VATICAN CITY (CNS): Fighting discrimination against Jews and Muslims must not come at the expense of protecting the rights of Christians, a top Vatican official told European foreign ministers.
The Vatican’s foreign minister, Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, said discrimination and intolerance must be faced “in an objective and peaceful way”.
He made his comments on December 6 as head of the Holy See’s delegation to the annual session of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, known as OSCE, held on December 6-7 in Sofia, Bulgaria. The OSCE addresses European security issues and crisis management.
Archbishop Lajolo told participants, “Christians, who constitute the religious majority in the territory covered by the OSCE, in some countries are also affected by discriminatory norms and behaviour.”
While anti-Semitism and growing violence and discrimination against Muslims have been the focus of many European efforts, the archbishop warned that injustices against Christians must not be ignored.
In a December 3 speech to a Rome conference on religious freedom sponsored by the US Embassy to the Vatican, Archbishop Lajolo lamented that concern for Church-state separation often led to religious activities being penalised in the public sphere, such as the exclusion of religiously motivated positions from public policy debates and tax laws that do not recognise the non-profit status of the Church’s charity work.
