Fw: [Pakistan Post] NYTimes.com Article: An Oxymoron: Europe WithoutChristianity

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> An Oxymoron: Europe Without Christianity

> > http://www.nytimes.com/ads/nytcirc/index.html

>

> June 14, 2003

> By KENNETH L. WOODWARD

 

 

> 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."

>

>

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/14/opinion/14WOOD.html?ex=1056605626&ei=1&en=

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