Turkey should not feel excluded from the EU by a spurious notion of Christendom, writes Enda O'Doherty
The successful conclusion in June of an agreement on a constitution for the European Union seemed to bring to a close, at least until the advent of the various national processes of ratification, the vexed questions not just of the relative political weights of its members but also of the place that might be accorded in the document's preamble to Europe's Christian tradition and, specifically, to God.
The final wording of the text, with its simple invocation of Europe's "cultural, religious and humanist heritage", elicited expressions of mild disappointment from Archbishop Seán Brady and Cardinal Desmond Connell at the absence of a specific reference to Christianity, but the archbishop went on to express satisfaction with other provisions of the constitution and seemed to display a willingness to see this particular chapter ended.
An interview given by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, to the current edition of Le Figaro magazine, however, suggests that powerful elements in the Vatican are not yet ready to accept closure on this much-debated political question.
Cardinal Ratzinger's comments, with their explicit linkage of the idea of a Europe and European Union which is by definition Christian,and the ambition of the Turkish republic to join that Union, reflect an increasingly insistent trend among European conservatives determined to call into question Turkish entry on religious grounds.
Echoing the views of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, French MEP Jean-Louis Bourlanges and other conservative French and German commentators, Cardinal Ratzinger argues that Europe's Christian essence is "a simple fact of history", indeed an "incontestable" one. Turkey, on the other hand, "has always represented another continent in the course of its history, in permanent contrast with Europe", a "contrast" which over the centuries often assumed violent forms.
It can equally be argued, however, that "Christian Europe" - if by that we mean a group of polities run according to the principles of Christianity as outlined, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount - has never existed. Indeed those sects, usually on the fringes of Protestantism, which occasionally rose up to strive for such a polity, were always marginalised, when they were not massacred.
What we did have in Europe, until the French Revolution announced the beginning of a slow but irresistible change, were societies in which the institutional church, particularly in Catholic countries, enjoyed considerable wealth and prestige together with varying degrees of political influence on a more or less autocratic ruling caste.
Nor, as it came to be increasingly challenged by liberalism, free thought, democracy and socialism, did it give up that influence easily. Catholics in newly unified Italy were for decades encouraged to abstain from democratic politics by a church still smarting from the loss of its temporal power in the Papal States.
In 1923, forced to make a choice between the nascent Christian democracy of Father Luigi Sturzo's Popular Party and Mussolini's fascism, the Vatican chose the latter. As late as the 1940s, Dutch Catholics who wished to vote for their country's Labour Party were threatened with excommunication.
Cardinal Ratzinger attributes the reluctance of his opponents to accept the absolute identification of Europe and Christianity to an inexplicable "self-hatred", a wilful denial of heritage and history.
But perhaps it may spring from a broader and cooler appreciation of that history, above all from an appreciation that the wars and persecutions which have wracked the continent over many centuries can often best be understood as struggles for power and wealth however convincingly they might have been clothed in ideology, religious or secular.
Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us that the Turk, in 1683, was at the gates of Vienna, but so also has the Christian "infidel" been at - and indeed inside - many a Muslim citadel. He suggests that modern Turkey, instead of seeking to join Europe, should place itself at the head of an alternative "cultural continent" of its Arab and Muslim neighbours, a destiny which seems increasingly unlikely for a state that is secular, non-Arab, a member of NATO and an ally of the US.
No one pretends that it will be easy to bridge the gap between the rich, liberal and materialist West and a Middle East which is poor, angry and often susceptible to the simplicities of a medieval fundamentalism. Bridging it as best we can is nevertheless our most important political task and for those of us in Europe, Turkey seems the most obvious place to start.
Though some Christians still have difficulty in accepting that "non-believers" have any social or cultural values on which society can be built, a partly or even largely post-Christian Europe has in fact created since the 1950s a community of nations enjoying unparalleled levels of peace, security, prosperity and tolerance. It is important that Turkey, which has made significant advances both in material terms and in the texture of its democratic life, should not feel excluded from that community by a spurious and anachronistic notion of Christendom.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist