Brussels, 06/11/2006 (Agence Europe) - The European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security recently appealed for a European Union that respected both Christian and rational ideas. On 30 October Mr Frattini declared in a column in the Libération newspaper that, “Christianity is not just nostalgia for the past but a living idea, which seeks to serve the cause of peace by guaranteeing freedom and, in pride of place, religious freedom. This affirmation can, on the one hand, reduce the divide with the secular world and, on the other hand, help the Europe of tomorrow, as it contributes to a European identity that requests religions to define their relationship to freedom and reason”. According to the Commissioner, Europe initially distanced itself from its Christian roots and only spoke out timidly in the fight against anti-Semitism or more recently, against Islamophobia but, “Benedict XVI is spurring us on by reopening the debate on the relationship between religion and reason ('it is not religion and violence, but rather religion and reason that go together') or when the theme of religious freedom and the political status of religion in society is there for us to see”. The Commissioner was apparently concerned by the ideas expressed by the Pope and the Conference of Ratisbonne and stated that, “posing the theme of Christian roots presents us with a triple challenge today: that of our European identity; the reaffirmation of a religious universe and that of a Christianity that is not just a memory of the past but rather, by posing the theme of freedom as a way forward for dialogue, a part of our future”. As a supporter of the construction of a European identity, Frattini considers that that the “debt that principles and values of modernity have to the Judeo-Christian tradition” should not be ignored and that in this respect “it is important for our future that we succeed in reconstituting this memory…that we reappropriate this shared core around which and from which it will be possible to build, in openness, this new supranational Community called Europe”.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit (German Greens) directly confronted a “Pope who lashes out for a claimed dialogue of cultures” and who at Ratisbonne “celebrates the apparently contradictory nature of reason and Christian faith”. Cohn-Bendit specifically targeted the links the Pope benefits from in the political sphere between, “budding soldiers of the faith who are already preaching what's allowed and what isn't and what is politically correct or not. In the footsteps of his Conquering Holiness, we are seeking to rehabilitate the Judeo-Christian God in the ECT (European Constitutional Treaty)”. The MEP explained that this diatribe of “Catholicism, as any religion, wielding seductive powers, is not surprising. However, if such a 'collective neurosis' assumes a proportion whereby it impregnates political speeches, it is surprising”. The MEP spoke out against idea that Europe required “stable references” from backward-looking or communalist visions instead of “the law as criteria for unification and the regulating principle of the European project” even if, he explained, it was a “choice containing risks”. (bc)