In his address at the meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which was reflecting upon the discrimination against Christians, Archbishop Dominique Mamberti, secretary of the Vatican secretariat for relations with states, noted that moral relativism could cause hate crimes against Christians.
As Pope Benedict XVI rightly stressed in this year’s message for the World Day of Peace, “at present, Christians are the religious group which suffers most from persecution on account of its faith”. Although the majority of hate crimes against Christians take place outside the OSCE region there are, what Archbishop Mamberti termed as, “warning signs” in the Old Continent as well. In order to consolidate his stance, the Vatican official referred to a report that exhibited “irrefutable proof of a growing intolerance against Christians”. In this perspective, Archbishop Mamberti suggested that it is only in fostering and reinforcing religious liberty that hate crimes’ prevention could work.
“Religious freedom cannot be restricted to the simple freedom of worship, although the latter is obviously an important part of it. With due respect to the rights of all, religious freedom includes, among others, the right to preach, educate, convert, contribute to the political discourse and participate fully in public activities.” Thus, religious freedom can never be made on a par with relativism or, worse, “the post-modern idea that religion is a marginal component of public life”. This is so since “relativism and secularism deny two fundamental aspects of the religious phenomenon, and hence of the right to religious freedom, that call for respect: the transcendental and the social dimensions of religion in which the human person seeks to be related, according to the dictates of his conscience, to the reality, so to say, above and around him”.
The marginalisation of religion can gradually deteriorate the spiritual calibre of contemporary society to the point that “hate crimes almost invariably (can end up feeding) on an environment where religious freedom is not fully respected and religion is discriminated against”. Since within the OSCE area there is a widespread agreement that religious freedom is important, efforts should continually be made so we Europeans, “continue our conversation on the substance of religious liberty, on its fundamental connection with the idea of truth, and on the difference between religious freedom and relativism that merely tolerates religion while considering it with some degree of hostility”.
At the end, Archbishop Mamberti was brave enough to highlight that authentic freedom can never be confused with both relativism and confrontational agnosticism. Therefore, any vision that “identifies freedom with relativism or militant agnosticism, and which casts doubt on the possibility of ever knowing the truth, could be an underlying factor in the increased occurrence of those hate incidents and crimes which will be the object of our debate today”.
Rampant relativism is an offensive assault against the dignity and freedom of the human person!