Pope Bendict and "reciprocity"

Pope Benidict XVI has recently taken a harder line stand against Muslims than his predecessor John Paul II. Benidict feels there is an "imbalance" in the way Muslim countries treat minority religions as opposed to the way Western countries treat Muslims. The new Pope wants equal treatment of Christians in Muslim countries where they can practice freely without the heavy hand of an abusive state. Here is the article laying out the "reciprocity" policy:

There is, however, one intriguing area of contrast: Islam. To put it bluntly, Benedict is more of a hawk, pursuing a kind of interaction with Muslims one might call "tough love."

The new climate has in part been driven by widely publicized incidents of anti-Christian backlash in the Islamic world, most dramatically the Feb. 5 slaying of Italian missionary Fr. Andrea Santoro in Trabzon, Turkey, a small hamlet on the country's Black Sea coast. A 16-year-old Turk entered St. Mary's Church in Trabzon and pumped two bullets into Santoro's lungs and heart, shouting Allah akbar, "Allah is great." He later said he had been agitated by the controversy surrounding the Danish cartoons.

Though the teenager's father told reporters his son is psychologically disturbed, most senior figures in the Vatican, where the Santoro murder made a deep impression, saw it as part of a rising tide of anti-Christian sentiment in fundamentalist Islamic circles. That impression was underscored by the recent death sentence for Abdul Rahman, a Christian convert from Islam in Afghanistan.

In his March 23 session with cardinals, much conversation turned on Islam, and there was general agreement with Benedict's policy of a more muscular challenge on what Catholics call "reciprocity." In essence, it means that if Muslim immigrants can claim the benefit of religious liberty in the West, then Christian minorities ought to get the same treatment in majority Muslim nations.

To take the most notorious example, if the Saudis can spend $65 million to build the largest mosque in Europe in Rome, in the shadows of the Vatican, then Christians ought to be able to build churches in Saudi Arabia. Or, if that's not possible, Christians should at least be able to import Bibles, and the Capuchin priests who serve the Arabian peninsula ought to be able to set foot off the oil industry compounds or embassy grounds in Saudi Arabia without fear of harassment by the mutawa, the religious police. The bishop in charge of the Catholic church in that part of the world recently described the situation in Saudi Arabia as "reminiscent of the catacombs."

It's the kind of imbalance that has long stuck in the craw of many senior figures in the Catholic Church, but these complaints were largely suppressed in the John Paul years as part of the pope's Islamic Ostpolitik. John Paul, who met with Muslims more than 60 times over the course of his papacy, and who during a 2001 trip to Damascus became the first pope to enter a mosque, believed in reaching out to Islamic moderates and avoiding confrontational talk.

Benedict XVI clearly wants good relations with Islam, and chose to meet with a group of Muslim leaders during his August trip to Cologne, Germany. Yet he will not purse that relationship at the expense of what he considers to be the truth.

No doubt, Benedict intends this tougher line as a stimulus to Islamic leaders to take seriously the challenge of expressing their faith in a multi-cultural, pluralistic world. Whether it's received that way, or whether it simply reinforces the conviction of many jihadists about an eternal struggle with the Christian West, remains to be seen.

I certainly agree that Christians ought to be allowed to worship freely in Islamic countries, but I can't buy Benedict's notion of "reciprocity." This idea seems to suggest that the religious freedom extended to Muslims in the west ought somehow to be contingent on the behavior of the governments of Muslim countries towards their religious minorities.

This is a dangerous and irrational idea. We are not negotiating trade deals here. We are talking about rights based on principles of individual liberty that we consider part of a just society. Religious freedom is not a concession in a negotiation, as Benedict would have it. It is something we value in our society for its own sake. To imply - as Benedict seems to - that if the Saudis, for example, do not grant religious freedom to Christians we should restrict the freedom of Muslims is to miss this criticial point.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, I think the Pope's notion of reciprocity is an attempt to secure religious freedom for Catholics in Muslim lands. The Church seeks to preserve freedom of religion as a politcal right so that it may go about its mission and that its members may practice the faith. I do not disagree with this end, but I just don't agree with the fundamental implications for such a policy. What do you do when Muslims tell the Pope to shove it? He cannot very well ask them to not practice their religion in Western countries.