Church-State struggle in Europe
I still haven’t been able to email over 127 scientists from the Departments of Zoology, Pharmacology and Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Cambridge to invite them to sign Declan's petition to the UN on therapeutic cloning (see last Friday’s blog “‘Creationism’ biologist quits job”). The computers at our local council's Idea Store Whitechapel library were down on Saturday and Sunday – although it was business as usual for laptop users. Yesterday the computers were back, but the internet was so slow come my second hour that I had to quickly abandon the idea of emailing (on 29 January our library imposed on both our membership cards a maximum of 3 hours of PC access per day), and turn instead to research for a blog. It must be a lack of staff: men's toilets on all four floors are generally locked (including for the disabled); and numerous computers have been down for weeks now – in fact, the computer I normally book for 12.00noon, is not available tomorrow until 2.00pm.
Pope Benedict XVI’s four-day trip (12-14 September) to France highlights church-state struggle in Europe. In an article dated 20 September, the International Herald Tribune said: “Benedict's insistence that religion and politics be ‘open’ to each other - coupled with his strong renewal while in Lourdes of the church's opposition to same-sex couples, communion for the divorced and euthanasia - sends a direct message: The church doesn't want European law to be at odds with church teaching.”
France, Germany and Italy are governed by church-friendly center-right coalitions. Last spring, the right made unprecedented challenges to Italy's 30-year-old law legalising abortion. In 2005, Italy passed a law restricting artificial insemination. The IHT quotes John Allen Jr, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter in the United States, as saying: “Let's not make mistakes, there are laws in Europe that the Vatican would like to change.” The Vatican, Allen added, is concerned about “a progressive secularisation of European institutions” that is “heavily influenced by the French model”.
Unlike any French president in decades, Nicolas Sarkozy sees a more open role for religion in French society. The political commentator Agnes Poirier points out in a recent article in the New Statesman that in December last year, when Sarkozy visited the Pope at the Vatican, the president seized the opportunity to develop a new idea that he called “positive secularism” – an expression that allows religion to play a greater role in public life. “This past week, in Paris, Sarkozy did it again: advocating, in front of the evidently delighted Pope, the benefits of a secularism ‘more open to religions,’” says Poirier.
Critics of the French President say it is not the province of a man elected to uphold the laws of the French republic to talk about God. They say he is violating the basic law of 1905, which establish laïcité, or the institutional Separation of Church and State, a defining characteristic of the French republic. Leading Socialist Party member Julian Dray said that “religion is an individual view in a state that respects religion. The president has to be the guardian of those principles.” Said The Christian Science Monitor: “It's a result of hundreds of years of efforts to remove the influence of the Roman Catholic church from French institutions and reduce its moral authority. French media don't discuss religion. At offices or work, most French believers don't tell colleagues they are going to mass or church. It is seen as a private matter.”
Yet political insiders say Sarkozy is calculating that he will be able to change at least the terms of public expression in France – if not the deeper roots of laïcité, which include the status of churches and religious exercise. “Sarkozy is appealing to conservative Catholics, 70 percent of whom voted for him,” says the Christian Science Monitor. “He is addressing a postsecular generation in the West, where ideas of transcendence, of a spiritual dimension to life, are widely discussed in everything from New Age seminars to the Internet and popular film. He is also speaking to a growing Muslim population in France that is unashamedly willing to wear its faith on its sleeve – or in covering its head.”
While Catholicism remains by far France’s number one religion, Agence France-Presse reports that a survey published last year showed 51 percent of the French consider themselves Catholic, down from 80 percent in the early 1990s. Of those, only 10 percent attend mass regularly, the survey in Le Monde des Religions magazine showed. (According to The Times, fewer than five per cent of the historically Roman Catholic French attend services regularly. Fifteen per cent of the French call themselves atheists - a figure that is double the European average.)
Poirier (she is French) had the following to say in the New Statesman on “positive secularism”:
To speak of positive secularism is to imply that there are two kinds of secularism, one good, the other bad. The supposedly good one, put forward by the Pope and his acolyte Nicolas Sarkozy, is a secularism that would allow politics to mingle with religions. One which would, for instance, turn a blind eye to sects and their actions, one which would accept that people be treated differently according to their faiths, one which would blur the frontiers between the public and private spheres. Sarkozy certainly knows a great deal about the blurring of the two distinct worlds whose separation has been France's trademark for at least two centuries.
Positive secularism would thus emerge to correct secularism as France has always known it, which the French must apparently now think of as negative: too rigorous, too restrictive, too extreme, a secularism that forces assimilation of a heterogeneous population rather than trying to create a tapestry rich with difference.
What the Pope and president pretend not to know is that there is no positive or negative secularism (laïcité in French). Secularism is neutral. It is neither a dogma nor a doctrine. If anything, it's an abstention. Secularism abstains from favouring one religion over another, or favouring atheism over religious belief. It is a political principle that aims at guaranteeing the largest possible coexistence of various freedoms.
From a strictly legal perspective, secularism is extremely positive: it creates a universal freedom to believe or not to believe, and protects individuals from any public interference in their belief, provided that their belief or lack of it does not disturb the peace. As the philosopher Catherine Kintzler wrote in the French weekly Marianne: unlike religion, secularism creates freedom. What religion has ever recognised the rights to believe and not to believe? What religion has promoted the physical emancipation of women? What religion accepts what believers would deem to be blasphemous words?
Instead of speaking of positive secularism, President Sarkozy would have done better to demand in the name of secularism that religions such as Catholicism be less exclusive in their political, intellectual and legal views - or, in other words, more positive.
Poirier points out that according to the political scientist Caroline Fourest, author of a recent book on the Catholic Church, the sympathy between the Pope and the French president shouldn't be surprising. Their “new idea” is a Trojan horse. The term “positive secularism” was actually coined in 2005 by the then Cardinal Ratzinger, whose views have inspired two of President Sarkozy's close aides and speechwriters, the practising Catholic Emmanuelle Mignon and the Dominican friar Philippe Verdin. Poirier: “So what we have witnessed is Nicolas Sarkozy pretending to have an idea that originated at the Vatican, while the Pope, its delighted author, sits back and waits for the president to implement ‘his’ idea. A few days ago, in an interview with the Catholic French daily La Croix, Benedict's private secretary clearly stated that the Holy Father expected the president of France to diligently transform this idea into acts. Machiavelli would be impressed.”
“Is the Roman Catholic Church a beleaguered underdog, fighting for a voice in secular Europe, or a still-mighty power, wielding its influence on European law through friendly center-right governments?” asks the International Herald Tribune. Well, I don’t think Poirier would answer the “beleaguered underdog”.
