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Friday, March 29, 2024

Je ne suis pas Charlie!

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There can be no moral or legal justification for the Hebdo massacre.  In the face of evil so egregious, so remorseless, the relativist line—it may be bad to us but not to them— has absolutely no convincing power.  The almost universal condemnation of the horrific crime is justified.

But there is an aspect of the entire sad and painful event that hollers for attention.  “Charlie Hebdo” was notorious for its not only irreverent but deliberately sacrilegious and blasphemous satirizing of religions.  Catholicism and Christianity have been on its receiving end.  Raymond Arroyo of EWTN reports that in one of its cartoons, a picture of the Holy Family was held between the legs of a naked woman.  Religion, an earnest student of the phenomenon will tell you, offers a person the most comprehensive of explanations and the highest level of authority.  For a person of faith, religion is the polestar of organized existence.  It is THE nomizing or ordering factor of human life.  An assault on religion will therefore never be taken lightly, and what this regrettable and condemnable Parisian affair tells us is that, fortunately for the world, there still are people for whom religion is supremely important.

The blame is not on religion, but on those for whom freedom of expression entails the entitlement to assault religion.  One is free to express whatever inanity it is that obsesses one, but free expression is not the only value of human persons, and for persons of faith, religion is high up in the scheme of things.  Persons will act on their beliefs, regardless of the fact that the law draws a distinction between the unbridled freedom to believe and the freedom to act in accord with one’s beliefs.  Good sense and regard for fundamental decency therefore dictate that free speech hold back from spite, the ridicule and the denigration of what others hold to be holy and sacred!

Not that there can be no debate or dissent in religion.  Theological debate is often very spirited, and it is so in a manner that is salutary to religion.  Religion so easily opens the door to fanaticism when it is denied the scrutiny of rational criticism.  But there is a difference between criticism and ridicule, between debate and spite, between disagreement and insult, and it is this crucial and yet clear distinction that Charlie Hebdo apparently consigned to impertinence!

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This brings us to the local issue of the Carlos Celdran conviction.  In the first place, no one compelled Celdran to attend the Cathedral service.  No one was going to stop him either from entering the Cathedral, what Catholics consider sacred space.  He went to spite. He went to insult. He was free to express himself elsewhere, at any other time, but he deliberately, calculatedly chose to disrupt a religious event by unfurling his “Padre Damaso” placard and drawing attention to his clearly intended insult.  How can that not be a violation of the clear provisions of the Revised Penal Code?  How can one claim innocence for such a transgression of the elementary precepts of human decency? The Catholic Church claims no special privileges.  All this talk about ‘lese majeste’ against the Catholic Church is merely incendiary, not thoughtful.  It looks not to cogitation but to visceral excitement!  All are entitled the freedom to practice their religion.  But the free exercise of one’s faith is illusory when the law does not concomitantly prohibit others who would interfere with the practice of the faith!  This much is clear from Hohfeld’s analysis of

rights, as it was ever since the very thoughtful Scholastics maintained that a right that one enjoys always creates a duty on the part of others!

Whether religion is on the decline or not is not the issue here.  Neither is there a claim made for special privileges for the Catholic Church.  The perpetrators of the Hebdo massacre have made clear that religion matters the world for some people—although there is no way to condone they way they made their point.

The only way to ensure ourselves against the senseless of sad events like Hebdo is not to make of “Je suis Charlie” an international mantra, but to take heed of the fundamental demands of respect! We cannot and should not be Charlie!  JE NE SUIS PAS CHARLIE!

 

rannie_aquino@sanbeda.edu.ph

rannie_aquino@csu.edu.ph

rannie_aquino@yahoo.com

 

 

 

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