EUROPE UNDER CHRIST

Introduction to the course

Two years ago, as part of a general course of lectures on Christian teaching in the months leading up to the General Election, I gave a talk Christians and Europe which attempted to show why Christians, and Roman Catholics in particular, should be enthusiastic supporters of European unity and integration, because of our distinctive history in these islands and the relationship between the ideals of the European Union and the teaching of the Catholic Church. This message has been reiterated in a number of articles in our parish newsletter, and occasionally in homilies at Mass, and it seemed right this year to devote the whole of our Lent course to this theme.

I took the decision to do this in October last year for a number of reasons. First, we tried in 2001 to cover the whole topic in one lecture, so it would be good to go into the different sides of the subject in more detail; second, a number of those specific sides have developed since the earlier talk - for example, the Euro is now a visible currency in most of the rest of the EU, and sooner or later there will be a referendum in this country about it; third, the current drift to war with Iraq has shown up some key points of tension in the relationship between Britain and our partners in Europe - similarly a clear decision has now been taken about the EU's enlargement; and finally, we celebrate this year the thirtieth anniversary of Britain and Ireland joining the EEC.

This is not a course about politics: it is about the Christian faith, deepening our knowledge and love of God, and about God has revealed to to us of how we should live. We spend quite a lot of time in this parish trying to help people understand that 'nothing is beyond the scope of faith' as our bishops put it in their 1996 document The Common Good. The things we will be examining about this country's place in Europe, and the future of Europe, go to the heart of our Christian faith; we will also be trying to deepen a shared European spirituality, as befits a parish dedicated to a fine Englishman, an Archbishop of Canterbury who died in the midst of France and became a very popular saint for centuries in that region, Edmund Rich, a symbol of the European Christian of the Middle Ages. Europe is not simply or even primarily a political issue - it is a moral and spiritual one. The issue of Europe, moreover, also links together so many other moral and political issues which are important to Catholics, some of which we looked at two years ago, such as social policy, employment rights, nuclear weapons, the sanctity of life, national identity, the just treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and many others, and we will try to refer to these as well. The more I have worked on this course, the more I have realised that Europe is a catalyst and a symbol of so much of what Christian teaching is about.

In the first lecture tonight we will be thinking about the soul of Europe, looking again at the roots of the European ideal in Catholic teaching and the experience of thousands in the Second World War, at the roots of anti-Europeanism in Britain in historic anti-Catholicism, and the efforts going on this year to remind all Europeans of our shared religious heritage in the European Convention negotiations to devise a constitution for the EU. In the second talk we will look more closely at what we mean by European integration, and why we should be proud and assertive about it, particularly in relation to the single European currency and what will surely be the most important political decision facing this country in our generation: whether or not we should join it. When this course was first conceived it seemed rather more likely than it does now that there would soon be a referendum on the Euro, but it will happen sooner or later. Next we will look at the heritage of holiness we share through the lives of Europe's saints - the six patron saints designated for this continent by Pope John Paul II, and other men and women of holiness, including our own St Edmund Rich, who teach us something of what Europe can be, and who can help us deepen a common and integrated spiritual identity. The enlargement of the EU to include a number of new nations in Eastern and Southern Europe will in the next two years change radically the nature of the community. This encompassing of east and west is close to the Holy Father's heart, and we should also be positive about this enlargement because many of these nations are Catholic - rather more so than most of western Europe. Popular resistance to the enlargement has been grounded in selfishness and xenophobia, so it is important that Christians reflect on its importance. Finally we will look at Europe's place in the world in the present international crisis, and make critical observations about the part our own country is playing in this - and at the witness Christians need to make. The primary purpose of the programme is to instil confidence. I also think, as I said two years ago, that part of the problem is that people simply don't know much about the history and principles of the movement for European unity - so we are also about enlarging our knowledge, the history of the lifetimes of most of us. Two years ago I dedicated my talk on Europe to the memory of Tony Kinch, whom many of us remember fondly. A few months later Barbara kindly let me have many of his books on Europe, which I have used extensively this year, so I am happy to dedicate the whole course to him. He was a fine Catholic European and an outstanding member of this parish community: may he rest in peace. I doubt if he would agree with everything I am likely to say, but I feel he would agree with most of it.

The Soul of Europe

You may be able to recall life in the second half of the 1940s, after the end of the Second World War. Life in Britain was hard in many ways - death and bereavement, homelessness, other effects of the Blitz, poverty and deprivation, rationing. But Britain had been one of the victors in the war, at times against all odds, and had remained free from invasion or occupation by the Nazis: we all know perfectly well that in the whole of mainland Europe outside the neutral countries (Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal) the picture was immeasurably worse. The collapse of civil institutions in many places, widespread poverty, the destruction of industry and agriculture, vast numbers of refugees - the list is endless. You may have served in the armed forces or known others who would have tried in the immediate aftermath to alleviate the sufferings of thousands. When we look at the history of European unity it is essential to remember what most of Europe looked like in the late 1940s. The Christian churches in Europe, and our Roman Catholic Church in particular as the largest church in Europe, was deeply engaged in relief efforts all over the continent - much of our contemporary witness on behalf of the poorest people in the world, and on behalf of refugees, has its roots in the post-war years. It is also true that the depth of horror at the evil of war which is now a part of Catholic identity gets much of its inspiration from these years. Listen to these words from a young Polish priest studying in Rome at that time:

'My experience at the Belgian college was subsequently broadened through direct contact not only with Belgium itself, but also with France and Holland...I was able to visit these countries during the summer holiday of 1947. There I came to appreciate the broader European context. From different and complementary angles, I was coming to an even greater appreciation of Western Europe: the Europe of the post-war period, a Europe of splendid Gothic cathedrals and yet a Europe threatened by increasing secularisation. I understood the challenge that this posed to the Church ...' (Pope John Paul II, Gift and Mystery [London: Doubleday, 1997], pp. 55-6)

In addition, of course, there was the fear - indeed the expectation - that it was all going to start again, at least from March 1948. Europe was rapidly divided down the middle, an 'iron curtain from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic', as Churchill memorably put it. The fear of communists taking over in Greece, Italy and even France was always real, and at this time Catholics were among those who feared this most of all. While this fear led quickly to the formation of a military alliance, NATO, and to the further development of fearsome and immoral weapons of mass destruction, the fear also engendered a determination to secure democratic structures in the countries not occupied by the Soviet Union during the war, and a resolve that the western European democratic countries should co-operate and work together, and not get caught up once again in historical rivalries.

The key to understanding this resolve lies in the two countries at the centre of western Europe - France and West Germany. Conflict between France and most of Germany had been at the heart of European wars since the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century, and in spite of the threat of communism there was no reason to believe after the war that a reconstructed Germany might once again become a threat to France, which is why many among the allies towards the end of the war wanted to keep the country divided into small units.

Wars are always bound up with economic rivalry, and many historians see this as the heart of the problem between France and Germany. This was centred on what you need to make weapons of war - steel, and the coal you need to make steel. This was mined and made in an area over which the two countries had fought for a century, the Ruhr/Rhineland and Alsace-Lorraine. While much of this was devastated in the war, it needed to be reconstructed: would the rivalry resume? During the war some French politicians and statesmen had urged the creation of an enlarged state of Lorraine, distinct from Germany (and France).

Before we look again at what was done about this, I want to consider three men, all Catholics (two of them devout Catholics) who were responsible for the solution to the problem - Monnet, Schuman and Adenauer.

Known as the 'Father of Europe' and declared the first (and only) 'honorary citizen of Europe' in 1976 (three years before his death at the age of 90), Jean Monnet was one of the most exceptional men of the 20th century. Monnet was a brandy heir and salesman from Cognac; as a young man he was involved, in the First World War, in the rather belated efforts by the allies to co-ordinate military and civil supplies in the common effort against the Germans, - he helped set up at the end of 1917 the Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC). He was never an elected a politician - rather he was a fixer behind the scenes, an administrator - indeed this role has sometimes created a negative view of him. And yet public life is not the exclusive preserve of the elected, and Monnet's career shows how people behind the scenes often get things done. In the Second World War, just before the fall of France in 1940, Monnet was responsible for the last-ditch attempt Churchill made to keep France in the war, the proposal to bring about a total political and economic union of France and Britain (on this, in addition to the Monnet biography, Churchill's History of the Second World War, volume II (Their Finest Hour) (London: Cassell 1949), pp. 180ff.). Hugo Young describes him thus:

'Elbow gripper, shoulder-tapper, a wanderer with a fat address-book, he was also a man of action, determined to harness a vision, which anyone might have, to the means of advancing it in the real world, which the average visionary tended to neglect'. (This Blessed Plot [London: Macmillan, 1998] p.47)

There is a lot more one could say about Monnet's life, but what is important is this: his experience of trying to solve enormous problems in enabling his country to fight a modern war showed him that what was necessary above all was the closest co-operation and integration of decision-making between allies. The failure to do so almost cost the allies the Great War, and certainly contributed towards France being knocked out in the second war. When the time came to rebuild Europe, co-operation and integration were necessary. The two remaining men I want to look at were from the areas I spoke of earlier- the Rhineland and Lorraine - Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer. Schuman was from Lorraine, the province constantly passed back and forth between France and Germany from 1870 to 1945. French by descent, he did not become a Frenchman until the end of the Great war, at the age of 32 - he had been a conscript in the German army. This man was on to become Foreign Minister and Prime Minister of France, and he understood the coal and steel which were produced in Lorraine and which had made it so desirable to both nations. Adenauer, the post-war first leader of the CDU and of the new Federal Republic, was from the Rhineland - like Schuman, he had lived all his life in the shadow of Franco-German conflict. These two men, from neighbouring areas which produced the same raw materials, were crucial in the rebuilding of post war Europe.

Another thing they shared (with Monnet, to a much lesser extent) was commitment to the Catholic Church and its teachings. Schuman in particular was very devout, almost monastic, well-versed in theology and philosophy - they were men who in the midst of war and conflict had tried in the 30s to pursue the Church's vision, enunciated by Pope Pius XI and others, of how society should be ordered. An example of how this became clear after the war is the place of trade unions in most mainland European states, reflecting Catholic teaching since Pope Leo XIII in the 1890s. The Italian leader Alcide Di Gaspari was part of the same Christian Democrat tradition, encapsulated in the aspirations of Italy's 1947 republican constitution (although Italian he was a German speaker and had grown up in the Austrian part of Italy). Part of the answer these serious Catholic politicians had to the menace of Communism after the war, which was particularly real in France and Italy, was to stress the need for co-operation in society, and of good welfare policies funded by taxation, in line with Catholic social teaching.

The first big fruit of this common view was the Schuman plan (named after him but essentially conceived by Monnet) in 1950. The reason we mark in our churches Europe Day each year on 9 May, is that it was on this day that it all began - France and Germany set up a joint 'High Authority' to run the base materials of their economies, the production, pricing and selling of coal and steel. They surrendered sovereignty voluntarily in order to work together - the European Coal and Steel Community set up by 1952 and including Italy, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg was the fruit of this plan and vision. The subsequent development of the ECSC into the EEC by the time of the Treaty of Rome in 1958 is well documented; we need to remember that the original vision aiming at political union and common defence, faded so that the EEC began by being primarily economic - why? Because of national pride, the turbulence in France in the lat 1950s, and fear of any armed alliance involving Germany. The first thing to remember is what people were doing: resolving to give up a measure of what they prized most highly - independence and sovereignty, to find a new way of working together in the interests of peace and stability. The second thing is to know why they did it - because of what they experienced, and because the key players were steeped in the life and teachings of the Catholic Church.

Europe and key tenets of Catholic social teaching

What is the deeper meaning of what was done? It is possible to be over-idealistic about the original vision of the founding fathers of European institutions in the 1950s. Many studies (e.g. Desmond Dinan, Ever Closer Union) have pointed out that much was done in the teeth of opposition from many of the nation states concerned: arguably France only agreed to integrate coal and steel production with West Germany when it became clear that Britain and America were committed to a German economic revival, rather than keeping the country subservient and divided, as most French people wanted in the late 1940s. Much of the original vision of political union was lost by the time of the Messina conference and the run-up to the Treaty of Rome - much of this would not be fulfilled until the 1990s, and then in a restricted form. We have also seen how moves for a common European Defence community were killed off earlier on, and are still a long way from fruition. At the same time many argue that a European leader whom we often see as a nationalist (who delayed closer union by at least a decade) rather than a prophet of unity and integration, Charles De Gaulle, was actually responsible for one of the European policies which has had most practical effect on people's lives, the Common Agricultural Policy.

All writers agree that a lot of the original vision of men like Monnet and Schuman has been lost. In Church statements the Pope and many others have repeatedly reminded us that European unity has to be about more than economics. At the same time Catholic teaching has specific things to say about economic and social life. I want to look again at the ways in which the vision of European unity reflects these teachings

(i) Solidarity

On the eve of the Second World War Pope Pius XII expressed what this was about, just after he was elected Pope:

'An error which is today abundantly widespread is disregard for the law of human solidarity and charity, dictated and imposed both by our common origin and by equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to. This law is sealed by the sacrifice of redemption offered by Jesus Christ on the altar of the Cross to his heavenly Father, on behalf of sinful humanity.' (Letter Summi Pontificatus, AAS 31 [1939], 423ff. = Catechism 1939)

Nationalism, and the tendency towards conflict and division on grounds of nation or race, are inconsistent with the Christian doctrine of creation - we were all created equal by God, and Christ died for us all on the Cross. The Church had experienced in the wars of the 20th century the worst that nationalism could do, and at times had been compromised by association with it: at the heart of the European vision is the belief that there has to be a better way of ordering human affairs. Just as this led to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and the founding of the UN, so it was that moves towards co-operation and integration were grounded in Christian teaching. Solidarity in international affairs is about nations not being motivated by narrow self-interest, but by a desire to serve the common good, to work together rather than compete with one another. This was a revolutionary theory in international relations in the 1950s and it still is: be on your guard against people who talk about 'enlightened self-interest' - there is no such thing! As the Catechism puts it:

'Socio-economic problems can be resolved only with the help of all forms of solidarity: solidarity of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples. International solidarity is a requirement of the moral order; world peace depends in part upon this.' (1941)

In 1987 the present Holy Father wrote a letter which explores the concept of solidarity, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, which we looked at in a lecture a few years ago. For nations to work together in common is a moral requirement. When the ECSC was set up, the original nations somewhat haltingly decided to pool their sovereignty and resources in the interests of a common interest and stability. It was Britain which decided at the outset that this was an unwarranted restriction on independence, and that it wouldn't work; British policy took the same view at later stages, but it was consistently proved wrong and Britain eventually joined the EEC in 1973. Solidarity is also about helping the poor: the establishment of VAT in 1967 raised revenues which have been used to channel resources to the poorest regions of the community - the same material effects can be seen in the work of the European Social Fund and the European Development Fund. Similarly, for all its faults (frequently criticised by Catholic aid and development agencies), the much derided Common Agricultural Policy has at least for the first time in history eradicated starvation in western Europe. At the time when Britain and Ireland joined the community thirty years ago, many on the political left were opposed to British membership because it was seen as a 'rich man's club'. However, if this were true, it has certainly ceased to be the case as the community has expanded to include the Iberian peninsula and Greece, and (as we shall see later on in the course) this will happen more. We are entitled to be concerned at the reports this week that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, is proposing drastic cuts in contributions to the regional fund - for which he has been praised by right-wing, anti-European newspapers. In our final talk we will look at some worldwide policies of the EU which conflict with Catholic teaching.

The key concept of solidarity is also furthered in Europe by provisions in the 'Social Chapter' of the 1993 Maastricht treaty with regard to the rights of men and women at work, and the recognition in the union of the place of Trade Unions. This reflects too the teaching of the Catholic Church since Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum. As the distinguished journalist Will Hutton (who is not a Catholic) points out in his book The World We're In (London: Little, Brown, 2002; see especially pp.63ff. on the history of 'social Catholicism), the way in which the free market is regulated in most of Europe, the ways in which workers' rights are protected by law, and much of the welfare state provision are partly a legacy of Catholic social teaching. We will look in our final lecture at how this contrasts with north American models, and at the uncomfortable position occupied by Britain, but it is clear tonight that much of the inspiration for what has happened comes from Catholic teaching. It is, of course, under threat: I heard recently on the radio of controversial efforts (in the name of the 'market') in Germany to lift restrictions on Sunday trading, just as has happened here. If you want to see what happens to a society when it forgets Christian teaching about work and recreation, just look at what has happened to the English Sunday.

I think I welcomed two years' ago the Blair Government's accession to the social chapter, but much of its legislation has been ungenerous and grudging compared to the rest of Europe, still influenced by views in our society which resent market regulation and which resent the influence of the European Union. From the point of the Catholic Church, this is unfortunate. The whole concept of solidarity helps us understand why the European issue elucidates Catholic teaching, as our bishops saw clearly six years ago in The Common Good;

'Solidarity is expressed at many levels - family, neighbourhood, region, nation, the continent itself, and the whole planet. Local loyalties and commitments are important and should be fostered, and they should not be set in opposition to these wider expressions of solidarity. It is possible to be both British and European.' (100)

(ii) Subsidiarity

This key concept in Catholic teaching, first expanded in Pope Pius XI's encyclical letter in 1931 Quadragesimo Anno urges on societies the need to keep as much decision-making as possible at the level closest to the people concerned.

'It is an injustice and at the same time a grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater or higher association what lesser and subordinate organisations can do.'

The Pope's priority at the time, in the face of growing state power in Communist and Fascist countries, was to safeguard and develop smaller units - small communities, guilds, unions. Our bishops in The Common Good welcomed the fact that the Major Government got references to the principle of subsidiarity written into the Maastricht Treaty; but there is some evidence that it means different things to different people. For some (e.g. the Major Government) it seems often to have been a way of defending national interests against the institutions of the EU, particularly the Commission, but it seems to me that this rather misses the point. When applied to international affairs, subsidiarity has been used by Bd John XXIII (Pacem in Terris 140-141), Paul VI (Populorum Progressio 78) and John Paul II (Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 21, 26) to call for the settling of problems and disputes by international structures and authorities.

Similarly, what it has come to mean in the EU has been to strengthen both smaller regions within traditional nation-states and smaller nation states themselves. Listen to this analysis of the EU by the historian Norman Davies in his book about this country (The Isles [London: Macmillan, 1999]):

'The most positive aspect of the EU is rarely noticed - it gives a place in the sun to Europe's smaller and middle-sized nations. Economics were never at the top of the agenda of the fathers of the European movement. It was always a means to a higher end. It was the mean of forging a prosperous community in which all member states, both large and small, could live in peace. For this reason, the European ideal is despised by those who wish to hang on to the vestiges of a superior status and of national domination. In the old European jungle of sovereign states, an independent Scotland or an independent Wales, or even an independent England, would have been vulnerable creatures living precariously among larger predators. But the jungle has been banished. Under the umbrella of the European Union, a 'Scotland-in-Europe, a 'Wales-in-Europe and an 'England-in-Europe' have every chance of doing as well as an 'Ireland-in-Europe.' No one seems to notice that the richest and most satisfied country in Europe is Luxembourg. It is a great pity that the British people, having won the Second World War (as they think) have largely forgotten what caused it. In the 1930s, Europe was a continent of independent sovereign states which today's Eurosceptics so strangely admire. And it was a bear garden..' (pp.882-3)

We will be able to look at this again in our fourth lecture on expansion; but it seems so clear to me that this reality expresses so clearly some of the way in which Europe has been able to live out the principle of subsidiarity, but of course it is not complete. In the 1980s, in the run-up to the Maastricht treaty, efforts were made by the EU commission to give smaller regions and localities a greater sense of involvement in how the community is run. This led to the Committee of the Regions. National governments have limited this body's powers, but we can see how closer integration is helping decentralisation in the nation states themselves, particularly in Spain, Italy, France and Britain. In their 1996 document The Common Good our bishops said this:

'The principle of subsidiarity applies particularly to Britain's relations with the European Union, especially the extent to which social, financial and monetary decisions ought to be made at European Union level or national level, or devolved further to regional or local assemblies. There may well be legitimate differences over which arrangements are most likely to respect the principles of solidarity and subsidiarity, and promote the European common good. But those principles cannot be set aside in this current debate.' (101)

Regionalism within Europe, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, will gradually make the old nation state in Europe less important, and this fits in well with Catholic history. The development of the nation state in late medieval Europe, even in Catholic areas, was very much about challenging the power of a supra-national Church, and sundered the spiritual unity of the continent. The history of the Catholic community in this country in penal times makes this even clearer: Catholicism had to be kept alive through links, surpassing national boundaries, with the rest of Europe - priests had to be trained abroad, young Catholics were sent abroad to school; all this backed the charge that Catholics were traitors. Catholic culture flowed in the opposite direction from the rise of the nation-state. For our forbears, there was a higher loyalty. Many of the leaders of the Church in this land still have roots elsewhere in Europe.

Just think for a moment of the religious orders which have been so important since 1850: the Virgo Fidelis convent in Norwood, so much part of the history of this diocese; our own Handmaids of the Sacred Heart and Sisters of St Peter Claver. All these orders are a testimony themselves to the unity of Europe for Christians. When we add this picture to our knowledge of how far the Catholic community in England has been shaped by immigration from Ireland and the rest of Europe, we can see again how Catholic history is bound up with consciousness of being part of Europe. Indeed, looking at Ireland ought to give us confidence; although prosperity has brought problems and may well have peaked, it is so obvious that Ireland as a small country with an uneasy historical relationship with Britain has flourished as part of the European Union. The first Nice referendum result might have challenged this picture, but overall you would be hard pressed to show that Irish people have a problem with Europe and are at home with the ideals which we have examined. It is also the case that greater integration will bring down the border and play a big part in eventually solving the problem of Northern Ireland, especially as important cross-community initiatives have been generously supported by EU money.

Anti-Europe = Anti-Catholic

Two years ago I also considered how opposition from the 1950s to Britain getting involved in the new European institutions was related to historic anti-Catholicism. Hugo Young again on the post-war Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, and others:

'For the British, the Catholic nature of 'Europe' was a generous source of prejudice against it, adding to the others. Britain in 1950 was still an emphatically Protestant country, in which Catholicism was something foreign and therefore suspect... Anti-Catholic prejudice was instinctive, and Ernest Bevin was one who exhibited it. Gladwyn Jebb records a scene on a journey with Mr and Mrs Bevin: 'The train was rather full and people often went by, including from time to time a Catholic priest in a soutane. Whenever this happened Mr and Mrs Bevin became uneasy and Mr Bevin muttered "black crow". I understood that he believed that Catholic priests brought bad luck.' (p.50)

Bevin played a key role in keeping Britain out of the negotiations leading to the ECSC; Young also points to anti-Catholicism in Labour figures rising then, such as Denis Healey. (A rather different picture is given by Healey himself in The Time of My Life - many of his constituents in Leeds were Catholics) and Kenneth Younger, and more recently to the instinctive suspicion of Catholicism on the part of Margaret Thatcher:

'Catholic social teaching, if not the threat of papal conspiracy, was a menace to the project of a leader bent on liberal market economics.' (p.310)

Of course, there are paradoxical figures, Catholics who are 'Eurosceptics' such as the famous opponent of the Maastricht treaty, William Cash, the journalists Rees-Mogg, Moore and Johnson (some would add the Leader of the Opposition, Iain Duncan Smith, if he is indeed a Catholic). It is sometimes pointed out that some of these men are converts, and some too were more pro-European in earlier life. Of course, I referred at the end of my last talk to the Paisleyite view that the EU is all a papist conspiracy, and that the stars on the European flag are the stars on Our Lady's crown.

God in the European constitution

In 1996 our bishops wrote this:

'The history of the whole continent is intimately bound up with the history of Christianity. Although all European states are pluralist societies, the churches still have a crucial role in safeguarding the moral and spiritual values which gave Europe its soul. Those values, which Christians share with other faiths, are essential if the continent is to regain its moral health and spiritual vitality.' (The Common Good 99)

We will examine some of what this means in the light of EU expansion in three weeks' time, but it is very important now because an international Convention on the Future of Europe, chaired by the former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaign, is in the process of drawing up a new constitution for the European Union, a project, of course, which some politicians in this country oppose in itself. The Catholic Church has made clear major concerns which will be debated in the coming months; on the convention the former Taoiseach John Bruton is actively representing the Catholic viewpoint. The Church's view is being made clear by the Holy Father himself, the Secretariat of State and COMECE (The Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Community). The Pope said last month,

'It has been asked that in the future Constitutional Treaty of the European Union there be room for the common patrimony of the East and the West. Such a reference would take nothing away from the appropriate secular character of the political structures, but on the contrary, would help to preserve the continent from the double risk of ideological secularism and sectarian fundamentalism. United by their values and their histories, European peoples can fully carry out their role in the promotion of justice and peace in the whole world...' (L'Osservatore Romano 19.2.03)

What he means is the Christian roots of Europe and the common religious heritage of the European peoples. The first draft of the first 15 articles, unveiled last month, do not contain this - or any reference to God. The Holy See is also concerned at the absence of reference to the juridcial recognition of churches and faith communities, and to the need for their freedoms and rights to be upheld.

The details of the discussions and the divisions over this are given in The Tablet, 15.2.03. It is secularised states of western Europe, led by France and Spain , who are opposed to the inclusion of God. COMECE has worked closely with Protestant, Anglican and Orthodox bodies all over Europe to try and influence the next draft, and it is important that we are aware of what is happening and pray that Europe does not lose sight of its soul or its religious roots. Disturbingly, it shows how some of the ideals of the 1950s have been lost - President Chirac and the Spanish Prime Minister Aznar are not steeped in Catholic Social teaching. But these problems, like other mistakes the EU makes which we will examine later in the course on major policy areas, do not devalue the European enterprise - rather they should make Catholics and other Christians more determined to work for a Europe grounded in the right values and high ideals we have looked at which inspired so many in the aftermath of the war. The EU reflects our society, it does not determine it: most of western and northern Europe is much more secularised than it was fifty years ago. We should, of course, be very careful about how we use religious language, and the Pope was very careful in the passage I quoted. The Anglican writer Ken Leech (in The Sky is Red, [London: DLT 1997] chapter 3) pointed out a few years ago that careless or nostalgic language about 'Christendom' in relation to Europe could easily play into the hands of sinister far-right groups and encourage bigotry against members of other religions in Europe such as Judaism or Islam. Being aware of Christian history in Europe is not a question of wanting to turn the clock back - indeed it is necessary to avoid making the same mistakes as in the past!

Conclusion

I will conclude with some words from Robert Schuman himself (my translation, I am afraid):

'Also, this whole gathering will not be able to and must not remain an economic and technical enterprise: it has to have a soul, the consciousness of its historical relationships and of its present and future responsibilities, a political will at the service of the same human ideal.' (Pour l'Europe, quoted in R. Lejeune, Robert Schuman - Une âme pour l'Europe [Paris, Saint-Paul, 1986], dedication)