Address by Minister Ernesto Araújo at the Ministerial Meeting on Freedom of Religion and Belief – 16/11/2020

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening to all,

I would like, first of all, to praise Minister Zbigniew Rau and Poland for organizing this very important session. I would also like to welcome the words of Secretary Mike Pompeo.

Dear colleagues, Ministers and Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, Ambassadors, Ladies and gentlemen,

I am honored to represent Brazil in this assembly of Nations gathered around the cause of religious freedom. Unfortunately, there are plenty of reasons for Nations to be concerned about the issue.

Religious minorities continue to be oppressed around the world either officially by the authorities or by more diffuse forms of oppression in their societies. The international community must stand up to abuses against all faiths. Brazil will not shy away from this urgent task.

No faith is safe from intolerance and persecution and Christians are among its main victims. Sadly, we have seen continuous episodes of hatred and violence against Christians in every hemisphere and continent. According to recent surveys, eight Christians are killed daily worldwide because of their faith.

Nevertheless, acts of violence against Christians and people of any other faith are not the only reason we should dedicate ourselves to the protection of religious freedom.

There is a subtler, but no less pernicious, menace surrounding us, which also deserves attention. In 1968 the then recently appointed Cardinal Karol Wojtyla wrote: “The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person.”

The urgency of Saint John Paul II’s warning grew ever since. In our age of artificial intelligence and Big Data, the human spirit must strive to avoid being reduced to subservient beings. Religious freedom is key to secure the integrity and depth of Mankind’s spiritual dimension.

The challenge of protecting religious freedom must start by recognizing and reaffirming that the spiritual dimension is part of the human being. Religious freedom means the preservation of that space, the defense of that sacred territory in our soul. People can only be free inasmuch as they preserve the spiritual dimension inside. Materialism is not compatible with free societies. The materialist conception of the world and of life encloses the human being in a prison of impulse and satisfaction with no higher aspiration, making him or her easy prey to the political dictates of the day.

Checks and balances in a horizontal perspective among different institutions are not sufficient to build free societies. Only the vertical checks and balances provided by the spiritual dimension can create true freedom. Only if the human being can communicate with the above and the beyond, can he or she escape from the cycle of control and oppression.

The religion I am, of course, most familiar with – Christianity – is basically a quest for liberation. Truth as a means to freedom – that is possibly the central philosophical concept of Christianity. But I am sure that other religions have equally important attachments to freedom as central to human dignity. The infinite dignity of each human being was not invented by the 18th-century philosophers, was not created by the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. It was there, from the start, in Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, and other faiths.

Religious freedom is not something democratic society should just tolerate as if religion was just a strange body. Religion, faith, the life of the spirit, must be regarded as fundamental to democracy. Freedom is at the core of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a cornerstone of our world because it existed before in the human heart and in the human spirit, and we must live up to those ideals.

Freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of expression, freedom of religion – all of those freedoms enshrined in the Declaration of Human Rights are all mutually ingrained and mutually interdependent. Freedom of religion should not be an afterthought. Freedom of religion is essential to freedom as a whole.

 
Thank you very much.