Pray for it
Gaffney, Edward McGlvnn Jr.
special negotiator to work with the UN, the Organization of tation to join such eminent constitutional scholars as Harold African Unity, and the Sudanese to establish a cease fire and ...
...The hope Joseph F. X. Flanagan, SJ (Boston College) that these goals can be achieved is not illusory...
...I suppose it might be thought ungracious for a guest to wonREPORT FROM MOSCOW der why he had been invited at all...
...Life can be complicated anypatter of rain...
...special negotiator to work with the UN, the Organization of tation to join such eminent constitutional scholars as Harold African Unity, and the Sudanese to establish a cease fire and Berman of Emory, Jesse Choper of UC-Berkeley, Robert Destro to set up an internationally monitored demilitarized zone...
...617-782-7319...
...the right is a moral claim A CATHOLIC PERSPECTIVE to a good (health care) which is essential to human dignity...
...in 1990 he signed a new statute that protected religious freedom in the Soviet Union...
...Decades of the subversion of the church by the EDWARD MCGLYNN GAFFNEY, JR...
...of course, will be a proposal, and its pub- care available to the citizenry...
...In the U.S...
...The duty in the pared by ideas and experiences to contribute points of tension among these complex first instance falls on society as a whole...
...to who was trying to promote religious freedom and who was There ought to be more sounds of hope for Sudan than the trying to control it, if not stifle it...
...Youri Rozenbaum, a legal scholar who has special- colonial Virginia is at the core of the American commitment ized in church-state relations...
...I guess that's the post-cold-war version of the old saying...
...Rozenbaum chairs the newly formed Experts' Consultative If our meeting helped to bring this result to pass, it was a Council recently established by Khasbulatov...
...And the patriarch de- Edward McG/vnn Gaffneti...
...ing on subsidiarity restrains the notion that er, as a voice of public advocacy, and as There are different ways to frame the the state should be the first agency to rean institution deeply involved in health care social justice argument about access to spond to the right...
...tion of the draft, state bodies are given the "right to receive esBut glasnost does not mean the disappearance of a bu- sential information from religious associations and attend reaucracy as vast and vicious as the KGB without a bang, a events sponsored by religious associations...
...Polosin, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet's Committee for Freedom of Conscience, Religion, Mercy, and Charity...
...Using the common logic of the social teaching, howevThe Clinton administration's These distinct roles correspond to the er, one could say that the right to health Task Force on National three major concerns which the church has care should assure for each person a basic Health Care is scheduled to in the U.S...
...to the national assessment of health-care concerns...
...And who could decline an invi- Alexis 11, Patriarch of Moseoir Commonweal 7 Mav 1993: 5 was a villa outside of Moscow that used to serve as a retreat "reemerging officials of the former Communist state, not one for the Central Committee of the Communist party...
...Against the historical context not tity of any of the Russian delegation before we arrived, and of colonial Virginia, but of a decades-long attempt to suppress he insisted on chairing each of our eight sessions...
...We certainly It was this panel of experts that issued the draft statute on witnessed that kind of frankness and candor among our religious freedom that we were asked to review...
...at the heart of this policy question vide health care for each person through lic life...
...Aware of the Russians' famous ability at chess, however, I did let the thought cross my mind that somebody might be interested in using us as pawns PRAY FOR IT in a domestic struggle far more convoluted than met a lawyer's RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN RUSSIA eye scanning a draft statute for legal difficulties...
...The head of the Russian delegation The repugnance of Baptists to the licensing of preaching in was Dr...
...PATRICK JORDAN is more so...
...Shortly thereafter the Russian Federation adopted its own statute, which was even more protective of religious freedom...
...Another section whimper, or a trace in a newly reconstructed Russia...
...The els of care...
...of Stalin in 1932 to Khrushchev's promise to eliminate Orthodox The most significant meeting throughout this week of ex- priests by 1988...
...Indeed, imposes a complicated duty on religious associations to regissome of our counterparts at the three-day consultation illus- ter with the council mentioned above...
...We will have greater cause to experts named to the council-shall we call them "friends of rejoice if a truly representative Consultative Council does not Youri"?-are what Michael Bourdeaux of the Keston Research waste energy erecting Potemkin villages to display to Institute at Oxford describes with British understatement as Westerners, but is empowered to protect the free exercise of religion fully in Russia...
...I read the briefing book prepared by the sponit in the small things...
...effort to describe the content of each of the right...
...Who could be against freedom of conscience...
...The sec- debate, the church will have to engage the lication will signal the beginning of a new ond is health care and medical ethics (or questions of universal access and the defphase of the national debate on health bioethics), involving a broad range of inition of which health-care benefits should care...
...After ous agency of the Communist regime that did as much to sti- three intense days of conversations, Rozenbaum casually anfle as to protect religious freedom...
...The U.S...
...He thought this was the most seek a preferred or established position in a newly recon- important gift an American jurist could bring to Moscow...
...Many among the intelligentsia-both here and in Russia-purport to deAnnouncing...
...It was moving to learn firsthand of the survival of religious faith from those who had suffered incredible For more information write to: Fred Lawrence, Director, 14nergan Workshop, Department of Theology, Carney 405, persecution at the hands of their government, including dissiBoston College, Chestnut Hill, MA 02167...
...As it turned out...
...IL k religion, mercy, and charity...
...Here several elements of Catholic Among the institutions which are pre- the church's interests and to highlight social thinking converge...
...structed state...
...Catholic teachargument for the church to act as a teach- viduals have no access to health insurance...
...In these of whom has any known religious commitment...
...No need to It is no accident, as my Marxist friends used to say, that worry, at least until the next draft comes out...
...of thought by central agencies of government...
...Using categories from Catholic social teaching to make the social justice case J. Bryan Hehir produces the following structure of argument...
...He refused to disclose the iden- to free exercise of religion...
...For that reaThe 20th Annual son there are serious issues that remain unresolved in Russia, including the recovery of church property confiscated after LONERGAN WC RK$HOP the revolution of 1917...
...So far, the nine success for that reason alone...
...health care, and some of the members of moral responsibilities, and a major role Commonweal 7 Mav 1993: 7...
...state would seem to counsel against that...
...Jr., is the clean of the Valparaiso scribed in painful detail the attempts of the state to destroy the University School of Latin...
...Patrick H. Byrne (Boston College) Our meeting not only identified these problems, but also elicitFrederick E. Crowe, SJ (Lonergan Research Institute, Toronto) ed a commitment to work toward their resolution...
...in the roar of thunder when the clouds sor of the American delegation, the International Academy for opened up during Mass...
...That goal is not coterminous with issuing legal documents purporting to protect "religious freeBoston College dom" as an abstraction...
...As it turns religion by governmental access to minute details of the acout, Rozenbaum's secretive and controlling style is long stud- tivities of religious bodies in Russia, it is understandable that ied...
...For example, Catholics in Moscow have no house of worship other than a small church attached The Legacy o f Lonergan to the French embassy...
...The setting, ironically enough, Nikita Khrushchev had promised to display "the last living priest...
...writes our missionary friend...
...argument about health care questions which have been traditional fall within the category of minimum levreaches back to the early 1970s, but the concerns of Catholic moral teaching...
...In the very week in March in which Russia was experiencing its latest constitutional crisis-which ended with two votes Five years ago on the occasion of the first visit of a that rejected both the impeachment of President Boris Yeltsin Soviet head of state to the Vatican, Mikhail for his attempt to expand the powers of the presidency and an Gorbachev promised Pope John Paul II that his pol- effort to remove his archrival, Ruslan Khasbulatov, as chairicy of perestroika or reconstruction would entail man of the Supreme Soviet-a group of legal scholars and a new era of religious freedom in the Soviet Union...
...There will be space in the public is the fact that close to 40 million indi- a multiplicity of agents...
...The answer to the second question proved easier than the an"Where is the hope...
...I was one of several legal scholars lucky enough to receive an official invitation for a consultation on this statute from V.S...
...The affirmation of the right finds concise expression in John XXIII's Pacein in terris (1963...
...and our sackcloth and ashes turned to Freedom of Religion and Belief, and packed my bags for excitement and joy...
...southern Sudan...
...Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk condemned the draft outright, while the apostolic administrator of the Catholic church in Russia, Thadeus Kondrusiewicz, took more focused aim at new provisions requiring registration of religious associations with the council and regular reporting of their activities...
...But the issues of religious liberty that we were asked bility of planting a small crop, but also the end to the dry sea- to comment upon were subtle, and it was by no means clear as son offensive...
...participation in the policy process exem- health care is focused on issues of social Society fulfills the responsibility to proplifies the diverse dimensions of its pub- justice...
...dent Orthodox priests such as Georgi Edelstein and Gleb Yakunin-who wear the scars of their years in the gulags-and 6: 7 May 1993 Commonweal Orthodox Jews with whom I prayed in the snow on Shabbat Orthodox church in Russia, from the notorious five-year plan because they have no synagogue within which to meet...
...The first step is defining the right HEALTH CARE FOR ALL to health care...
...WORLD WATCH the Task Force are ethicists who have been arguing the justice case over the last decade...
...Gorbachev kept his promise...
...traordinary experiences was an audience that five members of I recalled a bond of suffering between my people and his, the American delegation-including the ecumenical officer of going back to the period of the Penal Laws that imposed sethe Orthodox church in America, the Very Reverend Leonid vere criminal penalties and civil sanctions on Catholics in Kishkovsky-had with the patriarch of Moscow, His Holiness England and Ireland from the Tudor period down to our own Alexis II...
...From abroad there ought to come a mighty roar where, but in Russia-as any reader of Dostoevski knows-it of voices...
...That represented major progress after seven decades of Communist rule that did its level best to impose atheism as the official state religion and to eliminate all exercise of other religious convictions...
...The church's A major part of the national debate in sential aspect of the common good...
...Sebastian Moore, OSB (Downside Abbey, Bath, England) David W. Tracy(University of Chicago Divinity School) After our formal sessions on the proposed draft statute were Philip C. Rule (College of the Holy Cross) completed, several of us met informally with members of various religious bodies...
...While the right is declared, the papal text did not spell out the content of the right...
...Clinton campaign and the Clinton presi- third is the role of Catholic institutions as The assertion of each person's right to dency have generated new expectations for participants in the ministry of health care health care leads, secondly, to a determichange, and its proposal for reform will pro- in the United States...
...Neither does the Orthodox church him and for the church in Russia...
...In one secRussian counterparts...
...The patriarch committed to us that he supports the century...
...Remaining faithful under such circumstances as the principle of religious freedom, including equality of access by Irish and the Russians have experienced is not easy, so I different religious groups within Russia, none of whom should pledged the patriarch the constant support of my prayers for suffer at the hands of the state...
...Recently, however, word has drifted westward that changes were being contemplated in this important statute...
...I found swer to the first...
...The report, volving the question of access to health which the right is being secured...
...For here, rain means not only the possi- Moscow...
...It is how these documents are construed June 21-25, 1993 by those in power that will matter in the long run...
...religious leaders from the United States met for three days There was a great irony in this, for 1988 was the year in which with our Russian counterparts...
...health-care problem...
...The first minimum of benefits which will vary with submit its report to the pres- is health care as a social justice issue, in- the economic capability of the society in ident this month...
...but the state clearly has at the local and national levels...
...fend "religious freedom" in principle, but staunchly oppose religion and its exercise by religious believers...
...The of Catholic University, Cole Durham of Brigham Young, president should condemn Khartoum's human rights abuses and Douglas Laycock of Texas, and James Wood of Baylor for conpush the UN to increase assistance to humanitarian agencies in versations about these vital matters...
...ardent religious Mary Ann Glendon (Harvard Law School) believers-including Adventists, Baptists, Buddhists, Catholics, Joseph A. Komonchak (Catholic University) Jews, Old Believers, Orthodox, and Pentecostals-have been Matthew L. Lamb (Boston College) invited to serve as representatives on the council and to advise Frederick G. Lawrence (Boston College) the committee of the Supreme Soviet mentioned above...
...meeting the need for health care is an esreforms is the Catholic church...
...With the collapse of the Soviet Union it is this statute that now governs in Russia...
...The Ministry days of glasnost, frank and candid exchange of views within of Security (former KGB) will have an ex officio member on Russia has replaced domination and control of all expression the council...
...What follows is an nation of who has the duty to respond to vide a defined focus for the public debate...
...For example, an article last month in Isvestia blasted the creation of a new Experts' Consultative Council on religious matters...
...Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you...
...More than a disinterested scholar, he has had a check- Russian religious leaders rang alarm bells at these provisions ered career both in and out of favor with the KGB operatives in the draft statute, which confers on the council the power to who infiltrated the Council of Religious Affairs, the notori- suspend religious bodies that do not conform to the law...
...And educators are baffled about how to teach about religion in the state schools without promotSpeakers: ing a particular faith...
...trated this very difficulty...
...nounced that the draft statute had been withdrawn...
Vol. 120 • May 1993 • No. 9
