Catholic story and identity – Kolbe, More, Stein, Bhatti and countless others whose names are often unrecorded, from China to Nigeria, Sudan to North Korea, the former Soviet Union and its satellites to the contemporary atrocities in the Middle East – in self-giving charity and with love for the Truth, regardless of whatever worldly consequences that might bring.

David Alton (Professor Lord Alton of Liverpool KKSG) is Professor of Citizenship at Liverpool John Moores University; and for 33 years has served in the British Parliament, both in the House of Commons and House of Lords. He is the author of ten books, including “Citizen Virtues” (Harper Collins, 2000) and Pilgrim Ways (St.Paul’s 2001) – www.davidalton.net
altond@parliament.uk

Footnotes:
1 Sheila L. Croucher. Globalisation and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World. Rowman & Littlefield, 2004
2 Aristotle, line 1252B of Politics, in Terence Urwin, Gail Fine, Aristotle, Hackett Publishing, 1996, p. 290
3 Mahatma Gandhi, recorded in the Navajivan Trust’s English Weekly Journal: Harijan, 25-8-1946, p. 282
4 Tip O’Neil, All Politics is Local, and Other Rules of the Game, Gary Hymel, Crown Publishers; 1st edition 1994
5 E F Schumacher, Small is Beautiful Economics as if People Mattered, Hartley and Mark’s Publishers, 1999
6 Jacques Maritain, Christianity and Democracy translated by Doris C. Anson, Charles Scribner’s Sons, I944
7 Alasdair MacIntyre Dependent Rational Animals, Why Human Beings Needs the Virtues, Duckworth, 1999 pg. 5
8 Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse Free Press, 1991 pg. 14
9 Luigi Taparelli, Saggio Teoretico di Dritto Naturale Appoggiato sul Fatto, in J. Brian Benestad, Church, State, and Society: An Introduction to Catholic Social Doctrine Catholic Moral Thought, Catholic University of America Press, 2011
10 Pope Benedict XVI Deus Caritas Est, Catholic Truth Society, 2006
11 Dr. Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How there is a Better Way for Africa Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009
12 Hilaire Belloc, The Servile State, London; Edinburgh, T.N. Foulis, 1912
13 Shahbaz Bhatti, lifesitenews.com reporting on an interview posted on youtube.com:

http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/i-am-ready-to-die-said-assassinated-pakistani-christian-official-in-pre-dea/

14 Brian Roberts Dear Brother, Lulu Publishers, 2006 pg. 84
15 “Lectures on the Position of Catholics in England Addressed to the Brothers of the Oratory in the Summer of 1851″ and see Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman Ed. Ian Ker Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Penguin Classics, 1996
16 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 1906, Bantam Doubleday, 1996
17 C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Harper Collins, 1943
18 Pope Benedict XVI, Homily in Revolution Square, Cuba 2012 found online: http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2012/03/27/a-society-that-rejects-god-is-hurled-into-a-void-pope-tells-cubans/

Refelections on Local Elections 2012

Posted by David Alton on May 4, 2012

Traditionally, the first Thursday of May is local election day. This weekend, spare a thought for those good local councillors who have lost seats, not because of local issues, but because the electorate wanted to punish Messrs.Cameron and Clegg.

I cut my teeth in local politics. Forty years ago, on May 4th 1972, I was the surprise victor in Low Hill, an inner city Ward of Liverpool. Aged 21, still a student, I was daunted to find myself entrusted with the care of a community where half the homes were without inside sanitation. In streets, some of which were lit by gas, there was chronic poverty but incredible generosity; slum clearance but strong communities; wonderful humour. Faith, family, and friendship were in the DNA.
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Easter 2012: What Easter Means To Me

Posted by David Alton on April 6, 2012

This link takes you to the power point presentation which accompanies a talk give at the Celebrate Conference, 2012:

What Easter Means To Me

Professor David Hilmers on You Tube – speaking at St.Anselm’s Birkenhead http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW26il5f45A

Posted by David Alton on April 3, 2012

Category Archives: Author’s Recommended Posts

The Suffering of Chen Guangchen – his exit to the U.S. and the challenge he poses to China, the USA and the UK

The Tyburn Lecture – May 9th 2012

Chen Guangchen – the courageous blind man who sees with clear sight that which the world has failed to see

Phyllis Bowman – requiescat in pace – A friend in high places

2012 Audio and Powerpoint Presentation on Religious Pesecution Worldwide – the pain of the suffering church.

The remarkable Jimmy Wales and Wikipedia

Truth, Justice, Charity, Liberty in a Globalised World – Paper given at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Vatican City, during a symposium in anticipation of the 5oth anniversary of the publication of Pacem in Terris

Refelections on Local Elections 2012

Easter 2012: What Easter Means To Me

Professor David Hilmers on You Tube – speaking at St.Anselm’s Birkenhead http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW26il5f45A

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