Sorry, I was out of town for a few days, and so less on the net. I just saw your comment. I think we are going along the same path.

In my opinion, secularism is its own religious position, and so if a state (or society) wants to foster it, they have to admit they are proclaiming some sort of religious practice. That’s the problem. They say they want to “make it so anyone can practice their faith” but what they mean is “so we can practice our rejection of faith.”

As I have said before, I have no problems with others expressing their religious faith; I think that is what the Church promotes (within reason, of course; which can be a debate pointed, to be sure). In my opinion that is true religious toleration; what we have here is an intolerance to religious views different from secularism.

We are influenced on many levels by what we see and hear around us all the time. Advertising and music hits us on subconscious levels. Who knows what good comes of a constant reminder of Christ and Christ’s message day in and day out, on a subconscious level?

And I wasn’t trying to spin anything. The story is that one woman, a Finn with an Italian passport, took her beef to an Italian court, who dismissed it, and so she took her beef to a European human rights tribunal, who ruled in her favour and told Italy to pay her thousands of euros in damages. It turns out to have no legal right to make Italy itself take down its crucifixes.

As far as I know, there’s no groundswell of outrage from a fully multicultural, multireligious, Toronto-style Italy that multicultural, mulitreligious hyphenated Italian children are having nightmares because they have to look at the Christians’ saviour hanging in their otherwise sanitized-from-monoculture classrooms.

We don’t live in a Christ-free universe. Through Him all things were made. So why pretend we believe otherwise in our very classrooms? Unless–of course–forced to by the state. Boston College, I believe, had to give up its classroom crucifixes when it took state funding.

And the Curia fought tooth and nail over that as well, claiming that Italy was going to go to Hell in a heartbeat!!!

I posted the following on my blog when this story broke. I would be interested in your comments.

Thank you.

Fr. Tim Moyle
—————–
The European Union courts have ordered the removal of the crucifix from all Italian schools. Where I freely admit that the governing authority of any school should be able to either choose or not to present this symbol of Christian/Catholic faith, it is entirely another thing to deny the right to express their faith/convictions/belief in the public square. The principle that is expressed as “separation of church and state” also implicitly includes the freedom to express those values that we believe are the path which leads to the betterment of all humanity.

Read the story, and ask yourself whether the secular argument that leads to this European suppression of the freedom of speech of believers is any different from the agenda that marks the direction of North American society today.

This story is proof positive of the price of failing to argue in defense of the principles which are the accumulated human reasoning that stretches back to the earliest days of recorded history. Whether the moral principles of our modern civilization evolved as the refinement of simply human wisdom, or whether it is a still imperfect vision of God’s will, they have brought Western civilization to the point where we are today. The “rights” that are now so suddenly being tossed aside in the last twenty-five years are the foundations upon which the right itself is rooted. The poisoned fruit of the civilizational tree now endangers the root from which it sprang. 

Freedom of expression of faith in the public square must be respected; it is the essential corollary of the freedoms of thought and speech. I pray that leaders of our faith, our Bishops, would look to the European (or Québécois for that matter) social experiment and heed the need to “teach”, in every forum possible, the wisdom and teaching of our Church: to educate those raised in the “sex, drugs and rock and roll” generation (the first generation of essentially uncatechized “C & E” Catholics (i.e., “Christmas and Easter”) who now have moved into society’s corridors of power) of the wisdom of these first principles before they use the levers of power to shape the debate. 

Freedom of life… Freedom of belief… Freedom of speech: these are the Bishops’ menu of first principles to defend in full. Let’s pray that they fashion sumptuous salad of arguments, no matter how appealing the dessert table secularism seems to offer. 

Society needs strong bones to grow and prosper. We eat of the poisoned fruit at our own peril.

Amen!

Wiser words have rarely been spoken here, Gerald.

Recognizing it has a role in the culture does not mean that is all it means.

We have a lot of beautiful churches in Italy and this of course is our cultural and rich heritage, don’t woory nobody want destroy them.

But I ‘m a faithful Catholic so I’m very angry to see so many people that reduce the crucifix to a “cultural” symbol.

Its those Germans in Milwaukee. Even at the Turners Hall and Freethinkers Lodge, they couldn’t given up their Weihnachtsliedern not to mention their Christkindlmarkts, Stollen and Adventkalendars.

Kurt

I’m surprised crucifixes have survived in Italian classrooms as long as they have. I figured Mussolini would have taken care of that, but perhaps Italy’s anti-clerical culture didn’t extend that far. (Mussolini was beyond anti-clerical.) I’m very sympathetic with both Michael and Henry’s arguments. Since I have been pigeon holed as a Puritan elsewhere, I have to ask WWPD?