The successful conclusion in June of an
agreement on a constitution for the European Union seemed to bring to a close,
at least until the advent of the various national processes of ratification,
the vexed questions not just of the relative political weights of its members
but also of the place that might be accorded in the document's preamble to
Europe's Christian tradition and, specifically, to God.
The final wording of the text, with its
simple invocation of Europe's "cultural, religious and humanist
heritage", elicited expressions of mild disappointment from Archbishop Seán
Brady and Cardinal Desmond Connell at the absence of a specific reference to
Christianity, but the archbishop went on to express satisfaction with other
provisions of the constitution and seemed to display a willingness to see this
particular chapter ended.
An interview given by Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger, the doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, to the current
edition of Le Figaro magazine, however, suggests that powerful elements in the
Vatican are not yet ready to accept closure on this much-debated political
question.
Cardinal Ratzinger's comments, with their
explicit linkage of the idea of a Europe and European Union which is by
definition Christian,and the ambition of the Turkish republic to join that
Union, reflect an increasingly insistent trend among European conservatives
determined to call into question Turkish entry on religious grounds.
Echoing the views of Valéry Giscard
d'Estaing, French MEP Jean-Louis Bourlanges and other conservative French and
German commentators, Cardinal Ratzinger argues that Europe's Christian essence
is "a simple fact of history", indeed an "incontestable"
one. Turkey, on the other hand, "has always represented another continent
in the course of its history, in permanent contrast with Europe", a
"contrast" which over the centuries often assumed violent forms.
It can equally be argued, however, that
"Christian Europe" - if by that we mean a group of polities run
according to the principles of Christianity as outlined, for example, in the
Sermon on the Mount - has never existed. Indeed those sects, usually on the
fringes of Protestantism, which occasionally rose up to strive for such a
polity, were always marginalised, when they were not massacred.
What we did have in Europe, until the French
Revolution announced the beginning of a slow but irresistible change, were
societies in which the institutional church, particularly in Catholic
countries, enjoyed considerable wealth and prestige together with varying
degrees of political influence on a more or less autocratic ruling caste.
Nor, as it came to be increasingly challenged
by liberalism, free thought, democracy and socialism, did it give up that
influence easily. Catholics in newly unified Italy were for decades encouraged
to abstain from democratic politics by a church still smarting from the loss
of its temporal power in the Papal States.
In 1923, forced to make a choice between the
nascent Christian democracy of Father Luigi Sturzo's Popular Party and
Mussolini's fascism, the Vatican chose the latter. As late as the 1940s, Dutch
Catholics who wished to vote for their country's Labour Party were threatened
with excommunication.
Cardinal Ratzinger attributes the reluctance
of his opponents to accept the absolute identification of Europe and
Christianity to an inexplicable "self-hatred", a wilful denial of
heritage and history.
But perhaps it may spring from a broader and
cooler appreciation of that history, above all from an appreciation that the
wars and persecutions which have wracked the continent over many centuries can
often best be understood as struggles for power and wealth however
convincingly they might have been clothed in ideology, religious or secular.
Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that the Turk,
in 1683, was at the gates of Vienna, but so also has the Christian
"infidel" been at - and indeed inside - many a Muslim citadel. He
suggests that modern Turkey, instead of seeking to join Europe, should place
itself at the head of an alternative "cultural continent" of its
Arab and Muslim neighbours, a destiny which seems increasingly unlikely for a
state that is secular, non-Arab, a member of NATO and an ally of the US.
No one pretends that it will be easy to
bridge the gap between the rich, liberal and materialist West and a Middle
East which is poor, angry and often susceptible to the simplicities of a
medieval fundamentalism. Bridging it as best we can is nevertheless our most
important political task and for those of us in Europe, Turkey seems the most
obvious place to start.
Though some Christians still have difficulty
in accepting that "non-believers" have any social or cultural values
on which society can be built, a partly or even largely post-Christian Europe
has in fact created since the 1950s a community of nations enjoying
unparalleled levels of peace, security, prosperity and tolerance. It is
important that Turkey, which has made significant advances both in material
terms and in the texture of its democratic life, should not feel excluded from
that community by a spurious and anachronistic notion of Christendom.
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