Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Prince Charles Draws Attention to Persecution of Mideast Christians

Photo from the BBC

This year has been a dreadful one for Mideast Christians. In Egypt, Islamists frustrated at the fall of the Morsi government have singled out Copts for vengeance. By some accounts, Copts are suffering the worst persecution they have experienced in 700 years. In Syria, Islamist rebels are targeting Christians, whom they accuse of siding with the Assad regime.  In Iraq, Islamist gangs demand exorbitant protection money from the few Christians who remain–unless the Christians agree to convert to Islam. Across the region, Christians are being kidnapped, driven from their homes, killed. Their churches are being burned, their schools bombed. Christianity faces an existential threat in the place where it was born.

Mostly, the persecution of Mideast Christians has failed to attract attention in the West–although the media seems to be catching on. Mideast Christians lack strong lobbies in Western capitals, and the Western human rights community has a hard time seeing any Christians as victims rather than oppressors. So praise goes to Britain’s Prince Charles, who last week met with representatives of Mideast Christians in London to draw attention to the ongoing persecution:

“It seems to me that we cannot ignore the fact that Christians in the Middle East are, increasingly, being deliberately targeted by fundamentalist Islamist militants,” he said. Noting Christianity’s roots in the region, the Prince observed that today the Middle East and North Africa have the lowest concentration of Christians in the world—just 4 percent—and that this has “dropped dramatically over the last century and is falling still further.” He said that the effect of this was that “we all lose something immensely and irreplaceably precious when such a rich tradition dating back 2,000 years begins to disappear.”

The BBC’s report of the Prince’s meeting is here.

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Beorn, “Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus”

This January, Harvard University Press will publish Marching Into Darkness: The Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belarus by Waitman Wade Beorn Marching Into Darkness(University of Nebraska at Omaha).  The publisher’s description follows.

On October 10, 1941, the entire Jewish population of the Belarusian village of Krucha was rounded up and shot. While Nazi death squads routinely carried out mass executions on the Eastern Front, this particular atrocity was not the work of the SS but was committed by a regular German army unit acting on its own initiative. Marching into Darkness is a bone-chilling exposé of the ordinary footsoldiers who participated in the Final Solution on a daily basis.

Although scholars have exploded the myth that the Wehrmacht played no significant part in the Holocaust, a concrete picture of its involvement at the local level has been lacking. Among the crimes Waitman Wade Beorn unearths are forced labor, sexual violence, and graverobbing, though a few soldiers refused to participate and even helped Jews. By meticulously reconstructing the German army’s activities in Belarus in 1941, Marching into Darkness reveals in stark detail how the army willingly fulfilled its role as an agent of murder on a massive scale. Early efforts at improvised extermination progressively became much more methodical, with some army units going so far as to organize “Jew hunts.” Beorn also demonstrates how the Wehrmacht used the pretense of anti-partisan warfare as a subterfuge by reporting murdered Jews as partisans.

Through archival research into military and legal records, survivor testimonies, and eyewitness interviews, Beorn paints a searing portrait of a professional army’s descent into ever more intimate participation in genocide.

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Kertzer, “The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret Life of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe”

Next month, Random House will publish The Pope and Mussolini: The Secret Life of Pius XI and the Rise of Fascism in Europe, by David I. Kertzer (Brown Pope and MussoliniUniversity). The publisher’s description follows.

 The Pope and Mussolini tells the story of two men who came to power in 1922, and together changed the course of twentieth-century history. In most respects, they could not have been more different. One was scholarly and devout, the other thuggish and profane. Yet Pius XI and “Il Duce” had many things in common. They shared a distrust of democracy and a visceral hatred of Communism. Both were prone to sudden fits of temper and were fiercely protective of the prerogatives of their office. (“We have many interests to protect,” the Pope declared, soon after Mussolini seized control of the government in 1922.) Each relied on the other to consolidate his power and achieve his political goals.

In a challenge to the conventional history of this period, in which a heroic Church does battle with the Fascist regime, Kertzer shows how Pius XI played a crucial role in making Mussolini’s dictatorship possible and keeping him in power. In exchange for Vatican support, Mussolini restored many of the privileges the Church had lost and gave in to the pope’s demands that the police enforce Catholic morality. Yet in the last years of his life—as the Italian dictator grew ever closer to Hitler—the pontiff’s faith in this treacherous bargain started to waver. With his health failing, he began to lash out at the Duce and threatened to denounce Mussolini’s anti-Semitic racial laws before it was too late. Horrified by the threat to the Church-Fascist alliance, the Vatican’s inner circle, including the future Pope Pius XII, struggled to restrain the headstrong pope from destroying a partnership that had served both the Church and the dictator for many years.

 The Pope and Mussolini brims with memorable portraits of the men who helped enable the reign of Fascism in Italy: Father Pietro Tacchi Venturi, Pius’s personal emissary to the dictator, a wily anti-Semite known as Mussolini’s Rasputin; Victor Emmanuel III, the king of Italy, an object of widespread derision who lacked the stature—literally and figuratively—to stand up to the domineering Duce; and Cardinal Secretary of State Eugenio Pacelli, whose political skills and ambition made him Mussolini’s most powerful ally inside the Vatican, and positioned him to succeed the pontiff as the controversial Pius XII, whose actions during World War II would be subject for debate for decades to come.

With the recent opening of the Vatican archives covering Pius XI’s papacy, the full story of the Pope’s complex relationship with his Fascist partner can finally be told. Vivid, dramatic, with surprises at every turn, The Pope and Mussolini is history writ large and with the lightning hand of truth.

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The Top Five New Law & Religion Papers on SSRN

From SSRN’s list of most frequently downloaded law and religion papers posted in the last 60 days, here are the current top five. This week, Michal Gilad remains at #1, Patrick McKinley Brennan is at #2; Wilson Ray Huhn is at #3; Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman are at #4; and Asifa Quraishi-Landes and Najeeba Syeed Miller complete the list at #5.

1.In God’s Shadow: Unveiling the Hidden World of Domestic Violence Victims in Religious Communities by Michal Gilad (University of Pennsylvania Law School) [773 downloads]

2.Resisting the Grand Coalition in Favor of the Status Quo by Giving Full Scope to the Libertas Ecclesiae by Patrick McKinley Brennan (Villanova University School of Law) [157 downloads]

3.Slaves to Contradictions: 13 Myths that Sustained Slavery by Wilson Ray Huhn (University of Akron- School of Law) [147 downloads]

4.Some Realism about Corporate Rights by Richard Schragger and Micah Schwartzman (University of Virginia School of Law, University of Virginia School of Law) [146 downloads]

5.No Altars: A Survey of Islamic Family Law in United States) by Asifa Quraishi-Landes and Najeeba Syeed Miller (University of Wisconsin-Madison-Law School,  Unaffiliated Authors-Independent) [132 downloads]

Posted on by Mark Movsesian · 1 Comment

Can a Church Refuse to Sell Property Because of a Buyer’s Religion?

Here’s a bleg for you law and religion fans. Rod Dreher had an interesting post last week about the continuing division in the Episcopal Church over doctrinal issues. Several parishes, and even a few dioceses, if I’m not mistaken, have sought to leave the Episcopal Church because of the church’s liberal stand on issues like homosexuality. These parishes typically affiliate with Anglican bishops who remain committed to traditional doctrine.

Often, the departing congregations wish to maintain control of church property. Because of the way the relevant deeds and other legal documents are written, though, and because of the church autonomy principle, the congregations typically lose. Rod reports that the Episcopal Church has spent about $26 million litigating all the cases–an astounding figure, when you think about it.

All this is straightforward, legally speaking. But Rod’s post raises an issue I hadn’t thought about. When a departing parish in Binghamton, New York, sought to purchase its church building for $150,000, the Episcopal Church refused to sell. Apparently, the Church’s presiding bishop, Katharine Jefferts Schori, has adopted a policy of refusing to sell church property to any group that intends to affiliate with an Anglican bishop. The Episcopal Church has sold off property to Baptists, Methodists, Jews, and Muslims, but not Anglicans. In the Binghamton case, the Church eventually sold the property to a mosque which paid only $50,000 for it–one-third what the departing congregation had offered to pay.

So, here’s the question. Is it legal for a church to refuse to sell church property solely because of the buyer’s religion? You’d think there would be an easy answer, but I haven’t been able to find one. The federal civil rights laws prohibit religious discrimination in residential sales, but that wouldn’t apply to church buildings. Some state civil rights laws apply to commercial property, but there are exemptions for religious groups–and anyway, these cases don’t involve commercial property, either. In the federal employment anti-discrimination laws, a specific exception exists for religious bodies that discriminate on the basis of religion, and a couple of years ago, in the Hosanna-Tabor case, the Supreme Court held that the Constitution allows religious bodies to discriminate with respect to the employment of ministers. Would there be an analogous carve-out from non-discrimination principles for churches that do not wish to sell their sanctuaries to religious rivals? Any ideas?