2004 / 2
Introduction
Janet Martin Soskice with Alberto Melloni
In Europe, home to some of the world's oldest nation states, a new political reality is emerging. The trauma of two world wars and the ugly flowering of genocide in nations whose proud boast was to have spread Christianity through the world caused searching reappraisal in their aftermath. According to Hippolyte Simon, present Bishop of Clermont-Ferraud, the Coal and Steel agreement of 1951 was, amongst its more tangible aspects, also a ‘spiritual gesture’ whose significance was ‘never again' — never again to war, to genocide, to fraternal slaughter. Christian politicians and trade unionists were amongst the prominent architects of the new Union after the war, motivated to activism by their Christian faith.
Yet the Coal and Steel agreement was a relatively easy initial step. Awareness of the depth of diversity in their respective national pasts mean that ‘never again’ has to be said frequently, and some of these ‘never agains’ involve religions and churches.
Europeans are now a little indolent when it comes to putting together their faith with their politics. Confusion reigns — should the European Christian citizen be happy with the new polity? Unflagging in support for what is still a fragile agreement? Within the Catholic Church, the Pope has given sustained support to this new venture, although not without hopes of his own as to its outcome. All agree that Europeans stand at an important historic juncture. Opinions vary as to what the end of this shared adventure should be; should one wish for a United States of Europe, or a loose conglomeration with shared economic, social and geo-political policies? The fact of the matter is that, whatever individual preferences, the European Union is a reality affecting the lives of all those who live within its bounds, and with the potential to affect many who do not. Gone are the franc, the mark and the drachma — the euro has replaced some of the oldest ‘common coin’ in circulation. A European Parliament runs alongside national parliaments. Labour moves freely across all those Western lands once conquered by Rome. With the 2004 accession of new member states, including Hungary and Poland, we have the end of fifty years of a cruel East-West divide. Europe itself is ‘a new West’.
[8] Europe will have unified policies on immigration, refugees, trade relations and Third World debt. The changes underway affect not only the economics and politics but the self-understanding of European citizenry. Is this new Europe going to be any more ‘Christian’ than the old one? What should the world want from Europe and how should Europeans understand themselves in this new political incarnation (Borgman)? For readers of Concilium this will also imply questions of faith and history, and questions of guiding symbolism.
What is Europe, after all? Australia, Africa and the Americas are clearly demarcated by the boundary of the sea. Europe, by contrast, has no such evident marks of demarcation, at least on its eastern side. The nineteenth-century Russian philosopher, Danilevsky, asked if what we call Europe is not ‘just a peninsula at the end of Asia . . . a glamourous word . . .’ but perhaps, he suggests, an empty one (Fedorov). This is why the grounding metaphors or symbols of Europe are so important. Is Europe a shared house, a set of lungs, a tree with common roots and later grafted branches (Melloni, Siebenrock)? If Europe is such because of its shared ‘roots’, then why do these same roots nourish Turkey, but not Russia? If Europe has two lungs, will it need always be divided, spiritually if not economically, into an East and West (Melloni). How we conceive of Europe will play a major part in what Europe becomes, and here enter matters of faith and history.
Europe is widely considered to be the cradle of Christianity — widely, but wrongly. As 150 years of biblical criticism have made clear, Christianity is a profoundly Oriental, or at least Middle Eastern faith, albeit one whose origins lay in the Greek-speaking and Hellenized remains of the empire of Alexander. Christianity spread most quickly across north Africa — to Egypt, Libya, what is now Tunisia — and with equal speed throughout what is now Turkey, Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran. By 245 AD, when most northern Europeans were still running around kidnapping their brides, there were already twenty-four Christian bishoprics in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. Hungary, by contrast, was not Christianized until the year 1000.
We think Europe to be the centre of Christianity only because our historic memories are short. Saint Zeno, the African missionary who converted the population of Verona to Christianity, and whose very black and African Byzantine image stands as tribute in his namesake church there, would have been astonished to think of Christianity as a European faith. Indeed African and Asian Christians have more than good reason to think Europe was never more than superficially Christianized, given its subsequent political and social history.
The election in the last quarter of the twentieth century of a Polish pope, [9] the first non-Italian pope in many centuries, has had important consequences for Europe, and for the Catholic Church. Although the ink is not dry on the history of the late twentieth century, most political historians agree that the role of Poland, reinforced by its famous native son in Rome, was decisive in the breakdown of the communist East (Tomka, Michel). But if the pope has been important to Europe, then Europe has been important to the pope. From the beginning, the pontificate of John Paul II has had as one of its concerns the uniting of a wounded and divided Europe. The dynamics of East and West have played an important role. Papal writings have used a plenitude of images (lungs, roots, house) to try to set forth a vision. Perhaps, as in the diversity of images Paul uses to explain the Atonement, we need a set of overlapping metaphors to appreciate our shared past and tentative future?
The common ‘roots’ of European nations is not an appealing metaphor if one considers these must somehow tangle around the Shoah. Even though full-blown Nazism was an atheistic and anti-Christian ideology, the fact remains that European nations, East and West, colluded in the destruction of their Jewish citizenry. The shadow of the Shoah still hangs over Europe (Brenner). That this should have happened in ‘Christian’ Europe is a blow to the heart of faith, yet a reminder to Christians everywhere how readily ethnic and religious bitterness can slide into hostilities, or just fatal indifference.
Today Christianity is for most Europeans part of Europe’s distant past and not much more. The new political and economic union, as part of its turn away from a divided past, has decided to refrain from any reference to Christianity in its constitution. This could be conceived as a generous gesture towards the numbers of European citizens who are of other faiths, its Muslims and its Jews, but it is probably more a deliberate distancing of the secular society from its religious past. The inter-Christian rivalry which broke out into bloody violence with the Wars of Religion have not been forgotten by secular authorities (Frieling, Ferrari). Religion, the new Europe seems to say, is of our past, not for our present or future. Of course few Europeans, least of all members of the major Christian denominations, would like a return to the mediaeval ‘Christendom’ with its conflation of Christian identity and European politics. Indeed the churches have been amongst the first to argue that Europe’s Christian past should not be used as a metaphorical lever against its immigrant minorities (Kuschel). On the other hand, belief in God, and belief in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is dear to many of Europe’s new immigrants, as well as its old citizenry, and many of these non-Christians are equally alarmed at the [10] extent to which the legislating bodies seem eager to paint God out of Europe’s collective social and religious past.
It cannot be doubted that Christianity has contributed hugely to the mix of values, ideals, and hopes taken for granted by European citizenry today. The history of Europe does not make sense without the history of Christianity, in all its strengths and weaknesses: the importance of the individual, ideals of freedom and self-determination, commitment to the common good and to the dignity of women, the very old, the very young — all these have a deep anchorage in Europe’s Christian past. It is not unreasonable for religious people, and not just Christians, to wonder if they will have a place in its secularized and commercialized future (Ruggieri).
What then should the world want from Europe (Riccardi, Voiss)? The purpose of this volume is bring a double lens — historical and theological — to bear on Europe. We hope the essays contained here will unfold some of the challenges to church and faith, some of the semantic vagaries of over-used terms and images (roots and lungs, values and rights) and remind us of key Christian concepts that seem often forgotten in the political process (forgiveness, consolation, healing, poverty). Despite some palpable achievements it is too early for celebration and cheap, optimistic prophecies. To offer good questions is a beginning.
Concilium
English 
