Vatican
City, 14 December 2013 (VIS) – Yesterday, 13 December, Archbishop
Dominique Mamberti, secretary for Relations with States, attended at
a conference held in Rome abnd organised by the Religious Freedom
Project of Georgetown University and the Berkley Centre for Religion,
Peace and World Affairs, at which he gave a presentation on the links
between religious freedom and Christianity, within the scope of a
Conference organised by Georgetown University of Washington on the
theme “Christians and religious freedom: historical and
contemporary perspectives”.
The
Archbishop affirmed that “the concept of human rights itself
originated in a Christian context” and offered as an example St.
Thomas More, “who at the price of his own life bore witness to the
fact that Christians, in the light of reason and by virtue of their
freedom of conscience, are called to reject every form of
oppression”.
“The
link between Christianity and freedom is thus original and profound”,
he continued. “It has its roots in the teaching of Christ himself
and Saint Paul appears as one of its most strenuous and brilliant
defenders. Freedom is intrinsic to Christianity, for it was, as Paul
says, for freedom that Christ set us free”. While the Apostle
referred to interior freedom, this “naturally also has consequences
for society”.
“This
year marks the one-thousand-seven-hundredth anniversary of the Edict
of Milan, which crowned the expansion throughout society of that
interior freedom of which Saint Paul spoke. At the same time, from an
historical and cultural standpoint, the Edict represented the
beginning of a process which has marked European history and that of
the entire world, leading in the course of the centuries to the
definition of human rights and the recognition of religious freedom
as 'the first of human rights'”.
“Constantine
saw that the growth of the Empire depended on the ability of each
individual to profess freely his or her religious beliefs. … It
suffices to consider the great patrimony of the world’s art, not
only that of Christian inspiration, in order to appreciate the
inherent goodness of this relationship. … At this point, however,
there is a need to avoid possible misunderstanding, since the word
'freedom' can be interpreted in many ways. Freedom cannot be reduced
to mere caprice, or understood in a purely negative sense as the
absence of constraint”, continued Archbishop Mamberti.
“Consequently, the proper exercise of religious freedom cannot
prescind from the interplay of reason and faith. … This also
provides a bulwark against both relativism and against those forms of
religious fundamentalism which, like relativism, see in religious
freedom a threat to their own ideological dominance”.
The
Archbishop concluded by commenting that when the Second Vatican
Council set forth the principle of religious freedom, “it was not
proposing a new teaching. Rather, it was restating a common human
experience: namely, that 'all human beings … endowed with reason
and free will, and therefore bearing personal responsibility, are
impelled by their nature… to seek the truth … It is in the truth,
seen not so much as an absolute which we already possess, but as the
potential object of rational and relational knowledge, that we
encounter the potential for a sound exercise of freedom. And it is
precisely in this connection that we discover the authentic dignity
of the human person”.
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