This Difficult Europe

The Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith spoke in Berlin on the situation of the European continent, after the Nice summit and the drawing up of the “Charter of Fundamental Rights”

by GUIDO HORST

What will be the future of Europe? “We don’t know,” Cardinal Ratzinger stated synthetically at the end of his speech on the spiritual foundations of Europe. The Bavarian representative to the German federal government in Berlin had invited the Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to give his diagnosis of the situation of the European continent, at a conference in which hundreds of participants from the world of politics and economics came together to listen, for once, to a high-ranking representative of the Church of Rome in a Berlin that has by now been amply secularized. Ratzinger quoted the British historian Arnold Toynbee and his thesis on the crisis of secularism in the West. The Prefect expressed his perplexity at the hypothesis that, as a cure, it would be enough simply to reintroduce the “religious moment” into European culture–as proposed by Toynbee–especially when “the religious moment” consists of a “synthesis of the residues of Christianity and of the religious heritage of mankind in general.” Toynbee was right, however–Ratzinger went on–when he affirmed that the destiny of a society always depends “on its creative minorities.” For the Cardinal, this means that “the Christian faithful are to be considered a creative minority and should contribute to helping Europe recover the best of her heritage.”

The missing name
In his speech, the Cardinal analyzed the concrete situation of Europe regarding her spiritual and religious heritage, on the basis of the Charter of Fundamental Rights solemnly proclaimed by the representatives of the governments of the European Union on the occasion of the summit in Nice. Particularly important, Ratzinger emphasized, was the second paragraph of the preamble: “Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality, and solidarity.” The Cardinal went on to deplore the fact that the Charter does not expressly mention God. Important nonetheless is “the necessity to safeguard human dignity and the rights of man as values that lie at the base of every juridical system.” This value of human dignity that precedes every political action refers ultimately to the Creator: “He alone can establish laws rooted in the essence itself of man and not instrumentalized by anyone.” For Ratzinger, therefore, the Charter of Fundamental Rights maintains a characteristic trait of Christian identity: “That there exist values which cannot be manipulated by anyone, this is the true secret of the Creator and of man created in His image. Thus this phrase of the Charter of Fundamental Rights protects an essential element of European Christian identity in a formula that can be understood also by non-believers.” After this positive comment, nevertheless, the Cardinal did not fail to raise some criticisms, noting that in some points the Charter is too vague, as it lacks a clear acknowledgment of Europe’s concrete Christian values. Ratzinger cited two examples. First of all, there was no mention of “monogamous marriage as a fundamental model for governing the relationship between man and woman and at the same time as a cell of the social fabric of the State.” This value is clearly molded on Biblical faith. But precisely on this theme the Charter fails to speak clearly about the threats to the institution of marriage–on one hand, the increasing erosion of the value of indissolubility, on the other, the claims of homosexual couples to obtain legal recognition for their union analogous to marriage. “With this trend, man sets himself outside the entire moral history of mankind,” the Cardinal said. If homosexual unions are considered more and more equivalent to marriage, “we are on the threshold of the dissolution of the individual human being,” whom the Charter expressly defends in the second paragraph of the preamble.

Conscience and religion
As his second example of the too generic character of the Charter of Fundamental Rights, Ratzinger cited the guarantee of freedom of conscience and religion. The States of the European Union declare themselves to be neutral with regard to religion, without however considering that there exist “characteristic traits of the identity of our culture” which require special safeguarding, for example important holy days like Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, or Sunday. Tolerance, Ratzinger continued, has a limit: what will happen to the religious communities that have neglected the values guaranteed by the Charter of Fundamental Rights, like freedom of religion itself or the substantial renunciation of the use of violence? One thing, according to the Cardinal, should not have been missing in the Charter of Rights: “Respect for what is sacred to another and reverence before the sacred in general, before God, is something that is completely reasonable even for someone who personally does not believe in God.” Here the Cardinal observes that “the West demonstrates a peculiar form of self-injury, which can only be called pathological; in fact, it makes a praiseworthy effort to open up to values that are foreign to it, but no longer cares for itself, and sees only the most atrocious and destructive aspects of its own history, while it is no longer capable of grasping what is great and pure.” Thanks be to God, Ratzinger went on, in our society anyone who mocks the faith of Israel is punished, just as anyone who throws discredit on the Koran and Islam is punished, “but when instead it is a question of Christ and the values sacred to Christians, freedom of opinion seems to be the supreme value.” Europe, Ratzinger concluded, “must learn once again to accept itself,” instead of renouncing and running away from what is its own. “Certainly, we can and must learn from the sacred values of others, but precisely before others and for others, we have the duty to nourish in ourselves reverence before the sacred and to show the face of God that we have seen, the God who cares for the poor and defenseless, widows and orphans, foreigners, a God who is so human as to choose to become a Man Himself, a Man of Sorrows, who by suffering with us imparts dignity and hope also to pain.”