Cardinal: Democracy Doesn't Ensure Religious Liberty

 

VIENNA, Austria, MAY 3, 2006 (Zenit.org).- A Vatican official warned that the right to religious freedom is not always respected, even in liberal and democratic countries.

Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, expressed his concern in his address on "Religion in the Public Arena: Religious Freedom in the New Europe." He delivered the address last week at Vienna's Diplomatic Academy.

The meeting concluded his itinerary which in previous days took him to Croatia, Hungary and finally Austria to present the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, a volume published by his dicastery in 2004.

During his visit to Vienna, the cardinal said that the ideological neutrality of the "state of law" must not be confused with its alleged ethical neutrality.

"Freedom of religion is the primary guarantee for human rights not to be placed on the sand of convention but on the rock of the transcendent foundation," he said.

Hence the state's respect for the right of freedom of religion is a sign of its respect for other fundamental rights, inasmuch as it is an implicit recognition of the existence of an order that surpasses the political dimension of life, he clarified.

Not just private

Cardinal Martino rejected a concept of laicism that excludes religion from public life, relegating it to a purely private event.

"An authentically secular political regime accepts both that Christians act as such in the society -- as do persons without belief -- without camouflaging themselves," he said. Such a regime also allows the "Church to manifest its own assessments of the great ethical questions at stake."

And this is an interest of politics itself, because if the latter pretends to live as if God did not exist, in the end it becomes arid and loses its own awareness of the intangibility of human dignity, the cardinal concluded.

The cardinal met earlier with Austrian President Heinz Fischer, and with the president of the Parliament, Andreas Khol.

 

 

 

 

 

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