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Fides et Libertas

The Journal of the International Religious Liberty Association
1998 Fides et Libertas

Religious Liberty:

Essential to the Dignity of Humanity and the Preservation of Peace

Carlos Saul Menem

President of Argentina

Buenos Aires

                The Republic of Argentina is justifiably proud of its tradition of respect for religious liberty. Our Constitution includes freedom of worship among its fundamental principles because its authors understood that the immigrants they aspired to attract would need to forge a society in which the first right to be respected would be to worship God free from coercion and discrimination.

                Thus, without regard to religious beliefs, men and women of Argentina have reached the highest responsibilities in the world of science, culture, labor, and politics. Certainly there have been temptations to authoritarian tendencies, but such represented phenomena foreign to authentic Argentine sensibility.

                Now we are concluding a century marked by tremendous contrasts, including religious liberty. Constitutions have affirmed human rights--religious liberty in particular. International organizations have done the same in the conviction that the violation of the rights of the person cannot be considered an internal question for the states alone.  Such violations affect the peace of the world. The principal religious confessions, including the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with the Second Vatican Council, have committed themselves to follow the road of dialogue and reconciliation, of recognition of the rights of those professing other beliefs.

                At the same time, our century has witnessed explosions of hate and intolerance, and the negation of the right of individuals and communities to express and to transmit their faith.

                Let me emphasize that a pluralistic society cannot and should not be indifferent to religious and moral values.  Without these values the human being is at sea and loses the meaning of his or her existence, ending up a prisoner of self. When you build not on pluralism, but rather on an ethical relativism, on the reduction of that which is sacred to the person, you opt for a negative kind of secularism instead of the positive. From the moment of human conception, this process threatens life itself. New gods acquire a religious dimension: efficiency at whatever cost, consumerism, the drug culture, dehumanized sex. We have observed this in our time.

                Finally, I would underline the importance of peoples and governments to assume with renewed conviction the defense and promotion of religious liberty as essential to the dignity of the human persona and for peace in the world on the verge of a new millennium.

                Translated from the Spanish and condensed from President Menem’s message to the IRLA’s Fourth World Congress on Religious Liberty, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1997.

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