Secularism's Empty Box

by Brent Kallmer

There is a little-known fact about the flag of the European Union: the twelve yellow stars arranged in a circle against a blue backdrop came from somewhere else. Or, perhaps better said, they came from someone else. That someone is the Blessed Virgin Mary — the "woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars" (Rev. 12:1).

The absence of the figure of the Virgin Mary serves as something of an allegory for the story of Western Europe over the last half century: its rapid secularization, declining birthrates, and plummeting Mass attendance have all drawn attention. The failed EU constitution left conspicuously absent any reference to the continent's Christian heritage, instead blandly citing as inspiration "the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe . . . "

The countries of the European Union have not, to put it mildly, given much heed to the Christian moral vision that undergirded the integration project begun in the aftermath of the Second World War. The secularism to which Europe has gravitated in the years since has been accompanied by some rather untoward developments, particularly within the realms of integrating minority cultures (including Muslim immigrant groups), European family life, and the prospect of further European Union enlargement.

The Christian Roots of the European Union

Still, even today, the EU bears the stamp of the continent's Christian heritage. An example of this can be seen in the increased interest of late in reviving the EU constitution, a project that has been in limbo since 2005 when the French and Dutch rejected a draft of the document in separate referenda. In an opinion piece for the Financial Times, the former secretary-general of the European Convention charged with developing the draft constitution, Lord John Olav Kerr, argued that among the elements future drafts of the constitution should retain is a "subsidiarity" mechanism that gives national parliaments more say in the initial stages of legislation and greater monitoring ability of decisions made in Brussels (the seat of the European Commission, Council, and Parliament).

The concept of subsidiarity, as many Catholics know, was famously articulated by Pope Pius XI in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931), which stated:

It is an injustice, a grave evil, and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies . . . Of its very nature, the true aim of all social activity should be to help individual members of the social body, but never to destroy them.

It is no exaggeration to say that the tapestry of European integration was woven together from the thread of Christian thought. At the center of it all was the towering figure of Jacques Maritain, whose articulation of a philosophy of personalism took root in the minds of both thinkers within the Church and European politics.

Personalism, as such, was not Maritain's invention: it grew from western theologians' efforts to conceptualize how the Three Persons of the Holy Trinity could comprise One God. In its contemporary form, it integrated Renaissance and Enlightenment formulations of the dignity of the human person, including Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.

Though its insight was that individuals exist and find their meaning in community, personalism avoided two errors: the consignment of the human person to the atomized isolation of individualism on the one hand, and to the faceless mass of collectivism on the other.

Christian personalism was not mere arid intellectualizing or vague utopianism, however; it concretely influenced the thought of a number of key figures in the European integration project, including the first chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, and French foreign minister Robert Schuman. Both men were instrumental in the first steps of European integration, and both were serious Catholics.

Adenauer had by a happy accident discovered Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno while hiding from the Nazis in a Benedictine abbey where his old friend was the abbot, and found in the encyclicals a convincing articulation of how Christian charity could form the foundation of a rightly ordered society. Schuman — a Knight of the Order of Pope Pius IX — was deeply influenced by the writings of Pope Pius XII, Thomas Aquinas, and Maritain.

In one of his many talks on Europe (recently compiled and published by Ignatius Press as Europe: Today and Tomorrow), then-Cardinal Ratzinger seized on the often-overlooked spiritual and intellectual heritage of the European Union, claiming that "there is no doubt that among the founding fathers of European unification the Christian heritage was considered the nucleus of this historical identity," and again that "The fathers of European unification after the Second World War took as their point of departure a fundamental compatibility between the moral heritage of Christianity and the moral heritage of the European Enlightenment."

The Multicultural Dilemma

The challenges of multiculturalism — a policy position that seeks to integrate members of minority cultures into society without forcing their assimilation into the so-called dominant culture — bring into focus some of the conflicts created by Europe's fundamentally secular identity. The integration of Muslim groups, as Philip Jenkins points out in his study God's Continent: Christianity, Islam and Europe's Religious Crisis (forthcoming from Oxford University Press), necessarily requires that policymakers have some sense of what successful integration looks like. How is success measured? What is the difference between a French Muslim and a Muslim who happens to be living in France?

While there are many examples of peaceful coexistence of diverse cultures within the various countries of Western Europe, the failures of multiculturalist policies tend to be spectacular. They include, for example, practices such as the importation or exportation of brides for arranged marriages and "honor killings" of young Muslim women who run afoul of their families by adopting European customs and attitudes.

The issue such practices raise is how far efforts at cultural accommodation can go before the non-negotiable core of European values is reached, which of course presupposes a consensus on what those values in fact are.

It all touches upon the overdue and growing suspicion that multiculturalism is a self-devouring concept. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger characteristically put his finger on the foundational issue: "Multiculturalism, which is continually and passionately encouraged and promoted, is sometimes little more than an abandonment and denial of what is one's own heritage."

The Holy Father is not alone in this assessment; fellow German Angela Merkel commented prior to her election as that country's chancellor that "the notion of multiculturalism has fallen apart. Anyone coming here must respect our constitution and tolerate our Western and Christian roots." Indeed, the observation that multiculturalism has often translated in practice to a cultural relativism that exalts everything but Western culture has been shared by a surprisingly diverse group of observers, including author Salman Rushdie and iconoclast intellectual Christopher Hitchens.

The Birth Dearth

Given current fertility rates across Europe, it is remarkable indeed that little more than two centuries ago an Englishman, Thomas Malthus, could argue convincingly that overpopulation posed the principal danger to Western civilization.

For a society to maintain its numbers, it must bear an average of 2.1 children per woman. According to a 2002 United Nations population report, countries throughout Europe have dropped below this level: France and Ireland to 1.8 children per woman, Germany to 1.4 (the continent's average), and Italy and Spain to 1.2.

The causes behind the birth dearth are varied and complex; some of the factors at work include large-scale migrations from rural to urban areas where space is at a premium (and children considered a "liability"), a trend toward marriage later in life, and increases in female literacy and enrollment in schools. These, however, might be considered symptoms of the birth dearth phenomenon as much as causes of it. More obvious causes are, of course, the increased use of contraceptives and abortion.

So, quite aside from the dilemma of multiculturalism, Europe faces a more fundamental problem — namely, producing more Europeans. The political and economic consequences of under-population are legion, one of which being that the generous welfare states to which Europeans are accustomed cannot function without a young, vigorous work force to fund them. More generally, prosperous economies are not produced by anemic labor forces. Consider, for example, the prediction of economist Philip Longman that Italy's working-age population will decline by 40% over the next 40 years.

Growing Pains

From its inception in 1957 the European Union (known originally as the European Economic Community) has expanded from its original six countries (France, West Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) to 27. And while expansion of the EU has brought a great many economic benefits, these have been accompanied by significant political strains that have left many Europeans loath to countenance further enlargement. Critics contend that the institutions of the European Union were not designed to administer such a large political entity, and suspect enlargement is a ploy to duck the more difficult work of deepening the level of economic and political integration among existing members.

The most nettlesome issue associated with enlargement has to do with whether nominally Muslim Turkey should be admitted to the Union. German chancellor Angela Merkel is opposed to Turkish membership in the EU, as is Nicolas Sarkozy, a center-right contender for the French presidency.

Interestingly, Sarkozy, a Catholic of Hungarian descent, waded into uncharted waters with his book La Republique, les religions, 1'esperance (The Republic, Religions, Hope), which advocates a softening of the strict secularism that has characterized French public life since the enactment in 1905 of a law that stripped public funding from all religious institutions. Sarkozy favors a "laïcité positive" (positive secularism) that makes the practice of one's religion a fundamental right. He also argues in favor of an "Islam of France" as opposed to an "Islam in France."

The assertion that Europe's problems are primarily spiritual is not the preaching of vague pieties, but a matter of the most practical import. A set of policy initiatives will not suffice to address the continent's identity problems; these must be accompanied by a collective realization that secularism, on its own, does not have the motive force to sustain itself.

Secular news sources such as The Economist and the Financial Times view the challenges facing the European Union as mainly economic. Through this lens, prosperity is to be achieved through the right economic policies, such as reforming burdensome national welfare systems and making markets more competitive.

In his comments on multiculturalism mentioned above, then-Cardinal Ratzinger teased out what is inevitably missed by this type of purely economic analysis: the indulgence in the West of a sort of self-hatred that has become pathological. The West, he says,

. . . no longer loves itself; from now on it sees in its own history only what is blameworthy and destructive, whereas it is no longer capable of perceiving what is great and pure. In order to survive, Europe needs a new — and certainly a critical and humble — acceptance of itself, that is, if it wants to survive.

In this light, news that the Holy Father is preparing to release a motu proprio allowing wider celebration of the traditional Latin Mass appears a powerful response to the current state of European culture. Also interesting is the support for the motu proprio among intellectuals throughout Europe, demonstrated by French and Italian scholars in statements that appeared in France's Le Figaro and Italy's Il Foglio last December, and by German and English groups in January. The latter proclaimed that "there is great hope and expectation that this treasure of civilization will be freed from its current restrictions."

Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon touched upon a related cultural phenomenon in an address to university students at the Pontifical Council for the Laity's 8th International Youth Forum, stating that "we find ourselves in a curious situation where all too many of the most highly educated men and women in history have a religious formation that remains at a rather primitive level," and that "poor formation represents a special danger in a society like ours where education in other areas is so advanced."

In the end, though Hilaire Belloc's claim that "the Faith is Europe and Europe is the Faith," may find little hearing in any version of a European constitution, it can hardly be denied as an historical fact. And there is a growing sense within Europe that secularism is an empty box — that a continent which has replaced its mighty army of saints with a group of quibbling technocrats and administrators is a land without heroes. Indeed, it is, at last, members of this particularly unconventional culture — the saints — who are uniquely capable of bringing back to the European continent the glories of a heritage it has forgotten but cannot live without.

© Ignatius Press

This item 7953 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org