Session of the Council on Human Rights
United Nations – Geneva, March 27, 2009
Freedom of Religions and Minorities
Fraternite Notre Dame, founded in 1977 by Most Reverend Bishop Jean Marie Roger Kozik, is made of religious friars and nuns, missionaries at the service of the most destitute around the world, with no distinction of race, class, sex or creed.
Through a traditional Catholic religious Order founded in France, our Superior and Founder wanted to work in France because poverty and precariousness do bring a number of exclusions in this country as well.
Our Founder and his Congregation had to leave for the USA into exile and work there because of this lack of religious freedom in France. In fact the American Nation found its origins with immigrants who had to flee persecutions related to religion or of other kinds.
Who could think, in this the 21st century that French Europeans still migrate to the United States of America because of religious persecutions?
In France, all religions considered together, we experience the Inquisition again, an aggressive, religious and secular inquisition.
Fraternite Notre Dame’s Founder, along with its members, can testify to many typical facts of open or sly religious persecutions, raging against minorities in France:
Impossibility to teach the children according to the principles of Christian morals, to pay visits to elderly persons or prisoners; impossibility to run soup kitchens or relief services to benefit the less fortunate free of charge.
All what we could have offered to France could not be actually implemented because of persecutions, not necessarily coming from atheists, but rather from the Catholic clergy.
False campaigns in the press; pressure, searches, disinformation; pressure again exerted on the families of our religious priests, friars and nuns.
Would these attacks come from people hostile to religion, perhaps we could have understood that, but coming from members of the Roman Catholic Church, that is, from our very brethren in the faith, this is utterly scandalous.
There is one question that often comes back: why are you not recognized? That is a simple thing: on our way, we meet with certain sectarian churchmen from the Roman Catholic hierarchy.
Let us remember what a few churchmen asked us, some 20 years ago, for us to be recognized: they did not ask if we had the Catholic faith, but how large was our property! And because our possessions where not sufficient to their eyes, the recognition of our Order could never become a reality.
How strange it is to recognize a bishop who denies the death of a multitude of Jews in the gas chambers, and who refuse to acknowledge the 2nd Vatican Council in its entirety!
We leave these few remarks as good food for thoughts to all those who always ask us the question mentioned above.
Now, a French organization called the ADEFI, supported by the French Catholic Church, enlisted Fraternite Notre Dame in the group called ‘sects’, even though we are nothing else than convinced Christians, simply attempting to help our neighbors.
We come from every country, every walk of life, every culture, and we freely chose to give our lives to the service of Christ in order to help others, just like thousands of religious Priests, Sisters and Brothers have done before us, during the 20 centuries of Christianity that elapsed.
We work in the field, making no differences whatsoever between religions: in Asia, Africa, North America as well as South America. Thus, Fraternite Notre Dame’s Founder started charitable works in all these places, to relieve material and moral poverty in such countries.
Thousands of people can enjoy each day a decent family meal at Fraternite Notre Dame’s; poor children get to go to school and can hope they will play a professional role in society; some adults can avoid an early death thanks to the medical care that we provide; elderly persons can get their various needs properly met, while families are housed decently again.
All these people can achieve a better quality of life, and a basic level of social recognition. These people, usually despised, humiliated, rejected by society can finally attain a social status and recover their human dignity.
In various countries, public officials encourage and recognize the Founder of Fraternite Notre Dame, because his initiatives favor social and economical stability in these countries.
Now, in France, certain public officials, often connected with church representatives, still continue to reject us and calumniate the founder of Fraternite Notre Dame through the press. Some others however, showing a greater level of understanding and tolerance, act differently, but they usually have a hard time to get their point through.
This is a shameful reality for France. Recognized and appreciated by public officials in many countries, including the USA and other nations, the Founder of our Order still continues to be humiliated, despised and rejected in his own country of origin: France.
When reading of religious persecutions in the past centuries, we could think that such breaches to human rights are now done with in France, a country called democratic, which once was the Eldest Daughter of the Church, that is, a model to be imitated.
But this is not the case. We have been suffering from the situation for years, and nothing has changed. This state of mind has become a matter of fact, and it can but choke the development of a country that deprives itself of valuable riches.
Religion may be reduced to Pharisaic practices, formalism, after being deprived of her very marrow, after having been robbed of her very dynamism, which was charity.
Thus, the State shrinks down to remain but a rigid framework, shaping the outline of a sectarian society, watching and condemning all what does not fall into the line of its official thinking.
A society devoid of charity is really heading to its own ruin.
Strange is our current society, where the examples given to the youth are: violence, sexual disorders, lies, denouncement, crime and suicide.
Strange society, where Christian teachers are censured, and where laxity in education, amoral as well as irreligious, is fostered, while giving growth to a dangerous sectarianism.
Strange society, where a sense of mutual aid, politeness, respect for the knowledge of elders, of our moral values, or Christian virtues, are no longer developed.
Strange society, where, in primary schools, games of strangulations happen that kill the children, and they are even reenacted at home.
Strange society, where the children are perverted at the earliest age through the Internet, or simply because so called ‘responsible adults’, supposed to give them a good example, are scandalizing the little.
Strange society, where certain churchmen condemn religious minorities such as ours, while they should rather be men of example, but they lead scandalous lives, according to what their very victims themselves have reported.
There is a well-known saying that goes: ‘we are reaping what we sowed’.
We thank the Council on Human Rights for having allowed us to speak on the oppression of Religious Minorities in France. We alert this official body on such a painful situation, counting with a better future and hoping that one day, we might find on our way some men and women of goodwill who kindly agree to understand the work of Fraternite Notre Dame. Thank you.