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What Catholics can teach Muslims in a time of moral crisis for both

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Apr 18, 2010

Now that Pope Benedict is making public amends for the long-percolating sex abuse scandal inside his worldwide Church, all sorts of commentators are weighing in. As they should. Wisdom requires a multiplicity of perspectives.

What I find interesting is that when it comes to eviscerating the Vatican, nobody tells Jews, Protestants, Hindus, atheists, humanists, or Muslims that “you can’t comment because you don’t represent.”

But that’s a choice slogan hurled at non-Muslims who want to participate in public conversations about the troubles within Islam today. Usually laced with anger and meant to induce fear, the slogan tends to succeed in silencing non-Muslims.

Non-Catholics, on the other hand, feel utterly permitted to comment about Catholicism’s travails. There’s the Harvard law professor and proud Jew, Alan Dershowitz. There’s Nicholas Kristof, who strikes me as a religion-tolerant humanist. There’s the secular Hindu Tunku Varadarajan. There’s the strident atheist Christopher Hitchens, who has also testified against the miracle-workings of Mother Teresa — at the invitation of the Vatican.

I, myself, have been openly critiquing the Vatican for years. As the host of a Canadian TV show called Big Ideas, I’d deliver an editorial in every episode. From time to time, it would involve what I viewed as crimes committed by the Church’s top honchos.

In a 2003 editorial, I blasted “the Church’s complicity in the Rwandan genocide, in which ethnic Hutu extremists killed 800,000 minority Tutsis and Hutu moderates. Today, four clergymen are facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, and a couple of years ago in Belgium, two Rwandan nun were convicted of murder. They assisted the massacre of 7,000 Tutsis who sought protection at a Benedictine convent. In fact, human rights groups have documented several cases in which Christian clerics let Tutsis take shelter in their churches, then turned the Tutsis over to death squads. Some Hutu priests even encouraged their congregations to kill Tutsis.“

For all the emails I received about that editorial, not one told me, “You can’t comment because you don’t represent.” Not even a mention of the sort. Nor did anybody accuse me of being anti-Catholic. Could you imagine a non-Muslim issuing an unsparing indictment of mullahs without being branded an Islamophobe?

Another of my editorials started with respect for Pope John Paul’s denunciation of the “culture of death” — from suicide bombings to capital punishment to abortion. But, I pointed out, the Pope’s refusal to endorse stem cell research “strikes me as perpetuating the culture of death for people in developing countries. Ninety percent of what the world spends on health research is directed to alleviating diseases that affect only ten percent of the world’s population. If the Vatican supported the use of discarded embryos strictly to treat the neglected diseases of the Third World, wouldn’t this be more righteous than sinful? And if it’s deemed strictly sinful, then how does the Vatican reconcile that position with Catholicism’s cardinal principle that unnecessary human suffering is evil?“

Again, plenty of public feedback without a single soul assailing me as anti-Catholic. Not one accusation that my Muslim mouth has no business running on about another religion’s affairs. Muslims ought to salute Catholics for recognizing that what happens to people — any people — in the name of a universal God is everybody’s affair.

That’s what ordinary Muslims can learn from everyday Catholics in this moment of moral crisis for both of our religions. The lesson is simple. You can — you must — comment even if you don’t represent.

Which brings me to a final thought. In his column, “A Church Mary Can Love,” Kristof writes that “the old boys’ club in the Vatican became as self-absorbed as other old boys’ clubs, like Lehman Brothers, with similar results. And that is the reason the Vatican is floundering today.”

Clearly, Kristof sees that leaving the reform of institutional culture — whether Wall Street’s or the Vatican’s — to insiders alone is a non-starter. To do the right thing, insiders usually need outside pressure.

When will we all understand the same about Islam — that reform won’t happen exclusively from the inside?  Questions form the outside will be key to advancing change inside the world of Islam. In my next book, I’ll explain the crucial role that non-Muslims have to play.