(Photo: CHristians pray during an anti-North Korea and pro-U.S. protest in Seoul, 3 Oct 2007/Han Jae-Ho)

The United States sees a mixed picture on world religious freedom, with progress in interfaith dialogue weighed against government repression and sectarian strife in many countries.  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday unveiled the latest State Department report on global religious freedom, which particularly criticized Iran and North Korea among other countries for harsh limits on religious expression.

“It is our hope that the … report will encourage existing religious freedom movements around the world,” Clinton said, adding that all people should have the right to believe or not as they see fit.

The report tagged North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, China, Sudan, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia and Uzbekistan among the worst offenders, placing them on a watch list put out earlier this year.

Michael Posner, the State Department’s top official for democracy and human rights, said President Barack Obama’s call this year for a new beginning between the United States and Muslims did not mean sidelining religious liberty. “Religious freedom is a fundamental right, a social good, a source of stability, and a key to international security,” Posner said in the introduction to the report.

Posner praised interfaith dialogue efforts promoted by Jordan, Spain and other countries. But religious repression and discrimination remained huge problems worldwide.

Clinton said she opposed efforts promoted by some Islamic countries to establish a global benchmark for what constitutes “defamation of a religion,” saying it could be an unacceptable intrusion on free speech rights. “The protection of speech about religion is particularly important since persons of different faith will inevitably hold divergent views on religious questions,” she said.

Read our news story here.

Here is our Factbox summarising the main findings.

For the full International Religious Freedom Report, with links to each country section, click here.

For the full text of Clinton’s remarks, click here.

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A few days after he presented his credentials to Pope Benedict as new U.S. ambassador to the United States, Miguel Humberto Diaz, invited a few journalists to his residence on Rome’s Gianicolo Hill for a chat. It was his first meeting with the media in his new role and I was the only member of a major international news organisation to be invited to the first round.

Diaz, a very amiable man, is the first Hispanic and the first theologian to fill the post of U.S. ambassador. He took questions in English and Italian on a range of topics but most of the comments were centered on what he wanted to make out of the post. Here are some excerpts. The questions have been synthesized to reflect the conversation:

(Photos: Ambassador Diaz and Pope Benedict, October 2, 2009. REUTERS/Osservatore Romano)

How did you get the news that President Obama had chosen you as new envoy and how did you feel?

“When the call came in from the White House I was, like anybody would be, pleasantly surprised and honored and humbled to have this opportunity to serve my country, to serve under this president. I had been part of an advisory team of Catholic theologians and activists during the campaign.

“One of my desires for this president was that this kind of engagement between religious ideas, public service, people of faith and service to one’s country could continue beyond the campaign. I was of the opinion that of religious thinkers could continue to participate in some kind of ongoing advisory group. When I first received the call i thought  that the president was going to ask me to do …  instead I was very honored that the president had selected me to become the next ambassador to the Holy See”

What do you think led President Obama to choose you?

“The president, in his (book) Audacity of Hope, argued in a persuasive way that religious principles, that people of faith have an active role to play in society and that within a democratic and pluralistic society what one needs to have is a persuasive translation of those principles than can be placed at the service of society for the benefit of the common good. So in many ways the professor in Obama spoke to the professor in Diaz. His style and appeal to a reasoned approach to arguments was very much persuasive…”

Won’t you miss being a theologian and an academic?

“Maybe after my appointment as U.S. ambassador I will have time to pursue those kinds of conversation but, again, this is going to be a sacrifice, this is going to hard for me to abandon the classroom and do abandon the pursuit of theological ideas so I can embrace diplomacy …

“it is clear that no other ambassador in the past has been asked to totally shed their past so what I hope is that the theological and philosophical background that I have can somehow be useful in the service of bringing people together, so if I can learn to translate in an effective way — both in terms of communication and in terms of what I do — some of the those basic principles that I believe in, then I think I might be able to become an effective communicators and engage in the kind of things that I like to engage in — inter-religious dialogue, inter-cultural dialogue, inter-racial dialogue for the sake of building peace and the common good for humanity. So if I could somehow tap into that past without offending anyone and certainly by creating bridges then maybe I can succeed as an ambassador.”

Wouldn’t you love to have a one-on-one theological conversation with Pope Benedict, even if it had to be kept secret?

“I guess you’ll never find out if  I have one. But I don’t like to work in secrecy because hardly ever does the press not find out about it. I think that we’re about transparency in this administration so, if I were to have a theological conversation with the pope, I would not like to hide it from the world. I don’t want to operate behind closed doors. But there is no doubt that this is part of who I am but I am also very conscious that as part of who I am know, as ambassador of the United States I am not here primarily to have theological conversations with the Holy Father, but I am here to represent my president, my people, my country…”

How will you build on past relations between the Vatican and Washington?

“We all stand on the shoulders of giants in some ways. We don’t start from scratch. we build on the positive things that others have done. We are celebrating 25 years of formal diplomatic relations between the Holy See and the United States and over those 25 years we have done wonderful work. We have together rejected religion as a means for violence, we have rejected terrorism, we have worked together on issues related to food security and I suspect this will continue to be part of our work. We have worked on trafficking in person and this will be part of out ongoing engagements and in a few days we will have a conference with Caritas Internationalis on the prevention of  transferring HIV/AIDS from mother to child. These are some of the things that have preceded me. Because of my background, because of my educational background, I will invite my co-workers to engage themes such as inter-religious and inter-cultural relations and (seek) ways that we can cooperate with the Vatican and various Catholic organisations to promote these areas for the sake of human peace. Another big issue on the horizon will be climate change. This particular pope has increasingly drawn attention to the issues of distortion of the earth, global warming and so those are also issues that are dear to me …. that will also be on my radar screen.

“Given my educational background and my work with youth I would like to extend a bridge out to young people. the presidency of Barack Obama is a huge magnet of attraction for youth and I would also like to engage in conversations that engage them. As a leader I think one has to listen and one has to judge things as they come up and respond to things as they come up.”

This is only the second Democratic U.S. administration since relations between the Vatican and the United States were established 25 years ago. The last last time there was a democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton, relations were quite tense, particularly over abortion, which came to a head at the U.N. Conference on Population in Cairo in 1994. Do you think there is a danger of this happening again and what do you think your relationship with the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference will be?

(Photo: Pope Benedict and President Obama at the Vatican, 10 July 2009/Osservatore Romano)

“I think I am going to follow the example of my president here. I’m not going to look to the past but to look to the present and the future. I will certainly do everything that I can to keep the lines of communications open between our two countries. I cannot and will not get entangled in the domestic issues because I represent the United States at this international level, from one sovereign entity to another. So that while I think that this is a good conversation that my country is having at the domestic level but that conversation is being held there and I will do the job that the president would like me to do here. There is a differnce between what the U.S.  ambassador should do and what the Holy Father should do as the pastor of the Church which also has responsibility for and a relationship with the local Church. I am not representing the U.S. Church. I don’t have a relationship to the local Church nor to the (U.S.) Conference of Catholic Bishops. Of  course, wherever the dignity of the human person is involved the Holy See is going to have something to say. But I think its important to make that distinction, who is speaking for whom and under what circumstances.”

What other person attributes to you bring to the job?

“I am the child of an exile. I have immigration in my story. I know what it is to live and negotiate between cultures and peoples and speak different languages … I had to mediate with my parents, who still to this day do not speak the English language completely or perfectly … in some ways this was engrained in my very being while growing up.”

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Miguel Humberto Diaz might sound like the name of an ambassador from Spain or any Latin American country, but in fact it belongs to the new American ambassador to the Vatican.

And if any further proof  were needed that things are changing in Obama’s America, consider this: The surnames of the previous ambassadors to the Vatican were: Wilson, Shakespeare, Melady, Glendon, Flynn, Boggs,  Nicholson, Rooney, and Glendon.

In my coverage of the Vatican, I knew most of them well, a few of them very well,  and at least three — Melady, Flynn and Nicholson (two Republicans and a Democrat) — became friends who still keep in touch. Their kindness then and now will always be appreciated.

Still, there is a certain buzz in the air in Rome over the arrival of Diaz, who presented his credentials to Pope Benedict on Friday. The first Latino to get the post, he is Cuban-American (born in Havanna and raised in Miami).  Apart from the last ambassador, Harvard Prof. Mary Ann Glendon, Diaz perhaps knows more about Roman Catholicism and the workings of the Church than any of his predecessors.

But perhaps most significantly, Diaz is a theologian. He was professor of theology at the College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University, both in Collegeville, Minnesota. He is also  a former president of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians fo the United States and board member of the Catholic Theological Society of America.

President Obama, in sum, sent a theologian ambassador to a theologian pope.

As was to be expected, Diaz made his debut at the Vatican with the words of a diplomat. His address to the pope spoke of  mutual concerns such as food shortages, an ethical response to the economic crisis. He  praised the pope as any new envoy would and promised to be a bridge builder between Washington and the Holy See.

Also as was to be expected, the pope’s address to Diaz touched on issues dear to the pope, such as “issues touching the protection of human dignity and respect for the inalienable right to life from the moment of conception to natural death as well as the right to conscientious objection on the part of health care workers, and indeed all citizens.” The full version of the pope’s remarks to Diaz are here.

But one could only imagine how they both might enjoy a private theological discussion. If it ever happens (and I for one would not be surprised if it did)  we will probably never find out about it. Popes are not supposed to do theological one-on-ones with ambassadors.

But then again few, if any, ambassadors to the Vatican have been theologians.

(Photos: Ambassador Diaz and Pope Benedict, 2 Oct 2009/Osservatore Romano)

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Among the areas covered in the just released Pew survey of American public opinion about abortion, one that grabbed my attention asked about factors that influence people’s opinion about the issue.

For those who support abortion rights, only 11 percent cited religious beliefs as the primary influence on their views on the topic; among those who say abortion should be illegal, 53 percent cited faith as their guiding reason. Overall 32 percent of those surveyed cited religious beliefs as the main factor behind their views on abortion.

None of this, mind you, is surprising. Opposition to abortion rights in the United States has been driven primarily by religious conservatives — evangelical and Catholic mostly — and so the figure fits the usual narrative. Few people cite faith as a reason to support abortion rights and so the 11 percent figure in that regard is also what you would expect.

(PHOTO: People gather for the March for Life anti-abortion rally on the National Mall in Washington, January 22, 2009.  REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst   (UNITED STATES)

But looking at the numbers — 53 percent to 11 percent — does highlight how stark America’s religious/secular divide has become. That’s what jumped out at me.

Among white evangelical Protestants, 58 percent cited religious beliefs as the main influence on their opinions about abortion, a number that climbed to 68 percent for those who attend church on a weekly basis. The only surprise here perhaps was that those figures were not even higher.

The other factors cited were education, personal experience, the views of others and media. A surprising number of overall respondents — 21 percent — chose “something else” as the main influence on their take on this polarizing issue. This also caught my eye.

What do you think would fall under the “something else” category in this context?

It’s hard to watch France’s political and cultural elite rush to support filmmaker Roman Polanski against extradition to the United States on a decades-old sex charge and not wonder exactly how they interpret the national motto “liberté, égalité, fraternité.” It’s tempting to ask whether they’re defending the liberty to break the law and skip town, respecting the equality of all before the law and championing a brotherhood of artists who can do no wrong.

(Photo: Roman Polanski, 19 Feb 2009/Hannibal Hanschke)

Here in Paris, Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner declared the arrest was “a bit sinister … frankly, (arresting) a man of such talent recognised around the world, recognised in the country where he was arrested — that’s not very nice.” He and his Polish counterpart have written to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the issue. Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said “just as there is a generous America that we like, there’s also an America that scares us, and that’s the America that has just shown us its face.” Directors, actors and intellectuals have been signing a petition demanding Polanski’s immediate release.

Almost all the focus is on the argument that Polanski is a brilliant director, the charge of unlawful sex with a 13-year old dates back to 1977 and the victim herself says she wants the whole issue to be forgotten.  Almost completely ignored is the fact that he fled the U.S. to escape sentencing, which added a crime to the original crime. There is such a widespread assumption that all artists and intellectuals would automatically support Polanski that Paris papers today — both the left-of-centre Libération and the conservative Le Figaro — wrote with an air of surprise that Hollywood was not storming the barricades to back him.

The French Greens leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit made headlines by bucking the trend and saying he was “ill at ease” with the rush to absolve Polanski of raping a minor and the culture minister should have been more cautious in his comments.

Across the Atlantic, by contrast, Hollywood’s hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times, reviewed the objections by Polanski’s supporters and concluded: “Plausible or preposterous, these arguments are eclipsed by a simple fact: Polanski fled the country … the Justice Department and L.A.’s district attorney are right to seek extradition.”

And almost nobody in the media here in France asks the tough questions that Fr. Tom Reese, S.J. (photo at right) did in his Washington Post blog post entitled “Father Polanski would go to jail”:
“Polanski’s defenders … argue that he should not be punished. They say that the girl was willing and sexually experienced and she has forgiven him (after receiving a settlement). They even cite his tragic childhood and life as an excuse. And besides, it is ancient history. Such arguments from paedophile priests would be laughed out of court and lambasted by everyone, and rightly so…

“The Catholic Church has rightly been put under a microscope when 4 percent of its priests were involved in abuse, but what about the film industry? The world has truly changed. Entertainment is the new religion with sex, violence and money the new Trinity. The directors and stars are worshipped and quickly forgiven for any infraction as long as the PR agent is as skilled as a saintly confessor. Entertainment, not religion, is the new opiate of the people and we don’t want our supply disturbed.

“Is there a double standard here? You bet.”

There’s a lot to say about the different ways Americans and French approach the law. But let’s go right to Tom Reese’s question. Do you think Polanski’s supporters cut him slack they wouldn’t think of permitting for a paedophile priest? Is the entertainment industry setting our values?

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U.S. conservative Christians, a key base for the out-of-power Republican Party, gathered in Washington on Friday to rally the faithful against President Barack Obama’s agenda, including his top domestic priority of healthcare reform.

Obama’s falling poll numbers and what they depict as his ultra-liberal views on abortion rights, healthcare and climate change are galvanizing a group that could prove vital to Republican prospects of taking back control of Congress in the 2010 congressional elections or the White House in 2012.

Conservative activists see exploitable opportunities in Obama’s policies and performance that also can stir more centrist voters, such as suspicions of “big government” and the almost uniquely American skepticism of global warming that prevails in much of the heartland.

You can read the whole story here.

(PHOTO: President Barack Obama holds a rally on health insurance reform at the Comcast Center at the University of Maryland in College Park, Maryland, September 17, 2009. REUTERS/Larry Downing)

Wanted: a leader for the U.S. social conservative movement. Must be able to press all the right buttons, be a committed Christian and have a vision to propel the Republican Party back to power.

U.S. social and religious conservatives will be searching for someone to fill that void as they gather in Washington this Friday to Sunday for the fourth annual summit of self-styled “Values Voters.”

(Photo: Conservative protesters near the U.S. Capitol in Washington, 12 Sept 2009/Mike Theiler)

Dubbed the “Religious Right,” they have been stirred by a summer of discontent when their activists went on the offensive against Democratic President Barack Obama’s top domestic priority of healthcare reform, taking part in widely publicized town hall meetings on the issue that often turned raucous.

Formerly high-profile leaders of the religious right such as televangelist Jerry Falwell and political operative Ralph Reed have died or retreated from prominence. Last year’s economic crisis helped propel Obama to the White House.

“Social conservatives are looking for leadership and this is one of the places these folks are going to be shopping,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobby group organizing the summit.

Read the whole story here.

If you don’t know anything about the Koran but want to learn, does it make any difference if you’re an American “dummy” or a French “nul”? That  isn’t meant to cast doubts about knowledge on either side of the Atlantic. But it does arise now that the French version of the American guide to Islam’s holy book has just been published in Paris.

The book at right is based on the original text at left, but it would be wrong to call it a translation. First Editions, the French publisher of the “Pour les Nuls” (”For Dummies”) books, took the U.S. original and asked a leading Paris-based Islam specialist, Franco-Algerian Malek Chebel, to adapt it for French readers.

Chebel, who has also just published his own translation of the Koran and an accompanying “encyclopedic dictionary,” explained at the book presentation here that he had to make several changes. The original text by Sohaib Sultan, now the Muslim chaplain at Princeton University, was fine for U.S. readers, he said. “There weren’t errors,” he explained, “but I had to make some fundamental changes. I told the editor, she checked with the American publishers and asked if they agreed. They went along with it. So I worked from that basis and the book became a French book.”

“Le Coran pour les Nuls” keeps large parts of the original “Dummies” text but has new sections on the Koran’s message. “I added implications of the Koran for today,” Chebel said. “What does the Koran say today? How can a Koranic verse be interpreted on the veil, on society, etc? I updated aspects of critical interpretation and rearranged some sequences of chapters.”

(Photo: Malek Chebel, 9 Sept 2009/Tom Heneghan)

“The Koran for Dummies” had a full chapter on jihad with subtitles like “Understanding Martydom” and “Looking at Jihad in Today’s World.” Chebel cut it out of the French version. He does discuss the concept and deplores suicide bombers, but does not highlight it. “I judged there was no place to discuss geopolitics, especially controversial issues, in a book on Islam,” he said.

Chebel has experience with rejigging such texts, having already adapted the “Islam for Dummies” book. He did even more radical surgery on that one. “In ‘Islam for Dummies,’ there was no Islam in France or Islam in Europe. ‘Islam for Dummies’ was Islam of Americans for Americans,” he said. “But France is the largest ‘Muslim country’ in the West. That wasn’t an error but something was missing.”

In the end, about half of the Koran book was changed in one way or another, said Vincent Barbare, head of First Editions. This isn’t always the case for the “Pour les Nuls” series. “There are some American books we don’t adapt but we write our own, not because the American book is bad but because the reality in America is not the same as ours,” he said.

(Images: Chebel’s new Koran translation and “encyclopedic dictionary)

“Take a dumb example,” Barbare said. “Last year we published Les Annees 60 pour les Nuls (The Sixties for Dummies). The American book is very very good, but it talks mostly about Vietnam and Kennedy, and not about the May ‘68 student protests in Paris or about General de Gaulle… On Islam, there was a lot that was in common. Malek read and found it was not disconnected from what we wanted to do.”

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The heated debate over United States health care reform revolves around practical issues like its expected costs or the government-run “public option.” But when President Barack Obama addressed Congress on the issue, he quoted a letter from the late Senator Ted Kennedy saying: “What we face is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country.”

(Photo: President Obama addressing Congress, 9 Sept 2009/Jason Reed)

Religious leaders and politicians supporting health care reform sometimes frame the issue in moral terms. But the term “moral” rarely pops up in the Washington debate and — apart from the Kennedy quote — it didn’t figure in Obama’s speech either. The president did discuss the issue of character, which is a moral term, and used the word often enough for it to appear in the Wordle web cloud below. But he avoided repeating what might be considered a religiously loaded word in a crucial political speech.

What do you think?

The percentage of Americans who believe Islam encourages violence has declined and very basic knowledge about the faith has shown modest increases, according to a new survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Thirty-eight percent of those polled believed Islam was more likely than other faiths to encourage violence, down from the 45 percent who held this view two years earlier.

Most Americans — 58 percent – also believe Muslims are discriminated against. In fact, they see them as a group second only to gays and lesbians in terms of the discrimination they face. These findings suggest unexpected empathy for a community whose leaders often claim they are regarded with suspicion and hostility.

The survey also reports that Americans are generally learning more about Islam and that increasing familiarity with the religion correlates with a decline in belief that Islam promotes violence.

The poll’s findings, released ahead of the eighth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, come against the backdrop of President Barack Obama’s attempts to reach out to the Islamic world and eroding public support for the war in Muslim Afghanistan as U.S. combat deaths there rise to record levels.

You can see a link to the survey here and you can see our report here.