A few days ago, I was on a panel at the In Defense of Christians National Leadership Convention on Capitol Hill discussing “Building Bridges between Eastern and Western Christianity.” The first question was about obstacles barring such bridges, leaving persecuted Christians somewhat out in the cold, even as their very existence in the birthplace of Christianity is in jeopardy.
Reflecting on it, I started thinking about Donald Trump (it must have been the cable news in the background), tempted to declare that Donald Trump is the biggest obstacle.
I don’t really mean Trump himself (to his credit, he actually talked about Christians being beheaded in the Cleveland debate in August). What I mean is our limited attention spans here in the West.
We are so bombarded by so much. And so we’re so easily distracted.
And so there isn’t a lot of room for depth.
And so when the pope talks about hospitality to refugees, there’s a sudden awareness of something – with an image of a boy washed up on the shore — but without any context or understanding.
The most fundamental context being something Pope Francis talked about last week during one of his morning homilies. That is: What people did, to Jesus, has during the course of history been done to His body, which is the Church.
The biggest obstacles today are the silence and ignorance and indifference to not just the fact that it is happens today but in a particular way, the lack of acknowledgement on the part of Christians that when a Coptic Christian in Egypt is beheaded, that’s a piercing of the Body of Christ – the Church. If I am Christian, he’s my brother in a very particular and spiritually intimate way.
Christians have a responsibility. Christians in the media have a responsibility. We need to be telling more stories, showing more faces, profiling people who are helping.
We all need to encourage and reward good journalism about Christian persecution.
We need to pray together. I should be praying at Maronite churches and Lebanese Catholics should be getting to know Our Lady of the Americas here in D.C. There needs to be more of a palpable awareness of the diversity in the body of Christ and the reality of the body of Christ. Only then will we better tend to healing. Only then can we support and strengthen one another. Only then can we work together. Only then will we open our hearts and homes.
I often go back to what Pope Francis said during his first summer as pope, when he went to the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
God asks each one of us: “Where is the blood of your brother that cries out to me?” Today no one in the world feels responsible for this; we have lost the sense of fraternal responsibility; we have fallen into the hypocritical attitude of the priest and of the servant of the altar that Jesus speaks about in the parable of the Good Samaritan: We look upon the brother half dead by the roadside, perhaps we think “poor guy,” and we continue on our way, it’s none of our business; and we feel fine with this. We feel at peace with this, we feel fine! The culture of well-being, that makes us think of ourselves, that makes us insensitive to the cries of others, that makes us live in soap bubbles, that are beautiful but are nothing, are illusions of futility, of the transient, that brings indifference to others, that brings even the globalization of indifference. In this world of globalization we have fallen into a globalization of indifference. We are accustomed to the suffering of others, it doesn’t concern us, it’s none of our business.
This is his point so often. What are we doing? What are we not doing? What more can we do? If we are not examining our consciences we are part of the problem.
It’s that constant reflection that gets my friend Alejandro Bermudez to go spend Holy Week in Kurdistan. Not everyone can do that. But we can consider giving to efforts to help?
I admire what In Defense of Christians tries to do – they first get people praying together, talking together, listening to one another, and advocating on behalf of the persecuted who might otherwise be forgotten.
And I still think anyone who wants to be president of the United States ought to get to a refugee camp and meet some Christians. Perhaps only then will we realize how previous religious freedom is.