Symposium on church/state relations in Mexico

"We are looking to Create Political Ethics not Political Theology," said the CEO and World Wide President of the Knight of Columbus Carl A. Anderson at a conference on relations between the state and religion. At the inauguration of the International Symposium “Voices, the Lay State and Religious Liberty that is being held in Mexico City, Anderson said that Christianity is looking to create political ethics, not political theology. “These political ethics should be the same as our personal ethics. They should be consistent with our well-formed Christian conscience. Furthermore, as Pope Benedict has pointed out, our understanding as Christians that humanity is imperfect, and that politics too is imperfect, mitigates against our acceptance of radical, political solutions, which consider themselves perfect. This is the promise –and failure—for instance of communism and liberation theology”, said Anderson.

Talking about Mexico he said the nation has made tremendous progress in securing religious liberty. After referring to the conflicts that dominated the Church-State relationships during a good part of the 20th Century, Anderson said that Mexico is a far different place today. “Tremendous progress has been made in securing the religious liberties of the Catholic Church and of Catholics generally over the past several decades. President Calderón is the latest of four consecutive presidents who have worked to reduce or eliminate the legal constraints and disabilities that had been forced upon the Church earlier in the 20th Century. Analyzing the situation of religious liberty in the Western Hemisphere, Anderson said that threats no longer come from the barrel of the gun. “They are more subtle, and they are more likely to come from laws that attack individual rights of religious conscience than from targeting the institutional church”.

In his presentation “Sacred-phobia and religious liberty”, Doctor Jorge Traslosheros mentioned that there has been a transformation from characterizing religion as “the opium of the people”, as the Marxists did, to now being considered the “tobacco of the people”. “That is, religion viewed as an evil that should be eradicated, at least from the public spaces”, said Traslosheros. The UNAM academician added: “there is a tendency, each time more pronounced, among the intellectual elites and the communication media to adopt a sacred-phobia, an aversion to the sacred”.

The Symposium is been organized by the Becket Fund of Religious Liberty, the Knights of Columbus and the Archdiocese of Mexico.