Note: The following is a press release from The Dignitatis Humanae Institute
Rome, 6 January 2013
The liberties of French
Christians have long been in a perilous state, however now the
recently elected Socialist Government is set to impose a new form of
secularist surveillance upon the Church and lay organisations,
seeking to discover and 'dissolve' any potential cases of what it
deems 'religious pathology.'
The month of Advent saw a
disturbing spate of attacks and desecrations of Christian icons and
buildings across France; from the burning of a Nativity scene in
Savoy, statues decapitated in Frejus and Churches attacked in Mayenne
and Soissons. Yet rather than defend the religious liberty of her
persecuted people, the French government is pushing ahead with a
further curtailment of religious expression.
Announced by President
Hollande, the new 'the National Observatory of Secularism' will come
into being this year, tasked with closely monitoring religious
organisations for any potential 'excesses.' French Interior Minister
Manuel Valls highlighted various Catholic organisations, stating that
"All excesses are being minutely registered in case we have to
consider dissolving it."
This aggressive form of
imposed laïcité is coupled with the proselytization of what the
Socialist education minister Vincent Peillon called a 'secularist
morality' within the state education system. This compulsory form of
re-education will seek to remove any ethics other than the core,
secularist, tenets of the Republic. The Federation of State School
Parents has already protested against what could be viewed as child
indoctrination.
In response to these
worrying trends, Benjamin Harnwell, Founder of the Dignitatis Humanae
Institute, warned of the dangerous precedents being created:
"The French
government has already defied its own constitutional courts on its
tax policy and now seeks to redefine its notions of justice and due
process. A government that can predetermine your guilt before any
actual crime has even been committed, based solely on a supposition
of religious belief, has abandoned any claim to being a pluralist
democracy and has become something far more sinister. This
disturbing move marks yet another descent in a country which already
heavily curtails the universal right to public displays of religious
expression."
The Dignitatis Humanae Institute aims to uphold human dignity based on the anthropological truth that man is born in the image and likeness of God and therefore has an innate human dignity of infinite worth to be upheld. The Institute promotes this understanding by supporting Christians in public life, assisting them to present effective and coherent responses to increasing efforts to silence the Christian voice in the public square.
