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Candace Owens Doesn’t Speak for Catholics

Thu, 05 Sep 2024 10:00:00 -0400

Candace Owens, a Catholic convert and former pundit at the Daily Wire , has come under fire for anti-Semitic rhetoric, including promoting the “blood libel” charge and linking Judaism to pedophilia. She is not alone among Jew-bashers with large online followings trying to claim the label of “Catholic right” these days (notorious anti-Semite Nick Fuentes and some lesser-knowns do the same). But Owens stands out because her recent conversion in April through London’s fabled Brompton Oratory has coincided with her increasingly impassioned attacks on Jews qua Jews, creating the impression that the two are linked.

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Liberated from Dhimmitude

Mon, 26 Feb 2024 06:00:00 -0500

T hree years ago, an Islamist sheikh in the Middle East met with a group of young Americans. When asked about local Christians, he said, “Christians are protected here. They’re our guests.” That answer might’ve sounded harmless to innocent ears. But it caused a Coptic Christian woman in the group to shudder. She later shared how his fork-tongued words evoked childhood memories as a “protected” Christian in Egypt before her family emigrated to the U.S.

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A Modern Mendicant

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 00:00:00 -0400

Richard Lamar Ochiltree wandered the streets of Washington, D.C., for several years, mostly along a few blocks in Foggy Bottom, near the eastern shore of the Potomac. He monitored comings and goings at the State Department, George Washington University, the World Bank, and other agencies. Rick was in his mid-fifties, but life on the streets made him appear older: a gray, nicotine-stained beard; a gaunt frame beneath layers of clothes; the dark edges of his frostbitten fingers protruding from torn gloves, resembling talons, clutching a cigarette. Yet he had kind eyes and genteel manners.

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A Genocide Remembered and Denied

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 -0400

On the night of April 24, 1915, as Constantinople’s Armenian community was deep in slumber following Easter celebrations, Turkish gendarmes, following the orders of the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP), made their way through the ancient Byzantine capital to the homes of 250 Armenian cultural leaders. As Peter Balakian wrote in The Burning Tigris , Constantinople’s Armenian community had been “the center of Armenian cultural and intellectual life” since the nineteenth century. The Armenians were a minority community that excelled in the arts, academia, and the professional classes; successful, intelligent, and very much “the other” in a Turkey whose young rulers were influenced by the racialist ideologies then prominent in Europe.

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Medieval Golden Age, Modern Barbarism

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Earlier this year, as conflict raged in northern Syria, two professors, one Lebanese and the other American, both from elite universities in the Washington, D.C. area, passed the long night at Queen Alia International Airport in Amman, Jordan, drinking tea. They pondered the weighty issues of the region: whether the nation-state paradigm was the residue of colonialism or a reality to which nations of the Middle East must conform; American military engagement and its consequences; and, of course, the sources of violent extremism. At one point, the Lebanese professor lamented, “These extremists are the worst thing ever to happen to Islam.” The American professor casually observed that they wished to reject modernity and return to the Middle Ages. “But the Islamists are themselves modern,” the Lebanese professor responded. “The violence against ideas and freedom and the dignity of the person—this is all modern, not medieval. Islam’s Golden Age was actually fairly free and tolerant of diverse thought.” The American professor arched a skeptical brow.

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Christopher Hitchens: A Contrarian Remembered

Wed, 18 Dec 2013 00:00:00 -0500

No serious person is without contradictions. The test lies in the willingness or ability to recognize and confront them.” So wrote the late Christopher Hitchens in 2003, on the centennial of the birth of his fellow countryman Malcolm Muggeridge. The two had much in common. Both were middle class products of the English public school system and elite universities; both were journalist-adventurers, disillusioned socialists, contrarians, and iconoclasts. They were not quite contemporaries—Muggeridge died in 1990, just over forty years after Hitchens was born—but Muggeridge’s life offers a lens through which to remember Hitchens, who died two years ago this December.

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Solzhenitsyn and the Russian Renaissance

Wed, 31 Jul 2013 00:03:00 -0400

In the early spring of 1953, a sickly Russian novelist, “covered with ice, out of the dark and the cold,” staggered forth from the Soviet Gulag, the constellation of Communist prison camps that stretched from Siberia to South Asia. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, ill with cancer, had once been a proponent of the system that condemned him to forced labor. Now he saw his nation’s “deep suffering,” like his own, as redemptive.

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Benedict Face to Face with Islam

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 05:05:00 -0500

In 1095, in a carefully crafted speech before prelates and nobles in Claremont, France, Pope Urban II called Europe to action: A Crusade to aid the Christian empire of Byzantium. Emissaries of the emperor in Constantinople had come to Urban to ask for aid against the advancing Muslim Turks, who were mistreating conquered Christians, desecrating shrines, and pressing on toward Constantinople. The response was sensational and spread immediately across Europe. Knights, clerics, and peasants all heeded the call and marched to the East”toward Byzantium, Antioch, and Jerusalem.

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What Will Become of the Middle East’s Christians?

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 00:02:00 -0400

In the fall of 2010, a few months before revolution swept the Muslim world, I happened to be in Yemen for work. The trip coincided with the start of the Eid holiday, which provided ample free time to see much of the capital, Sana’a. One afternoon, en route to the hotel from the historic Old City, the driver pointed out the window at a group of men standing on a vacant corner. “Look!” he said with the excitement of happening upon a rarity. “Those are Jews.” They were some distance away, and whatever distinguished them from other Yemeni, I could not see it through the window of an SUV. In the blink of an eye, they were no longer visible.

At the start of the last century, there were tens of thousands of Jews in Yemen; today, there are perhaps hundreds. Most were airlifted out in 1949 and 1950 as part of Operation Magic Carpet, an Israeli undertaking to rescue Arab (especially Yemeni) Jews following the pogroms that resulted from the founding of Israel in 1948. While efforts to rescue the remaining Jews have recently resumed, the whereabouts of many Yemeni Jews remains unknown.

The exodus of Jews from Yemen, where they had lived for fifteen centuries before the birth of the Prophet, was not an isolated occurrence; it was repeated across the Middle East and North Africa, as these Diaspora Jews made their way, reluctantly in many cases, to Israel. Their fight for survival foreshadowed that of the more than ten million Christians of the Muslim world, who today struggle to maintain a presence and identity in the lands where they have lived for centuries.

Across the Middle East , affiliated Islamist movements have undertaken the systematic eradication of religious minorities, especially Christians. From Mali to Egypt, and from Syria and Iraq to Pakistan, millions of Christians find themselves threatened daily with humiliation, extortion, displacement, and murder. Yet where the Muslim world’s Jews had Israel to come to their defense, the region’s Christians have no protector state. These Christians have looked to Western governments, especially America, for moral leadership and advocacy. Yet as the violence of the Arab Spring escalated, America was retreating from its commitment to religious freedom”not only abroad, but at home as well.

Shortly after the 2009 Fort Hood shooting in which an Army psychiatrist who adhered to radical Islamist ideology shot forty-two people, killing thirteen, President Obama first used the phrase “freedom of worship.” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton followed suit, using the more restrictive phrase in lieu of the more expansive “freedom of religion.” The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s 2010 Annual Report took note of the shift, stating, “This change in phraseology could well be viewed by human rights defenders and officials in other countries as having concrete policy implications.”

As Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom, observed, this expression implies a narrower scope of the exercise of religion. “It excludes the right to raise your children in your faith; the right to have religious literature; the right to meet with co-religionists; the right to raise funds; the right to appoint or elect your religious leaders, and to carry out charitable activities, to evangelize, [and] to have religious education or seminary training,” said Shea, who previously served on the Commission.

When the State Department’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices were released in May of this year, the section on religious freedom, which had been a crucial component of the reports, had been removed. Secretary Clinton originally announced that the reports had “evolved.”

But by the time the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor released its annual International Religious Freedom Report two months later, events unfolding in the Middle East had compelled her to reconsider the issue. She called religious freedom “a cherished constitutional value, a strategic national interest, and a foreign policy priority,” adding that it was an “essential element of human dignity and of secure, thriving societies, statistically linked with economic development and democratic stability.”

The Secretary’s eloquent remarks on liberty were not, however, sufficient to exculpate an administration whose foreign policy has failed to press for the human rights of religious minorities in countries like Iraq, Pakistan, and Egypt”recipients of billions of dollars in U.S. foreign aid annually.

In January, Obama’s political appointee at the Department of Health and Human Services issued the contraception mandate. That same month, Pope Benedict XVI issued a warning to the U.S. bishops: “The entire Catholic community in the United States must come to realize the grave threats to the Church’s public moral witness presented by a radical secularism which finds increasing expression in the political and cultural spheres.” Such an admonition is without precedent in the history of U.S.-Vatican relations.

In a speech earlier this year, Archbishop Francis Chullikatt, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations and former apostolic nuncio to Iraq and Jordan, challenged Americans to protect religious freedom in their country: “While nobody would confuse the marginalization of religion with the actual killing of Christians in other parts of the world, it is through this marginalizing that violent persecution is born.”

The aftermath of the Arab Revolution will be a crucial period for the region’s Christians, as well as for other religious minority groups. Their fate will signal the future of the Muslim world and will tell us much about the character of Muslim democracy: Will it cherish the contributions of its minorities; will it tolerate diversity; or will it follow the trajectory of radical Islamism, exterminating all traces of Christian culture from Christianity’s ancestral homeland?

If the Islamists prevail, there will be no “Operation Magic Carpet” to rescue Christians from their ancestral homelands. America need not orchestrate an exodus of Christians; indeed, as many Muslim moderates have noted, Christians bring a healthy diversity to the Middle East and their role there ought to be preserved. However, the U.S. must provide moral leadership on this issue. If America’s emphasis on tolerance and pluralism has any meaning, it must mean that, at a minimum, America speaks out in defense of religious minorities in the Middle East, for whom the holding of their beliefs may be sufficient to cost them their lives.

Andrew Doran is a consultant for the U.S. Department of State, where he previously served on the Executive Secretariat of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO.

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The Potomac and the Tiber

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:22:00 -0500

Oscar Wilde once observed that “the Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone. For respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.” Newt Gingrich would have made a pitiable Anglican“or Mormon, for that matter. As a Catholic, however, he fits right in. Catholics are all too familiar with frailty, and in fact the central Christian idea of redemption by Christ presupposes a need for such redemption.

A few years ago, a friend who frequents the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. told me that he had seen the former Speaker there often, speculating that Gingrich was likely going to convert to Catholicism. Such a conversion would be what the old Jesuits called “a big splash” (the bigger the stone, the greater the splash). The Catholic intellectual tradition’s rigorous examination of theology and philosophy undoubtedly appealed to his acquisitive mind. And in the Church’s annals, the professor of history found two millennia of events that shaped the course of the Western world, from Leo the Great riding out armed only with his scepter to meet Attila the Hun, to John Paul II traveling behind the Iron Curtain to his native Poland to bring down the scourge of Communism”an iconic event that seems to have captured the imagination of the recent convert.

To many observers, he appears to be the same old Gingrich“a pompous policy wonk who will eventually implode, either before or after he becomes the Republican nominee. Perhaps.

Gingrich’s journey to Rome, like many who journeyed there before him, involved many messy detours. He resembles in many ways the deeply flawed figures of an Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene novel, rather than the prototypical American politician. His baggage is well known (even if myth sometimes overtakes fact in the retelling). His is no storybook American or Christian family, and yet it is a fairly typical twenty-first century American family.

Since his conversion is well known to political insiders, he will no doubt be accused by some of hypocrisy (as if Christianity demanded perfection) and cynical opportunism. It is, of course, impossible to know his heart, though not altogether impossible to know his mind, and it is telling that on what are perhaps the three most crucial international policy issues facing the next president“the Arab world, Iran, and illegal immigration“Gingrich’s positions appear to have been shaped significantly by Catholic thought.

In a recent debate, Gingrich referred to the Arab Spring as an “anti-Christian Spring,” signaling that the status of Middle Eastern Christians might become the centerpiece of his foreign policy toward the Muslim world. The fate of Middle Eastern Christians has never figured prominently in American foreign policy, despite foreseeable consequences that have led to destructive genocide in places like Iraq. This political indifference is in no small measure attributable to the fact that American Christians have expressed little affinity for their fellow Christians in the Muslim world. The Catholic Church has been virtually alone in its advocacy on their behalf. Gingrich’s expression of concern may, then, have been less an obscure policy reference than a deliberate decision to propel this issue to the forefront of his foreign policy toward the Muslim world“a decision rooted in Catholic thought and culture.

On Iran, Gingrich has said he would approach the matter as Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and John Paul II dealt with the Soviet threat: Contain Iran, while bringing moral and political pressure to bear, rather than mere military force“the clear preference of many. Reagan was similarly always prepared to talk tough but would generally engage militarily only as a last resort, often finding himself at odds with the more hawkish elements in his party. Whether Gingrich envisions a role for the Vatican in his diplomacy with Iran (the Vatican has amicable relations with the current regime, which it presses for religious tolerance“especially of the hundreds of thousands of Christians who live in Iran) is unclear. What is clear is his preference for the model of a multifaceted, multilateral approach.

On illegal immigration, Gingrich has offered a humane, if arguably unworkable, solution to the issue of illegal immigrants, stating that he would not use the government to “break up their family and deport them.” Taking a harder line would almost certainly be politically advantageous in a primary fight steered more to the right than many in recent history, yet he has opted for a moderate approach. In so doing, he has invoked the language of the Catholic Church, which recognizes the primacy of the family unit, even amid immigration controversies.

Newt Gingrich is nothing if not a shrewd politician. The fact that his positions appear to reflect the influence of Catholic thought suggests that he at least takes seriously the teachings of his newly-adopted faith. Time will tell. Whatever the case, it is refreshing to see Catholic ideas in the public square, even if they are not recognized as such.

Andrew Doran is a consultant for the U.S. Department of State, where he served on the Executive Secretariat of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO (2008-09). He was a Director for the Educational Initiative for Central & Eastern Europe, a Vienna-based institute that promotes democracy in the former Soviet-bloc region. He is an attorney, writer, and has traveled extensively throughout the Muslim world.

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