The Torment of Silence

Elie Wiesel declares. "Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

We must apply the following words to our victims in Iraq: "However remote to us may be the victim of torture, abuse, or mistreatment, Christians must seek to develop the moral imagination to enter into the suffering of all who are victimized. Having personally witnessed the horrors of the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, Robert A. Evans writes: "The motivation of basic human rights can never again become a matter of statistics, or theory, or strategy, or legislation, or judicial decision. It will always be, for me, the violation of the dignity of other children of God."

The broken child on the nightly news is the face of Christ.

"Human rights place a shield around people, even when (especially when) our hearts cry out for vengeance. It is precisely when we are most inclined to abandon a commitment to human rights that we most need to reaffirm that commitment."

The following summarizes one of the primary themes of this blog: "We live in a free society, a representative democracy, and while only a few may be direct perpetrators of human rights violations or even torture, we all share the responsibility because we are the citizens on whose behalf interrogators and military personnel are working. Whether we commit an offense against humanity, or simply sin by refusing to speak up for someone who is being victimized, as individuals and a society we are accountable for the indignities that are authorized and carried out by our nation. We each have responsibility to exercise our right/obligation to participate in the deliberative processes of our democracy. Those who have greater social or political power have even greater moral responsibility to act."

And again, "When torture is employed by a state, that act communicates to the world and to one’s own people that human lives are not sacred, that they are not reflections of the Creator, that they are expendable, exploitable, and disposable, and that their intrinsic value can be overridden by utilitarian arguments that trump that value. These are claims that no one who confesses Christ as Lord can accept."

Please read the whole declaration, AN EVANGELICAL DECLARATION AGAINST TORTURE:
PROTECTING HUMAN RIGHTS IN AN AGE OF TERROR, and for those of us who are Catholics, let us pray that our Church will begin to concentrate more on protecting human rights and dignity and less on persecuting theologians such as Jon Sobrino, whose whole life is an impassioned example of that struggle.