Christianity is a blank page in charter for a brave new Europe

POOR old Giscard d’Estaing. There he was with his nice draft European constitution all ready for the Thessaloniki summit on June 20, and what happened?

The smaller member states of the EU ganged up and rejected his plans.

They want the institutional balance already agreed at Nice, and they joined forces with those ungrateful wretches from the new candidate countries temporarily to block his vision for a federal Europe.

As a result of last week’s discord, we are now facing six months of negotiations and horse-trading over the draft constitution.

Just as well really, because some of what is being proposed by the convention on the future of Europe is dangerous and deserves to be, let us say, Giscarded.

Let’s start with God. Despite the fact that Giscard is of an age when it is best not to be too dismissive of the deity, he clearly thinks that God is a bore.

Ignoring the entreaties of Pope John Paul, the Metropolitan of the Russian Orthodox Church and the Secretary General of the Conference of European Rabbis, Giscard will have no mention of God or Christianity in his draft constitution.

What we get is an almost masonic denial of the unique civilising role played by Christianity in European history.

The current preamble, written by Giscard himself, refers to “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe which (was) nourished first by the civilisations of Greece and Rome” and “later by philosophical currents of the Enlightenment”. Spot the gap? Right, Giscard.

Suppose you are on Qui Veut Gagner des Millions (as they call Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? in France).

Suppose you are asked ‘Which person with the initials JC influenced humanity greatly by suggesting we should love our enemies and care for the poor? Was it:

a Julius Caesar;

b John Cleese;

c Jacques Chirac, or

d Jesus Christ?

Careful now, Giscard. We’ll give you a hint. This person wasn’t actually European.

Still confused? So much for the Enlightenment. Giscard isn’t stupid, of course. Just hostile to Christianity.

“It borders on the ridiculous,” says the President of the Convention of Christians for Europe, Josep Miró i Ardèvol, “that the preamble should omit a reference to Christianity without which the Enlightenment is incomprehensible.”

Such an omission, Ardèvol argues, itself involves an ideological imposition and expresses the political will that exclusive secularism constitutes the sole cultural category and reference point for Europe.

In the light of this high-level hostility it is ironic that the Catholic Church should be one of the European Union’s biggest supporters.

Last Sunday, the Polish president paid tribute to Pope John Paul II after Poland’s landslide vote for EU membership, because the Pope had reminded Poles that their destiny lay with Europe.

Addressing Polish pilgrims in St Peter’s Square a few weeks ago, the Pope told his countrymen that “entry in the EU structures... is for our nations and for the adjacent Slav nations, expression of an historical justice.”

For John Paul II, membership of the European Union represents a final stage in his beloved country’s journey ‘home’.

Having been a subservient member of an atheistic communist bloc, Poland is on the point of joining a new family of nations with a common Christian heritage, he believes.

And the Pope’s enthusiasm for the European Union is widely shared throughout the Church. Last week, the Commission of Bishops Conferences of the European Union (COMECE) welcomed the draft constitution, despite the omission of Christianity from the preamble.

Here in Ireland, Bishop Joseph Duffy of Clogher says he agrees with the move to establish a common foreign policy and to give the EU a legal personality which would allow it to sign international treaties.

Only time will tell whether the Church’s enthusiasm for the European Union is one of the great unrequited loves of history.

In the meantime the bishops will argue that the EU has delivered peace and stability to western Europe and prosperity to its poorer regions.

The logical next step is to reconstruct eastern Europe. And the accession of Turkey also makes sense if there is to be an accommodation between the historically Christian west and the Islamic world.

But the cure may be worse than the disease. At the moment, the power elites in Europe are not only reluctant to acknowledge the contribution of Christianity to Europe’s history.

They are working hard to impose a brand of human rights and freedoms that is alien to Christianity in several crucial respects.

Despite the reservations of many European politicians, including Bertie Ahern, the draft Constitution for Europe is set fully to incorporate a charter of fundamental rights of the European Union.

Now we’ve all been conditioned to believe that rights, and charters are very good things. And so they are.

But everything depends on how they are interpreted.

This particular charter claims to protect the right to life, and is willing to get specific by prohibiting the death penalty.

Good. But, not surprisingly, the charter does not extend its definition of life to include the unborn child.

Worse than that, there is every chance that some of its more general provisions could be used in the future to liberalise Ireland’s laws on abortion.

Remember the way the US Supreme Court first ‘discovered’ a right to privacy and then extended it to include an untrammelled right to abortion for American women?

And the way abortion activists at the UN used the euphemistic language of ‘reproductive rights’ to promote abortion in the third world?

Well, similar things could happen with seemingly beneficial concepts like ‘respect for private and family life’ and ‘right to liberty and security of person’ contained in the EU charter.

There are three reasons why these fears are not imaginary.

Firstly, the Irish approach has always been to adopt EU treaties right into our constitution. This means that, in the event of a conflict between our own constitutional provisions and those of the charter, the charter will win out.

The second problem is ideological hostility among EU types to the unborn child. What else would explain the recent decision by the EU Development Commissioner, Poul Nielson, to establish a group to ‘monitor’ the activities of pro-life movements, and to attack their arguments?

Thirdly, our government doesn’t seem to have much stomach for a fight when it comes to defending Irish constitutional values in Europe.

Recently, our government refused to support a clause in an EU parliament motion which would have supported an EU-wide ban on any cloning involving human embryos.

Content to rest on its laurels, the government argued that a proposed European directive explicitly allows member states to ban cloning in their own jurisdictions.

In other words, we shouldn’t worry about cloning happening in other member states, even if our tax money is going into EU-sponsored research on human embryos.

With such a deficit of vision, is there any hope that the Irish government will insist on an explicit acknowledgement of Europe’s Christian heritage in the preamble to its new Constitution?

Or for a re-jigging of the Maastricht protocol to guarantee Ireland’s autonomy in laws affecting reproduction and the family?

We’ll wait and see.