The former EU ambassador to Washington has described the “secularist notion that religion and politics should be kept entirely separate” within the EU as “quite simply unrealistic – and therefore naïve”.
In his address on ‘The place of religion within the European Union’ on Monday in a lecture organised by the Irish pro-faith think tank, the Iona Institute, as well as the Jesuit publication, Studies, John Bruton said his “basic thesis is that the EU should be open to influence by people of faith”.
He urged people of faith to get involved on a day to day basis as the best way to promote Christian values in Europe. “Opting out in an effort to recreate a romanticised past would lead nowhere”, he said.
John Bruton is one of those in contention for the position of EU president, though as yet no frontrunner has emerged and one of the strongest candidates is former British prime minister, Tony Blair.
The position of president under the terms of the Lisbon Treaty will involve, along with the foreign policy chief, conducting EU policy abroad, and conducting a common foreign and security blueprint to be drawn up by the 27 heads of state or government.
In his lecture, Mr Bruton asked what the relationship should be between the Churches and the European Union. “Secularists might claim that there should be no such relationship” but he added this was a “naïve” view.
Referring to the Convention on Human Rights which guarantees the right of citizens “to manifest his or her religion with others in public or private, in teaching, practice, worship, and observance in public or private”, John Bruton underlined that the right to public religious freedom of expression was not subordinate to other rights in the Convention such as the right of equality. “They are all there of equal status in the Convention”, he said.
He added “It is not possible to entirely separate the religion practised by a significant body of the members of the citizenry of EU from the politics of that Union.”
The former EU ambassador to the US said that now that the Lisbon Treaty was “finally passed” that “dialogue with the Churches is formally required by the EU – it is not an option under the Treaty”. He added that the EU would only have committed itself to a dialogue with the Churches in such a solemn way if it were “open to being influenced by such a dialogue”.
Underlining that it was not a matter of wishing for a confessionalisation of the EU but of seeing if the social doctrine of the Church could assist the citizenry of the Union, he said “the Churches do not take over the role of the state or the citizens – they can help them discern what to do”.
Asking if the EU was prepared to listen to what the Church had to contribute, John Bruton rejected the notion that the EU was a “cold place for Christians”.
He highlighted the extent to which pro-life values were embedded in the programmes of the largest European party. He cited the EPP’s manifesto which states that the party follows the protection and promotion of human dignity and consequently “respects the right to life and the uniqueness of every human being from the moment of conception to death”.
“The EU is a work in progress – it always will be. It is fragile and depends for its continued existence on the freely given consent of all its members. But this very weakness is its strength. It is partly because it is a voluntary union, which states are free to leave, that there is in fact such a long line of states wanting to join,” Mr Bruton said.
Unlike practically every other union of states in the world and most countries, the EU “came into being without the shedding of a single drop of blood”, John Bruton reminded his audience.
Noting that the Catholic bishops had called the creation of the EU as “an act of mutual forgiveness” between European states he said that the fact that it had emerged "without the shedding of a single drop of blood in the cause of freedom” made the EU “something very special”.
