ICC Note:
“Myanmar’s isn’t a Vatican soap opera, but a suffering church.” Since December 8, 2016, any news involving Myanmar – otherwise known as Burma – circles around a showdown between the Knights of Malta and the Vatican under Pope Francis. However, these events overshadow Myanmar’s true issue: Christian persecution. As a minority, ever-increasing Buddhist radicals attack Myanmar’s Christian population, rescinding sixty plus churches and instigating a Christian migration into China. “Surely, at some point, that story deserves our attention too.”
02/09/2017 Burma (Crux Now) – One perennially frustrating dynamic of Western attention spans is that we tend to focus on other people and places only when they intersect with our concerns, not theirs. Myanmar, also known as Burma, is currently a good example of the point.
It’s a southeastern Asian nation of roughly 53 million people, around 80 percent of whom are Buddhist but with important Christian and Muslim minorities. Two stories out of Myanmar recently have obvious Catholic relevance, and it’s depressing to contemplate which one has had, by far, the greater traction in the West.
The first pivots on the Knights of Malta, and a showdown between the order and the Vatican under Pope Francis.
The drama began on Dec. 8, 2016, when the order decided to oust Albrecht von Boeselager, the group’s chancellor. Since then, Pope Francis announced the creation of a panel to look into the situation, the Knights initially rejected its authority due to their status as a sovereign state, and the Vatican reaffirmed its determination to forge ahead.
Shortly thereafter Francis asked Grand Master Fra’ Matthew Festing to resign, declared Festing’s recent acts of governance “null,” and said he would appoint his own overseer. Last Saturday the Sovereign Council of the order accepted Festing’s resignation and vowed to cooperate with the pope’s intervention.
The most-ventured explanation for why von Boeselager was dumped is that on his watch, a charitable program run by the Knights became involved in a condom-distribution scheme in Myanmar. Do an internet search for “Catholic” and “Myanmar” and you’ll be off the races, drawn into discussions about tensions in the Church pivoting on the Pope Francis v. Cardinal Raymond Burke, progressives v. conservatives, Germans v. Anglo-Saxons and Italians, etc.
By now the affair has been widely chronicled, and doesn’t require additional comment. For our purposes, the point is that Myanmar functions in this setting as a backdrop to a story in which Westerners are the lead actors.
On the other hand, there’s another story of obvious Catholic interest right now in which Myanmar isn’t a bit player but the main protagonist.
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