Author: Kenneth L. Woodward
Publication: The New York Times
Date: June 14, 2003
[Note from Hindu Vivek Kendra: Would
Woodward, the Vatican, and the Christians in Europe and India agitate for
India's constitution to specifically recognise its Hindu heritage?]
Next week, leaders of the European
Union will meet in Greece to vote on a proposed constitution that will
govern the lives of 450 million Europeans. The most agitated debate at
the convention that produced the draft focused on the preamble, specifically
whether God in general, and Christianity in particular, ought to be mentioned
among the sources of the "values" that produced a common European culture
and heritage.
Though the Vatican did not have
a representative at the convention in Brussels, Pope John Paul II has been
the most outspoken of the European churchmen who have argued that Christianity
should be listed among the inspirational sources that have shaped European
culture. That's no surprise, since the pope has long insisted that Christianity
is the cultural link between the people of Western and Eastern Europe.
Ten East European countries, including Catholic Poland, are expected to
join the union next year. Opponents have argued that a reference to God
belies the constitution's secular purpose, and that a specific reference
to Christianity would alienate Western Europe's 15 million Muslim immigrants
- not to mention Muslim Turkey, which is eager to join in the union's eastward
expansion.
For the moment, the secularists
have won. In the draft that the convention approved yesterday, the preamble
refers abstractly to "the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance
of Europe." That seemed awfully vague to me as I sipped brandy one recent
night in the Piazza San Marco after hours of communing with the mosaics
of the Christian saints inside Venice's majestic Basilica of St. Mark the
Evangelist. Indeed, it seems as if one cannot find a Venetian public square
that does not also have a church, many of them decorated with frescos by
masters like Titian, Tintoretto and Tiepolo. The next evening, in the perfect
acoustics of the Church of San Samuele, I listened to two young vocalists
sing arias from "Tosca," "La Bohème" and "La Traviata" under the
serene gaze of a "Madonna and Child." No one can visit Italy, or the medieval
core of any European city, without encountering evidence of the Christian
humanism that gives Europe its enduring cultural identity and - even now
- its particular glow. Who goes to Brussels except on business?
"At the center of culture is cult,"
observed Christopher Dawson, the great historian of medieval Europe. And
for more than a millennium, the cult or "worship" of Europeans was manifestly
Christian. On that basis alone, Christianity has an unrivaled claim to
a privileged place among the sources of European culture.
Of course, the culture of modern
Europe is pervasively secular. And many on Europe's left reflexively identify
religion with political reaction. "We don't like God," was the reported
comment of one diplomat from France, which led the secularist forces that
wanted no mention of the deity in the union's constitution. Indeed, as
convention president, former President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing
of France, a practicing Catholic, almost single-handedly prevented any
reference to God or Christianity in the text. But delegates from Germany,
Italy, Portugal and Malta, among others, argued for inclusion.
Among those in the ambivalent middle
was an Irish delegate to the constitutional convention who declared: "I
am most firmly convinced that God is everywhere. I am very doubtful how
apt a place Article Two in the constitution is for him to appear in." I
tend to agree. Why mention God as a source of European values when most
Europeans find theirs in economics? Such a gesture would be no more genuine
than if the union were to print "In God We Trust" on the euro.
But the failure to acknowledge Europe's
specifically Christian heritage is something else. At one point in the
process, the preamble referred to the "humanism" of Greek and Roman civilization,
then skipped without pause to the 18th-century Enlightenment. Those specific
references to Europe's past have been cut, but the preamble still ignores
Christianity's contribution to the core European values that the union
is pledged to uphold: "the central role of the human person, and his inviolable
and inalienable rights, and of respect for law." What kind of history is
this? Surely it was Christianity that made the human person, as a child
of God, central to European values. And it was the canon law of the Catholic
Church, the oldest legal system in the West, that nurtured respect for
law long before the rise of Europe's nation-states.
In the language of the French Enlightenment,
the preamble extols Europe's "underlying humanism: equality of persons,
freedom, respect for reason." But as we all know, these "humanist" values,
separated from religious faith, crumbled in the blitzkrieg and disappeared
at Auschwitz.
As an American, I shouldn't much
care what the bureaucrats in Brussels write in their preamble. But it should
matter to Europeans - and to anyone anywhere who cares about history -
because the eliding of the Christian foundations of Western culture is
morally and intellectually dishonest. One can only hope that wiser heads
at next week's summit meeting in Greece will set the historical record
straight and reject the trahison des clercs manifest in Brussels. What
kind of future can there be for a united Europe that disavows its own past?
Such a move would be unimaginable, I like to think, if the convention had
met in Venice.
(Kenneth L. Woodward, a contributing
editor at Newsweek, is author, most recently, of "The Book of Miracles.")
