Washington D.C., Aug 31, 2017 / 05:03 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- Although the State Department plans to cut or consolidate certain senior positions as part of an ongoing reorganization, the international religious freedom office will reportedly be expanded.
“I am encouraged by this move,” Dr. Tom Farr, head of the Religious Freedom Institute, told CNA in a written statement on the agency moving religious “special envoy” positions into the Office of International Religious Freedom.
“Each of these religion-related envoys and offices are intimately connected to religious freedom,” he said.
“I believe that the Department will be able to better execute its mission by integrating certain envoys and special representative offices within the regional and functional bureaus,” Tillerson wrote in a letter to Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, “and eliminating those that have accomplished or outlived their original purpose.” CNN first reported the letter.
Of 66 senior positions at the department which Secretary of State Rex Tillerson discussed in his letter, 30 are planned to be kept in place, according to a department official. Nine will be cut, 21 will be consolidated into various bureaus within the agency, and five others will be “folded into existing positions.”
The moves are being made to consolidate positions within the agency in the name of efficiency, clarity, and concentration of resources, according to an official at State.
Certain senior religious positions at State – including their staff and functions — are now being assumed by the Office of International Religious Freedom, all of which will reportedly be expanded.
That office was created with the original International Religious Freedom Act of 1998 (IRFA), sponsored by former Congressman Frank Wolf. It was meant to establish a place at the State Department where promoting religious freedom would be a lasting part of U.S. foreign policy.
Daniel Mark, the chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a bipartisan federal commission that advises the State Department and promotes religious freedom abroad, did not take an official position on the re-organization.
However, he said that if it improved the effectiveness of the State Department’s mission of promoting religious freedom as part of U.S. foreign policy, then it obviously would be a sound move.
“For coordination purposes, it is helpful, we think, for the Ambassador for International Religious Freedom to be taking the lead and coordinating the activities of all those different groups and offices,” he said of the re-organization.
“The goal isn’t to have this many envoys or that many envoys. The goal, of course, is just to see all the issues that need to be addressed, addressed in an efficacious way.”
The end results may depend on how much of a voice the Office of International Religious Freedom is given within the State Department.
Some advocates have thought that the office was marginalized at the agency over the years, both in its physical presence within the building and in its diminished role in the hierarchy of offices.
However, the previous Ambassador at-Large for International Religious Freedom, David Saperstein, who served during the last two years of the Obama administration, played an important role in increasing the voice of the office within the agency, Wolf said.
President Donald Trump nominated Kansas Governor and former Senator Sam Brownback for the position in July. He has yet to be confirmed by the Senate.
And in the new State Department plan, the ambassador will report to “a higher-level official,” Mark told CNA.
The ambassador will now report to the Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights, a change which is “a step in the right direction” and one which will hopefully gain the office a more prominent voice within the agency, Mark said.
However, “we would look to see it be elevated even further,” he said, “to be a direct report, involved in the senior-level staff meetings and that sort of thing.”
The Frank R. Wolf International Religious Freedom Act, which is the most recent version of IRFA, passed by Congress in 2016, calls for the ambassador to report directly to the Secretary of State.
And now the office will absorb other religious positions within State: the U.S. Special Representative for Religion and Global Affairs, the U.S. Special Representative to Muslim Communities, and U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of Islamic Conference, and Special Advisor for Religious Minorities in the Near East and South/Central Asia.
And by keeping the envoys and placing them within the International Religious Freedom office, State will be able to bring their expertise to the office’s mission of promoting religious freedom.
“For example, the Muslim-related envoys will strengthen the US capacity to advance religious freedom in Muslim-majority nations by, for example, presenting evidence that moving toward religious freedom will benefit Islam and their societies,” Dr. Farr said.
One of the positions – the Special Advisor for Religious Minorities in the Near East and South/Central Asia – has been hailed by advocates for Middle Eastern Christians as vital to the mission of protecting them.
Knox Thames is the current Special Advisor, but a State Department official could not provide information as to whether specific staff members would remain in positions. Wolf praised Thames’ work as Special Advisor.
The Special Advisor position was created through bills passed by the House in 2013 and by the Senate in 2014 as a way to ensure that an advocate for persecuted religious minorities in the region would exist at State as part of a “one-stop special place” for leaders of those communities to share their concerns and requests.
Initially a “Special Envoy” position, it was changed to be a “Special Adviser” role under the Obama administration. The position is extremely important, Wolf told CNA, because of the dire plight of many religious minorities in the region.
These persecuted communities, he said, would include Coptic Christians suffering deadly terror attacks in Egypt, Iraqi Christian refugees, and Yazidis who suffered genocide at the hands of Islamic State, Baha’is imprisoned in Iran, and Christians and Ahmadiyya Muslims in Pakistan.
“You can’t pick up the paper, and there’s not a story about persecution of religious minorities in the Middle East,” Wolf said. “You can’t get rid of the person who’s working on that issue at this very time. It would send a terrible message to the persecuted people in the Middle East.”
Not only must the position exist, he said, but the right person must fill it.
“Personnel is policy,” Wolf said. “You put the right person in, and things are going to happen. You put the wrong person in, and you can have nothing happen.”
The Special Envoy for anti-Semitism will reportedly be kept, but moved to the Bureau of Democracy, Rights and Labor. The Special Envoy for Sudan and South Sudan will be cut, with its functions and staff being transferred to the Bureau of African Affairs.
[…]
Carnage and the Cross
I look at the blood and devastation,
Decimation of God’s creation.
Innocence on full display,
There is no execution stay.
A body pierced by a blade,
As a life begins to fade.
I see wounds everywhere,
More than my heart can bear.
Evil on full display,
No words, nothing to say.
Not thinking of Calvary,
But killing fields for all to see.
Unborn children torn apart,
Forever stopping a beating heart.
Jesus cried two thousand years ago,
His tears continue to flow.
“When asked what he would say to Catholic president Biden, Hying responded: “I would say, Mr. President, we invite you to look at what the Church says about the dignity of life.”
What a weak statement! The CCC lists several sins that cry to heaven – murder is first on the list. Abortion is murder, the deliberate killing of the unborn. Those in the abortion business, women seeking abortion, and politicians promoting abortion (murder) are endangering their eternal salvation. Would it be too much to ask a bishop to state this, rather than just saying it is “wrong.” Lots of things are “wrong” but they don’t necessarily endanger one’s soul.
I am not singling out Bishop Hying, because what he said is typical of bishops’ statements on abortion. Not long ago I saw one state’s bishops reacting to the state’s latest pro-abortion action as “problematic.” Hard to see Saint Paul telling some of the Corinthians that what they were doing was “problematic.”
Unfortunately, the bishops’ statements on abortion are in line with their actions, or should I say their lack of actions. They refuse to enforce canon 915 by continuing to give the Eucharist to public notorious sinners. So, what are people to think?
There is a description for people who do the same thing over and over and expect a different outcome. and it is not a positive description.
I am looking for a little outrage. Is it too much to ask, for example, for the same level of outrage by the bishops over the murder of the unborn that many bishops show when our country enforces our border immigration laws?
“The CCC lists several sins that cry to heaven – murder is first on the list.”
Yes, the Catechism and the Magisterium (nn. 2033-5) identify intrinsically evil acts which are immoral under all circumstances and non-negotiable. These include: intentional killing of the innocent (n. 2273), infanticide (n. 2268), abortion (n. 2273), euthanasia (n. 2277); and sexual immorality (nn. 2352, 2353, 2356, 2357, 2370, 2380, 2381).
The Second Vatican Council makes direct reference to the binding force in all cases of universal Natural Law (n. 79), and then expands the list:
“Furthermore, whatever is opposed to life itself, such as any type of murder, genocide, abortion, euthanasia, or willful self-destruction, whatever violates the integrity of the human person, such as mutilation, torments inflicted on body or mind, attempts to coerce the will itself; whatever insults human dignity, such as subhuman living conditions, arbitrary imprisonment, deportation, slavery, prostitution, the selling of women and children; as well as disgraced working conditions, where men are treated as mere tools for profit, rather than as free and responsible persons; all these things and others of their like are infamies indeed. They poison human society, but they do more harm to those who practice them than those who suffer from the injury. Moreover, they are a supreme dishonor to the Creator” (n. 27).
QUESTION: About the appeasements of so-called “gradualism,” why doesn’t Dignitas Infinita remove Fiducia Supplicans’ drop of cyanide in the punchbowl—the crypto-blessing of “irregular” couples—as “couples” rather than as persons?
Munich in 1938. Rome in 2023?
Bishop Hying is one of the good guys. He deserves support.
One may reasonably suspect that Biden has known the Catholic position on abortion for decades and has come to reject that teaching for political, perhaps financial gain. Biden made his choice to promote and sustain abortion.
Good on him for taking a stand, but where are the rest of the US Bishops on calling out Biden and all the other self-professed “Catholics” in the political world, and where have they been the past 7 years? Aside from the very few who have shown courage, US Catholic “leadership” has been guilty of silence on so many vital issues.
Your Excellency, demand Biden’s excommunication or sit down and shut up. Those are your options.
Abortion isn’t bad because the church says it’s bad, abortion is bad because the Bible says so. God says that murder is a sin against humanity and Gods Holy nature and his Word, not because the Catholic Church says so.
Not only because the sola Scriptura Bible says so…
St. Irenaeus said it this way: “From the beginning, God had implanted in the heart of man the precepts of the natural law. Then he was content to remind him of them. This was the Decalogue [the Bible].” And St. John Paul II underlines both the baked-in natural law plus your point: “The Church is no way the author or the arbiter of this [‘moral’] norm” (n. 95).
Amen!!!
Can we please stop dancing around this issue and tell the blunt truth? Abortion is murder and as such, it’s a mortal sin. The punishment for mortal sin if never confessed and forgiven is hell. This is real simple.
Amen!!!
The Bishop, as well as all the Bishops, should be inviting Biden to either repent or to leave the Catholic Church altogether. Biden knows full well what the Church has to say about abortion and he has made it clear time-and-time again that he doesn’t care. Given that, he should be invited to honor his choice to not be Catholic and to leave the church (or made to if he doesn’t accept that invitation or the invitation to repent). We need to stop being weak about our faith, and live it the way the Lord requires us to as revealed in Scripture!