Catholic Perspectives on the Downtown NYC Muslim Community Center Controversy
posted by Frank Pasquale
While there have been many secular arguments for permitting the construction of the Downtown New York City Muslim Community Center, there’s good reason to focus on religious rationales, as well. John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby note some lessons from 19th century attacks on Catholics:
For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent “religious other.” Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense. . . .
Like many American Muslims today, many American Catholics squirmed when their foreign-born religious leaders offered belligerent or tone-deaf pronouncements on the modern world. New York’s own Bishop John Hughes thundered in 1850 that the Church’s mission was to convert “the officers of the navy and the Marines, commander of the Army, the legislatures, the Senate, the Cabinet, the president and all.” . . . .[Over time] American Catholics helped transform parts of their own church that seemed at odds with the American freedoms they had come to cherish.
Must Muslims unequivocally reject all forms of terrorism—especially those Muslims who wish to promote full Muslim participation in American society? Of course. But if the Catholic experience in the United States holds any lesson it is that becoming American also means asserting one’s constitutional rights, fully and forcefully, even if that assertion is occasionally taken to be insulting. The genius of the American experiment in religious liberty is precisely this long-term confidence that equal rights for all religious groups builds the loyalty every democratic society needs. Certainly American Catholics learned that lesson long ago.
On a related note, Jennifer Bryson makes compelling arguments for Christians to “reject ‘burn a quran’ day.” I came to be acquainted with Bryson’s work while a parishioner at St. Thomas More in New Haven, and McGreevy’s work during my college stint as President of the Catholic Students Association at Harvard. Both provide valuable insights on the recent rise in intolerance in the US. As Hans Kung has stated, “Until there is peace between religions, there can be no peace in the world” (quoted in Thich Nhat Hanh, Living Buddha, Living Christ, 2).
Image: John Courtney Murray, author of We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition.
September 4, 2010 at 8:46 pm
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Responses (3)
Steven M. Bellovin - September 4, 2010 at 10:12 pm
And for a Jewish justification for building the “mosque”, see http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/08/05/my-take-the-jewish-case-for-the-ground-zero-mosque/
Patrick S. O'Donnell - September 4, 2010 at 11:55 pm
And “Rabbi Joy Levitt, executive director of the Jewish Community Center [JCC] in Manhattan….is an adviser on the project.”
“Levitt confirmed that the JCC has been advising Khan and Rauf. ‘Well, we got a call from Daisy [Khan, the wife of Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf], when they began to think about this project, and said we want to build a MCC [Muslim Community Center] just like the JCC,’ Levitt said.” (Levitt is co-editor, with her husband, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, of A Night of Questions: A Passover Haggadah, 1999).
monica - September 6, 2010 at 11:05 pm
i may not believe what you believe but I will fight for the death for your freedoms
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