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15/05/2004 |
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The battle for the soul of Europe is under way - the battle, that is, to convince the EU that it has a soul. What gains Europe by an EUtopia of free-flowing goods and capital, the continent's Catholic bishops asked on 1 May, if it loses that soul? Europe, they said, has a mission to fulfil which it forgets at its peril. Last Saturday a historic gathering of church movements in Stuttgart put flesh on that idea. "Together for Europe" took place just a week after enlargement and on the eve of the anniversary of the Schuman declaration of 1950 which laid the foundations of the Union. Historic, because this was the first Europe-wide interdenominational meeting of movements from the Catholic, evangelical, Orthodox and Anglican traditions. That such a meeting could take place at all is down to a sudden new connectedness in the late 1990s among and between the charismatic movements within the Churches. Seven movements - four Catholic (Focolare, Cursillos, Sant'Egidio, Sch�nstatt) and three reformed (YMCA; an evangelisation initiative called ProChrist; and a charismatic renewal within the Evangelical Lutheran Church known as GGE) organised the gathering. It was big - 10,000 people from 175 movements attended; another 100,000 watched it on a live TV feed - and it was slick, a happy blend of Teutonic timekeeping and Italian �lan. From the Vatican came the heads of the Christian unity and laity councils, Cardinal Walter Kasper and Archbishop Stanislaw Rylko. A Presbyterian pastor from Cuba represented the World Council of Churches, and the former Bishop of Hertford, Robin Smith, the Archbishop of Canterbury. There were plenty of Orthodox leaders in salt 'n pepper beards and black stove-pipe hats while messages of good will came from, among others, Pope John Paul II, Bertie Ahern, the King of Belgium, and - oddly - Val�ry Giscard d'Estaing, president of the body responsible for the constitution which has a God-shaped hole in its preamble. Arriving from Britain, where the Murdoch press feeds off knee-jerk suspicion of all things EU, spiritual europhilia is a shock. The argument of the day - that European political unification is an expression of, and depends on, a deeper spiritual mission to the world and to itself - is not the sort of thing one often hears in Britain. Stuttgart was an apt place to proclaim this message, Pastor Friedrich Aschoff told the conference. Today the prosperous modern hme to the Mercedes and Porsche car factories, it was the bombed-out city where Lutheran Evangelical leaders gathered in 1945 to confess their Church's failures in opposing Nazism. That is where contemporary Europe begins - in Auschwitz, said Andrea Riccardi, an historian at Rome's Sapienza University and founder of the Community of Sant'Egidio; the Holocaust stood as a warning to Europe never again to become the home of technological barbarism". There was much to be grateful for, he added: Europeans have not fought each other for more than 50 years, and young Europeans no longer see themselves as rivals. But this is not enough. "The big dream of the new millennium must be peace in Europe leading to world peace," he said. "Just as a war in Europe meant world war, so must peace in Europe lead to world peace." But that means abandoning the idea that economic interests are worth dying for. And it means Europe can no longer live for itself. Africa, said Riccardi, "waits like poor Lazarus before the door of wealthy Europe seated at a lavish banquet...we will either survive together or perish together". He summed it up in a slogan: pace nell'Europa, pace nel mondo. Chiara Lubich, founder of Focolare, said Europe had a mission to universal fraternity, to build networks of love. (In cold print, Focolare's charism -to build solidarity between peoples - seems risibly naive. Yet like Sant'Egidio's commitment to peace, it has concrete expressions, and focolarini really do practise the "art of loving".) Let us live a deeper fraternity in Europe, said Lubich, as a stepping-stone towards building fraternity throughout the world. She echoed Riccardi's slogan with one of her own - a "united Europe with a vocation to world unity". The vision of the fathers of the EU - Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer, all Christian democrats - was at once political and spiritual, Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, was keen to stress. The stages of building the EU - the coal and steel treaty of 1950, the euro, the current constitution - would not have been possible without a greater idea of Europe towards which these were instruments, he argued, adding that these are also, therefore, "spiritual gestures". You could almost feel Murdoch shudder. Prodi then took off. The euro, he said, was a means of creating a multipolar world in which the EU could have relations of equality, not of dominion, over other nations. It was a "union of minorities" in which no country was either inferior or superior to another, a political union with a soul, "which makes justice and reconciliation its calling". The EU has four great objectives, he believes: caring for the weakest, upholding the rights of others, reconciliation, and overcoming fear. The last two in his list related to war and terrorism. The mess in Iraq and the Middle East, said Prodi, was a direct consequence of American unilateralism; war, he said, fuels terrorism and therefore could not be the answer to it. The task of Christians was to counter the logic of fear and war with the antidote of faith. As the fathers of the EU were committed Christians, unafraid to seek guidance from their faith, said Prodi, so must Christians now be the leaven of the new Europe, nurturing - together with other faiths - the soul of the European project. It was stirring stuff. After the big-vision Catholicism came some evangelical straight-talking. Europe is in urgent need of Jesus Christ, said Ulrich Parzany, evangelical Lutheran pastor, secretary-general of the YMCA in Germany and founder of a nationwide evangelisation initiative, ProChrist. History showed - Pastor Parzany added in a rather good phrase - that "a man who decides to emancipate from God becomes a wolf to others". And because democracy "depends on conditions that democracy itself cannot bring about", he was concerned at the absence of a mention of God in the preamble to the draft EU constitution. Because this last was followed by deafening applause, I put it to Pastor Parzany and Professor Riccardi at lunchtime that the crucial part of the EU constitution was not the philosophy of the preamble but the articles in the charter itself. Surely regimes which regularly invoke God as the supreme authority do not, on the whole, have a proud record in the human rights department? Parzany agreed that while a mention of God and Christianity would act as a useful reminder, "the destiny of Europe does not depend on whether God is named in the constitution". That destiny, he said, hinges on the witness of people rather than texts. But Riccardi wanted to see the mention nonetheless. The limitation of the European Constitution was its "lack of pathos", its lack of feeling, he said. Christian history formed a large part of that core European sentiment; he would like therefore to see a reference to Christianity - " in a non-monopolistic fashion" - along with a reference to Auschwitz. The charter, he said, should contain a reminder of the darkness from which the EU was founded to escape. Lunch over - the corridors were full of steaming bratwurst - hundreds of young people danced into the stadium bearing banners in different languages - "mundo unido", "grenzen �berwinden", "forgiveness". They gave testimonies: a young Slovenian woman, who said her country had been cut off from Europe against its people's will, was so happy to be a part of the EU - yes, it was a gift of God, she said. Andy, 22, dreamed of a Europe which would be like his football team in Munich which makes friends with Afghans and Kosovans by playing them. A Spanish member of Focolare, Clara L�pez, told how, after the Madrid bombings on 11 March, her inbox overflowed with messages of solidarity from all over the world. Love, she said, was stronger than hate, and that's what Europe was about. If this was the message ad extra, "Together for Europe" was also about demonstrating the new unity among Europe's church movements. They are no longer so new, but until the late 1990s seldom networked. Then came the 1998 Pentecost meeting of the movements at the Vatican, in which the Pope encouraged them to deepen communio - a task for which Focolare in particular has assumed responsibility. Meanwhile, Pentecostalism in the reformed Churches and the charismatic renewal in the Catholic Church - which share similar experiences of the action of the Holy Spirit - helped to dissolve the denominational boundaries even while institutionally their Churches remained apart. This paved the way for the 1999 Lutheran -Catholic meeting at Augsburg a year later, where after 500 years the two Churches agreed on the doctrine of justification by faith. That declaration led to regular ecumemical meetings of European movement leaders, at one of which - Rome in 2001 - Stuttgart was planned. Some of the movements had a brief chance to say who they were. Focolare was founded in Trent in 1943, spread to Italy and then from 1958 to the rest of Europe, and now has 2m. members around the world, many of whom live in its 33 towns. Sant'Egidio was founded in Rome in 1968 and has 60,000-odd members across 70 countries, practises liturgical prayer and solidarity with the poor, and works in inter-religious dialogue and for peace. Sch�nstatt, founded in 1914 by a priest who was later interned in a concentration camp, reckons several million people are in contact with the movement - which stresses faith in the guidance of God in the here and now - in more than 90 nations. But just when you thought the big, continent-straddling movements were all Catholic, up popped the Anglican Alphameister himself, Nicky Gumbel, a lone Sloane among the eurovolk. It turns out his father was a German Jew born in - of all places - Stuttgart. So Nicky wasn't brought up Christian, he explained, but discovered Jesus (etc.), designed the Alpha course, and has spent the last 11 years watching it blaze through the world: 6m. people - of all denominations and none - in 147 countries have watched the videos, of whom 75 per cent were between 18 and 35. He was delighted, he said, to be contributing to the "re-evangelisation of Europe and the transformation of society". Cardinal Kasper, whose trademark grin does wonders for defrosting the Orthodox in Russia, wound the day up in great excitement. What Europe needed, yes, was "its heart - a heart full of God". The movements were carrying on what the monks and the saints did in early Europe - building up a spiritualit�t der Gemeinschaft, a "spirituality of communion", he said, adding that unity was breaking out everywhere, and the energy and spirit of the movements were testimony to that. "What we need", he said, was "a new Pentecost" - but from his speech it appeared that was exactly what we had. "Together for Europe" ended with a "message": that the love of God was urging the Union to be much more than a market or a security barrier but to live fraternal love through sharing goods and resources, deepening cultural links, being open to other countries, expressing solidarity with the weak, respecting human life, and forging peace. It is the sort of thing one should hear more in Britain. Kitty Arbuthnott, who works with Nicky Gumbel promoting Alpha for Catholics, read the final pledge. Then the Queen of Belgium led everyone in the "Our Father" and the day was over, but for a fair bit of hip-swaying to the strains of Sei mein Licht, sei mein Licht - "Shine, Jesus, Shine". By then, the excitement had got to me. Vorsprung durch Christus! as they - should now - say in Germany.
Austen Ivereigh
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