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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
The paper describes the settings for an official dialogue between religious communities, including the Catholic Church, and the institutions of the European Union. It goes on to describe some important and necessary contributions that a Christian vision can make to the European project. Finally it considers how far certain styles (rather than content) of Catholic discourse can impede the reception of this vision, and so render effective dialogue more difficult.
1 The EU has twenty-seven member states, whereas the Council of Europe has forty-seven (every European country deemed to be a democracy with a respect, in principle, for human rights, i.e., every European country except Belarus).
3 Pope Benedict XVI, Meeting with the Representatives of British Society, Westminster Hall, London, 17 September, 2010. (http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2010/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20100917_societa-civile_en.html). See also the Archbishop of Canterbury's address on the same day: (http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/articles.php/946/the-fraternal-visit-of-pope-benedict-xvi-to-archbishop-rowan-williams)
4 Caritas in Veritate§.56 acknowledges religious fundamentalism and does not merely project it outwards to Islam or to the US religious right. However, the Pope never, as far as I know, acknowledges what might be the characteristic ‘Catholic fundamentalism’– the tendency to treat magisterial documents in an uncritical way that we no longer treat, for example, the Scriptural sources. I return to this point below.
5 a) It is acknowledged that religious consciousness, far from being a danger to society, is a civic asset, forming in believers a strong sense of community, moral seriousness, personal integrity and civic responsibility.b) It is unjust and irrational that religious people are asked, in the name of tolerance and cultural pluralism, to keep their beliefs and norms ‘private’ in order to avoid disturbing the public project of secularism. Ejecting religious belief from the public realm excludes from discussion many people's deepest beliefs about human life: so it injects public debates with a sense of unreality, while denying the pluralism that one claims to safeguard;c) this so-called ‘private realm’ to which religion is ex hypothesi confined is in no way removed from politics but is itself politicised: thus, for example, the nature of the family is now a key and contested issue of public policy.
6 Francois Hollande, first secretary of the Parti socialiste, a presidential candidate, said absurdly that it was ‘une vieille rengaine de la droite la plus cléricale’– an ‘old tune of the clericalist far-right’! Jean-Pierre Chevènement begged a number of questions simultaneously by defining laïcité as ‘the belief that it is within our human capacity to define the common good in the public space, so eliminating the empire of dogma’: as if certain forms of secularism were not themselves dogmatic, and as if religious articulations of the common good bypassed human capacities.
7 For a helpful summary of papal approaches to European politics, from 1945 to the beginning of the reign of Benedict XVI, see O’Mahony, Anthony, ‘The Vatican and Europe: Political Theology and Ecclesiology in Papal Statements from Pius XII to Benedict XVI’, International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church, 9 (2009), 177–194CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8 The Pope acknowledges various sources of the authentic values of contemporary Europe but ‘these inspiring principles have historically found in the Judaeo-Christian tradition a force capable of harmonizing, consolidating and promoting them. This is a fact which cannot be ignored’ (§.19, cf also 24–25).
9 In Christendom, as Paul Ricoeur explains, Church and State were mutually supportive. There was an exchange between ‘unction’ and ‘sanction’. The Church blessed the State and the State offered the force of the ‘secular arm’ to defend the Church (for example, against heretics). Each supplied what the other intrinsically lacked: spiritual power for the political order, and material constraint for the spiritual order. See Ricoeur, , “`Tolérance, intolérance, intolérable’,” in Lectures, I: Autour de Politique (La Couleur des Idées) (Seuil, Paris, 1991), 295ffGoogle Scholar.
10 Magisterial documents are strongly intertextual, justifying their positions not only by analysis of the world but by citing earlier texts. A changed position tends to be marked simply by ceasing to restate the earlier view.
12 Caritas in Veritate incorporates ‘life issues’ in Catholic Social Teaching. But the Church is simply not a partner in European Union discussions on abortion, bioethics, etc., since it is seen as absolutist, so that dialogue would be futile.
13 In Catholic thought, solidarity is the moral imperative that flows from the communal character of human life: what affects others affects me. It entails a commitment to the attainment of a just social order, and seeks deeper unity for the sake of the common good. Every year's report of the European Commission is studded with the word ‘solidarity’– meaning any policy that promotes ‘social cohesion’ and international development, without commitment to dismantle the unjust structures from which the EU may benefit at the expense of others. Subsidiarity’, a concept that bears on every level of social organisation, becomes in the EU a code-word for defending the prerogatives of member states over against ‘Brussels’: to favour what in Brussels jargon is called the inter-governmental method against the ‘community method’. Mrs Thatcher was the great proponent of national sovereignty against the EU, whilst steadily undermining local government powers within the UK, as against the power of central government.
14 Catholic Social Teaching will rarely distinguish between policies of the EU collectively on the one hand, and policies of some or most or all member states on the other: this distinction is naturally basic in EU debates themselves.
15 Justice is the responsibility of the state: indeed ‘it is the aim and the intrinsic criterion of all politics’: (justice, note, not economic growth, or power, or even ‘freedom’ which is a part of justice).
16 http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/newsroom/cf/document.cfm?action=display&doc_id=894&userservice_id=1. See for example, the trade and regulatory policies set out in § 2.1.
17 Hayek's best-known book argues that the State's acceptance of the role John Paul II would later prescribe for it sets society on The Road to Serfdom. On the contrary, Hayek and his followers take the ‘free market’ to be the principle of social life, and the only ‘neutral one’: as Hayek writes in a famous article, amusingly called ‘Why I am not a conservative’ (1960),It is part of the liberal attitude to assume that, especially in the economic field, the self-regulating forces of the market will somehow bring about the required adjustments to new conditions, although no one can foretell how they will do this in a particular instance.Hayek thinks that state intervention tends inevitably towards ‘serfdom’– but that the market is ‘neutral’ and ‘self-regulating’ yet embodies ‘freedom’. John-Paul would regard it as pseudo-religious blind faith to ‘assume’ (Hayek's own word) that the market ‘will ‘somehow bring about the required adjustments, though no one can foretell how’.
18 The French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuis suggests that ‘the economy contains violence’– the word ‘contains bearing a double sense: ‘C’est-à-dire, qu’elle en contient et qu’elle la contient, la limite, la rend tolérable.’ (cited by Boissonnat, Jean, Dieu et l’Europe (Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 2005) p.157)Google Scholar.
19 In the Parliament magazine: http://www.theparliament.com/policy-focus/culture-education/culture-article/newsarticle/securing-future-prosperity/
20 The groups which actively consult our Jesuit office are those with clear Christian links – mainly the group of the European People's Party, the centre-right. (The group no longer includes the Tories, who emigrated from that group, seeing it as too Europhile, being now part of the fringe group of ‘European Conservatives and Reformists’ with an explicitly anti-federal programme.) We work with Greens or Socialists, but we have usually to take the initiative. Conversely, the EPP is less likely than are the Greens and the Socialists to support our work on justice issues.
21 See also Fides et Ratio (1998) § 4. ‘It is as if we had come upon an implicit philosophy, as a result of which all feel that they possess these principles, albeit in a general and unreflective way. Precisely because it is shared in some measure by all, this knowledge should serve as a kind of reference-point for the different philosophical schools. Once reason successfully intuits and formulates the first universal principles of being and correctly draws from them conclusions which are coherent both logically and ethically, then it may be called right reason or, as the ancients called it, orthós logos, recta ratio.’ To be sure this concept of reason is not narrowly Catholic: Plato's nous (inspired, imbued with religious insight) is not Cartesian rationalism.
22 Yet because I thought that as in the poole of Bethsaida. there was no health till the water was troubled, so the best way to finde the truth in this matter was to debate and vexe it (for we must as well dispute de veritate as pro veritate). (John Donne, Biathanatos, 1608)
23 In his personal christological writings as Pope, Benedict XVI has invited such free reaction and scholarly debate. But he thereby defines a different literary form than that of the encyclical. The 1986 US Bishops Pastoral on the Economy, Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy (USCCB, Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1997) exceptionally – I think, uniquely – included a process of extensive public consultation.
24 Poole, Joyce, The Cross of Unknowing: Dilemmas of a Catholic Doctor (Sheed & Ward Ltd, 1989), p.4Google Scholar.
25 Ricoeur, Paul, “Tâches de l’educateur politique,” in Lectures, I: Autour de Politique (La Couleur des Idées) (Seuil, Paris, 1995), 241–247Google Scholar.
26 It appears in the Prologue of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, it comes in the opening sentence of the 2004 Letter of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the ‘Collaboration of Men and Women in the Church and in the World’. It appears to derive from an address of John Paul II, though on that occasion he said something more innocent: ‘There is a need for heralds of the Gospel who are experts in humanity’– a different matter.
