Another story was evident in Maple too, a contrast between an old Canada passing away, and a new Canada emerging.
As to the ORF itself, promised in the 2011 federal election campaign, it was a day of pride. I was proud to be Canadian, to hear the prime minister speak clearly in the name of those who are daily harassed, assaulted, imprisoned and killed for their faith in God.
Stephen Harper was not reticent, identifying by name both persecuting regimes and those groups persecuted. He was willing above all to call out Beijing, the greatest systematic violator of human rights on the planet.
We learned after the Cold War that the enslaved peoples behind the Iron Curtain were in fact heartened by those Western leaders bold enough to call evil by its name. One trusts that the words in Maple may strengthen those who even now face being silenced, enslaved or slaughtered.
The prime minister also explained why it is that religious liberty is the first liberty — in the Magna Carta, in the American Bill of Rights, and yes, in our Charter of Rights of Freedoms. If a person is not free before God, is not free in his conscience, then there is no basis for his freedom before the state, and his property and other rights are of little avail. The state that claims the right to interpose itself between man and God is by definition a totalitarian state, even if should be a softer sort of totalitarianism, at least at first.
Ten days ago, I invited Cardinal Joseph Zen, bishop emeritus of Hong Kong, to speak about religious liberty in Toronto and in Kingston, Ont. The fearless champion of human rights made the point vividly — a caged bird may be in a larger or smaller cage, but the salient fact remains that it is caged. The troubling reality is that the cages are constricting the world over, often with lethal results.
Religion is playing an increasingly important role in foreign affairs, and the defence of religious liberty will be a critical means for Canada to promote both pluralism and democracy abroad. More urgently, not a month goes by without a massacre of religious believers solely for that reason — sometimes even desecrating houses of worship themselves.
Original Article
Source: fullcomment.nationalpost.com
Author: Father Raymond J. de Souza
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