All Things Catholic

Beyond any doubt, religious freedom has emerged as the premier social and political concern of the Catholic church in the early 21st century. Pope Benedict XVI offered confirmation as recently as last Saturday, during his trip to Lebanon.

Speaking to politicians, diplomats and religious leaders (including representatives of all four major branches of Islam in Lebanon -- Sunni, Shi'ite, Druze and Alawite), the pope insisted that "religious freedom is the basic right on which many others depend."

Most people, most of the time, are fundamentally decent. Hence if they knew that there's a minority facing an epidemic of persecution -- a staggering total of 150,000 martyrs every year, meaning 17 deaths every hour -- there would almost certainly be a groundswell of moral and political outrage.

"Be careful what you wish for," as the saying goes, "because you will surely get it." In light of a couple of recent Vatican stories, the corollary also seems to apply: Be careful what you try to avoid, because it might actually be good for you.

A stringent European money laundering exam in July and a federal court ruling in Oregon this week both make the point.

Ideological labels for the church are notoriously ill-fitting, but if we're going to use them, I prefer the European taxonomy of "left, center-left, center-right, and right" to the American convention of "liberals, moderates and conservatives." In my experience, most self-described moderates actually lean one way or the other, but their defining trait is a preference for consensus.

Pope Benedict XVI will travel to Lebanon on Sept. 14-16, marking his first visit to the Middle East since the Arab Spring and his fourth overall to the region (after Turkey in 2006, the Holy Land in 2009 and Cyprus in 2010). It's also the closest he's likely to get to the current chaos in Syria.