The Roman Catholic Church and the European Institutions Dialogue and Advocacy at the European Union

Transcription

1 The Roman Catholic Church and the European Institutions Dialogue and Advocacy at the European Union My paper has three parts, of unequal length: 1. Brief factual information about the RC presence to the EU institutions, focusing on Brussels; 2. Reports from official sources, about the nature and necessity of this dialogue; 3. Personal reflections about the dialogue. 1. RC PRESENCE TO EU INSTITUTIONS This falls into four main categories: - The diplomacy of the Holy See. There are two papal nuncios, in Belgium: one to the Belgian State and the Belgian Church, one to the EU. Whereas, for example, the Vatican Representative to the UN has Permanent Observer Status, with the right to intervene at the General Assembly (though not to vote) the Nuncio to the EU has no such status. He works through informal contacts, seminars, etc., especially on those EU matters which concern international law. - COMECE (the Commission of Bishops Conferences of the EU) represents the bishops of the EU, whose primary function is that of pastoral leadership. COMECE s policy areas cover such fields as fundamental rights (religious freedom, the rights of refugees and other migrants, etc), bioethical issues, but also governance, and economic policy. - Organisations representing religious orders. There are several, but I may cite my own, the Jesuit European Office, or OCIPE. We have three functions: - to be a resource for those Christians in and around the EU institutions who welcome a forum to reflect on the link between their faith-convictions and their professional responsibilities; - to follow, to analyse and comment on issues of the EU that seem to manifest its deeper ethos and dynamic; - to work with Jesuit related organisations elsewhere in the world (especially Africa and Latin America) on issues where the policy and practice of the EU most affects them. For example, our principal long-term project, on this track, is one of advocacy relating to the activities of transnational mining corporations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the need for a binding framework of corporate social responsibility. - There are Catholic NGOs of all kinds in Brussels active at the EU, across a broad spectrum of issues: from small groups working on issues of the family, etc., to secretariats of large, international umbrella organisations focusing on justice and peace. For example, an organisation named CIDSE represents the Catholic agencies of several countries engaged in international development: it advocates on international aid and trade, the Millennium Development Goals, etc. (Mmany of CIDSE s advocacy partners on such topics are ecumenical, inter-religious and secular. In Brussels I discovered the adjective interconvictionnel for a dialogue between faith groups and humanist groups.) 2. OFFICIAL POSITIONS Pope Benedict XVI s (Deus Caritas Est, 2005,.28) argues that politics is more than a mechanism for defining the rules of public life: its aim and intrinsic criterion are found in justice, which by its 1

2 very nature has to do with ethics. However: practical and ethical reason must undergo constant purification since it can never be completely free of the danger of a certain ethical blindness caused by the dazzling effect of power and special interests. Faith can be such a purifying force for reason, and therefore a valid and valuable witness in politics. There is no claim to power over the State nor to impose what is proper to faith on on those who do not share it. The Pope agrees, in turn (as he said in London, September, 2010), that religion itself needs to be purified by reason, since distorted forms of religion, such as sectarianism and fundamentalism... can create serious social problems. Those social problems will be the responsibility of, among others, governments. This understanding is ecumenically shared. I quote Archbishop Rowan Williams at an encounter with the Pope in London, on September 17th, 2010: We do not as churches seek political power or control, or the dominance of Christian faith in the public sphere; but the opportunity to testify, to argue, sometimes to protest, sometimes to affirm -- to play our part in the public debates of our societies... And we shall be effective not when we have mustered enough political leverage to get our way but when we have persuaded our neighbours that the life of faith is a life well lived and joyfully lived. As for the EU in particular, it is true that Pope Benedict has more than once criticised its ethos: as Archbishop Williams says, protest is part of testimony. In receiving the new EU Ambassador to the Holy See in October, 2009, the Pope accepted the Ambassador s description of the EU as a zone of peace and stability that gathers twenty-seven States with the same fundamental values, but argued in reply that these common values do not constitute an anarchic or uncertain aggregate but form a coherent whole - which presumes a precise anthropological vision : the Pope of course proposes that this anthropological vision is expressed pre-eminently in Christianity - and believes that the EU rejects certain of its fundamentals. As my second official source I quote COMECE, to which I have already referred. Since my humanist colleague Mr Pollock will speak of Article 17 of the Treaty of Lisbon, I illustrate from the same article. The Treaty for the first time enshrines the established dialogue with churches and church institutions (as well as philosophical and non-confessional organisations) within the primary law of the EU: they are known as interest partners, not lobbyists, still less antagonists. COMECE (together with the Conference of European Churches, representing a broad spectrum of Christian Churches), made a submission to the European Commission on Article Its main thrust was to parse the key terms of Article 17 (3): what is entailed in the commitment to a dialogue that is open, transparent and regular? - Openness (evidently something other than transparency ) requires the EU institutions to consult partners at key stages; to include a reasonable range of policy themes within the EU s competence; and to make the dialogue is frank - allowing for constructive and critical engagement from all parties. 1 Article 17 is part of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) and reads as follows: 1. The Union respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches and religious associations or communities in the Member States. 2. The Union equally respects the status under national law of philosophical and non-confessional organisations. 3. Recognising their identity and their specific contribution, the Union shall maintain an open, transparent and regular dialogue with these churches and organisations. 2

3 - Transparency is an ideal proper to democracy. COMECE and CEC simply quote the EU s own Bureau of European Policy Advisors : everyone should have the right to know, at any time, who are the Dialogue s partners and what are its objectives and results. - Regular : the dialogue should be an ongoing (though not necessarily very frequent), not merely an occasional ad hoc discussion. The Article 17 dialogue is not an exclusive privilege of the churches. In October, a delegation from philosophical and non-confessional organisations was to meet senior officers of the Commission the Council and the Parliament to discuss how to combat poverty and social exclusion, a special theme of 2010 within the EU. (This is also a key theme for the churches, who would, I expect, share common ground with the non-confessional organisations on this issue.) Similarly, as in all dialogue, the churches have no right to expect that their views will prevail, only to make their point and be heard. One concern for the churches is that the process so far has been less a dialogue than an annual summit : a regular but rare formal encounter, with set speeches, between major international leaders on each side. The dialogue needs to feed ordinary expert working groups on agreed themes. That does not mean that there is some single Christian position on transport, or on mobile phone roaming charges! On some issues, however, such as migration or trade, there would be a characteristic Christian concern and contribution. 3. REFLECTIONS I presume and affirm the secularity of the EU. In the political arena, secularity entails the procedural impartiality of the state and civil institutions between religions, and between religious and non-religious groups. Public debate may occur freely between different world-views, but none may claim state sponsorship or favour. There is a clear distinction between the realms of church and state. This principle of distinction was hard-won. Historically, the European struggle went by way of privatising religion so as to carve out a realm of state autonomy. In this way the necessary distinction became separation. That process was an understandable reaction to the previous dominance of the public sphere by churches (above all, in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church), to religious wars under the principle of cuius regio eius religio, and so on. But however historically understandable, separation cannot be sustained as a principle. We have only one human life, which is indivisible. We can and must distinguish the religious and political spheres, but that is not to separate them. The Catholic formula would be to distinguish and relate. No one would exclude business executives from political fora on the grounds that the market principle sometimes conflicts with the political principle. So why exclude religious bodies? Secularism, however, stronger and more assertive in Europe than elsewhere, proposes exactly this exclusion of religious belief and expression from public life. But where secularism also aspires to be the legitimate judge of the religious sphere, it implicitly claims not only separation from the religious realm but control over it, and becomes an ideology to be imposed on societies, regardless of their prevalent beliefs. (Approximately 80% of European citizens still think of themselves as Christian. Numbers have limited significance in such matters, but it is not democratic to ignore them entirely!) Dialectically, one might say, from the Christendom model and the secularist reaction, there has emerged post-secularism, the sense that it is futile and unjust to dismiss religious expression from the public sphere. Post-secularism (which does not imply religious belief) rejects the claims of some 3

4 secularists to represent, even exclusively to represent, rationality, objectivity, scientific consciousness. Post-secularists, and a fortiori religious believers, would argue that: - religious consciousness is not a danger to society but is a civic asset, capable of forming a strong sense of community, moral seriousness, personal integrity and civic responsibility. Secondly, it offers an ultimate grounding or justification for human dignity, and hence for basic human rights: whereas the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, for example, speaks of dignity and of rights, without offering any such foundation; - to eject religious belief from the public forum - disqualifying from the public realm many people s deepest beliefs about human life - injects some public debates with a sense of unreality, and denies the very pluralism that secularists claim to safeguard; - the so-called private realm to which religion is ex hypothesi confined, or banished, is in no way separate from politics but is itself politicised: thus, for example, the nature of the family is nowadays, in many countries, a key and contested issue of public policy; For post-secularists in general, and for religious believers in particular, 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. This claim does not mean, however, that it is necessarily either right or prudent to invoke religious beliefs directly in the public discussion of moral and political affairs. Theologically, all mainstream Christian churches accept the key truth put most concisely by the Protestant theologian Karl Barth: God transcends all human thought or would not be God and cannot be captured in human reasoning. Strategically, if the Church engages in a public discussion about morality, rights, justice, it is ill-advised to appeal to a discourse (about Revelation ) that those without Christian faith cannot possibly share. God is the absolute : in New Testament language, the one to whom we will grant what we do not grant to Caesar. In the political realm, this absolute functions negatively and positively:- - Negatively, in that that it prevents other commitments, however profound, powerful, from becoming themselves absolute. I name three that tend to claim ultimacy: the well-being of family, or of the nation state, or even of the market. Absolute national allegiance, for example, is what Christians would call an idol. In 2008 I attended a discussion at the European Policy Centre in Brussels on the spectacular rise of Chindia - China and India. I quote from the conference report. Questioned about India s attitude towards human rights, Professor (Rajendra) Jain acknowledged that... India resists international interference in its internal affairs. However, the EU... should accept that, for some countries, human rights are defined by national interests. Belief in God will preclude our allowing that human rights are defined by national interests. Negatively speaking, faith is a guard against false absolutes. - Positively for many millions of Europeans faith underpins their human commitments, their freedom, their energies, their hope. God cannot be worshipped neat apart from the service and love of our neighbour : and the concept of the neighbour in the New Testament has a universal reference. The Catholic Church, the body I know best, spans the globe and spans the centuries. I have experienced this community strongly in Africa and in Latin America. I have found this sense of global community (which implies both universal human dignity and solidarity) to be a deeply helpful perspective from which to evaluate the aspirations, 4

5 achievements and failings of the EU. It is no coincidence, for example, that the churches are among today s foremost defenders of refugees. Europe, and European politics, needs this breadth of vision. Frank Turner, OCIPE-Jesuit European Office, Brussels. turner@ocipe.info 5