Table of Contents
Fall 2003
Quick Links:
Articles in this issue
From the Editor:
Under Whatever
The Anglican Crackup
The View From
Lagos
The Case of Chaplain Yee
Instructions From the
Vatican
The Social Gospel Lays
an Egg in Alabama
God and the EU Charter
Mel Gibson, the Scribes, and the
Pharisees
Gibson and
Traditionalist Catholicism
The Religion of Country
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God and the EU Charter
by
Jean-François Mayer
Writing in the French news magazine L’Express
July 17, Bernard Guetta claimed that the “most explosive topic” in framing a
European Constitution would be whether to acknowledge Europe’s Christian
roots. “Christ,” warned Guetta, “will divide Europe.”
At a time when the European Union (EU) is
struggling to bring countries from the former Soviet bloc into its ranks,
Christ is hardly the only source of division on the continent. But the
Enlightenment anticlericalism that still runs strong in parts of Western
Europe and the presence of large numbers of Muslim immigrants throughout the
EU make the question of Europe’s Christian heritage a potent source of
tension.
From February 2002 to July 2003, the drafting
of the new Constitution was in the hands of a convention chaired by former
French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Frantic lobbying and heated
rhetoric surrounded the question of whether the Preamble, in setting forth
Brave New Europe’s fundamental philosophical and historical orientation,
should refer to Christianity and/or God?
Some Christian Democrat members of the European
Parliament proposed a nod to God along the lines of the current Polish
Constitution. Mentioning the Deity “beyond religions and denominations”
would provide, they said, a useful reminder that power cannot be exercised
only for its own sake—and also that Europe “has a memory,” as Matthias
Drobrinski put it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung October 6. In an op-ed
published last December in a number of German newspapers, Hildesheim Bishop
Josef Homeyer, the president of the Roman Catholic Commission of the
Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community, contended that mentioning
God would be “a guarantee against totalitarianisms.”
But most observers were dubious. “When it comes
to democracy, human rights and equality, God is only a recent convert,”
declared Spanish socialist politician Josep Borrell Fontelles. “God,” the
Guardian’s Ian Black pronounced May 29, “has not always been on the side
of the angels.” On October 3, Black reported that Prime Minister Tony Blair,
“a devout Christian in a deeply agnostic country, takes the view that
religion is such a difficult, divisive—and personal—issue, that it is best
not dealt with in Brussels.”
There was more support for acknowledging
Christianity. A group called the Convention of Christians for Europe,
launched in April 2002, issued a manifesto declaring that “neutrality does
not consist in denying the social dimension of the Christian conscience of
the majority of the people of Europe, but in recognizing it, together with
other religious and non-religious global conceptions with which it
dialogues.”
Opposition to any mention of Christianity was
led by the center-right French government in the name of laicité, a
concept often mistranslated as secularism but which reflects two centuries
of resistance by the French state to the once dominant Roman Catholic
Church. Writing in the November 9, 2002 issue of the newspaper Libération,
the well-known French political analyst Alain Duhamel claimed that the
recent victory of a moderate Islamic party in Turkey justified France’s
uncompromising approach: Only by firmly anchoring European constitutionalism
in laicité could Europeans eventually bring Turkey with its huge
Muslim population into the EU.
Across the channel, London Times
essayist Jonathan Meades on May 10 denounced pro-Christianity lobbying as
“essays both in the repoliticisation of the Church and in turning back the
clock to a denominationally homogeneous Europe—a Europe which doesn’t exist
but which the Vatican’s will might cause to come to pass.”
A draft of the Preamble published May 28
omitted any explicit reference to Christianity: “Drawing inspiration from
the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, which, nourished
first by the civilisations of Greece and Rome, characterised by spiritual
impulse always present in its heritage and later by the philosophical
currents of the Enlightenment, has embedded within the life of society its
perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and
inalienable rights, and of respect for law…”
This was “a victory
for the churches,” suggested Jean Quatremer in Libération May 29. It
didn’t “negate religious realities” but put them “into an historical
perspective which, Giscard hopes, will be acceptable to everybody.”
Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome are indeed the three sources of European
culture, remarked retired professor of pastoral theology Casiano Floristan
in Madrid’s El Pais May 29, but there is no need to “mention the
contribution of the Christain faith explicitly in the European Constitution”
as long as “basic values of the Christian tradition endorsed by modernity”
are present in it.
The churches themselves, however, didn’t see it
that way.
Vatican foreign minister Jean-Louis Tauran
denounced the text as the product of an “authoritarian temptation to rewrite
history.” As far as the Moscow Patriarchate was concerned, the “special
reference to the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment” revealed “an
ideological bias.” Such currents should only be mentioned, said the
Patriarchate, “along with the Christian inheritance and perhaps that of
other religions visibly present in Europe”—a riposte to Giscard d’Estaing’s
remark that Christianity could not be included without referring to Judaism
and Islam as well.
What was at stake, wrote Le Monde
religion editor Henri Tincq June 12, was the “way religions are perceived”
in today’s Europe.
After many last minute interventions and
pressures, the convention chose a minimalist solution, dropping all
references to specific historical civilizations and movements: “Drawing
inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe,
the values of which, still present in its heritage, have embedded within the
life of society the central role of the human person and his or her
inviolable and inalienable rights, and respect for law…”
This did not satisfy Greek Orthodox Archbishop
Christodoulos of Athens (who called it “a dagger in the back of European
civilization”) or several Roman Catholic prelates. But others in the
religious camp felt that sufficient progress had been made.
In a lecture at the University of Fribourg,
Switzerland on June 12, a few hours after the final draft of the Preamble
had been disclosed, an influential Italian Roman Catholic, Prof. Giovanni
Barberini, suggested that the (provisional) outcome should not be seen as a
defeat for the Roman Catholic Church and could have been half a victory:
Although Christianity was not mentioned, references to the Enlightenment had
disappeared.
Moreover, Barberini said, Article 51 of the
draft met some of the more concrete desires of Catholic Church, including
recognition of the particular church-state arrangements of each EU member
state and a promise to maintain “an open, transparent and regular dialogue”
with churches and other religious organizations. Indeed, faced with new
institutions spanning the European continent, Europe’s Christian churches
sense new opportunities as well as threats and are determined to be seen as
respected players even in a context of secularization.
In October, as an Inter Governmental Conference
(ICG) began work to finalize the draft Constitution by the end of the year,
changes in the Preamble were still possible. Although French President
Jacques Chirac warned in September that “the secular character of French
institutions does not allow them to accept a religious reference,” several
countries—primarily Italy, Spain, Ireland, and Poland (slated to joint the
EU in 2004)—continued to push for some explicit mention of Christianity.
Writing in El Mundo October 3, magistrate Jose Luis Requero insisted
that historical truth required a deeper understanding of the content of
Europe’s civilizational work than the one offered by the draft.
All in all, the Preamble has served as the
occasion for a wider debate over the place of religion in Europe. On one
side are high Enlightenment types like lawyer Jose Maria Ruiz Soroa who,
writing in El Pais July 23, denounced the return of religion
“disguised as cultural roots,” since what defines Europe as a political
community consists in “having expelled [religion] from the political sphere
forever.”
On the other side are those like the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung’s Klara Obermüller, who in a June 22 commentary wrote
that the Enlightenment had “reached its limits” and that “today one who
doesn’t want today to know more about religion is outmoded, while one who is
aware of its growing importance—for good as well as for evil—is modern.”
Europe, she continued, is “a continent whose fate…was and under many aspects
still is influenced by religion.”
Perhaps, as Anthony Bellanger philosophically put it
in Agence France Presse’s Courrier international July 18, the authors
of the draft Preamble could not have been expected to solve “the question of
God.” Although it is peacefully taking place in chanceries and conference
halls, “there is,” Luc de Barochez commented in Le Figaro October 6,
“a war of religion in 21st-century Europe.”
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