Marcello Pera is an interesting chap. He is a pro-Catholic atheist. A book of his called ‘Why we should call ourselves Christians’ has just been published in English with a foreword by Pope Benedict.

Pera,  former president of the Italian Senate, basically believes that without an identity, Europe will dissolve into a multi-cultural mess that no longer knows what it is and the best way to save ourselves from that fate is to re-embrace our Christian culture, if not actually Christian belief itself.

Pera, being an atheist, is clearly himself culturally Christian, rather than a Christian believer. He is also obviously light years away from atheists like Richard Dawkins who view their atheism as a repudiation of Christianity itself.

Pera’s example proves that it is possible to be an atheist without being anti-Christian.

Another atheist who proves this point is Jurgen Habermas who is probably Europe’s most influential living philosopher.

Increasingly he sees that Europe’s Christian heritage has something vital to contribute to Europe’s future and it cannot be contemptuously tossed aside without losing something very valuable.

In fact, Habermas and Cardinal Ratzinger (as the present pope was then) debated this very point in an atmosphere of great mutual respect some years ago.

What a pity most of our home-grown exponents of atheism are of the militant variety whose atheism is often less a philosophy and more a way of radically rejecting the Catholic Church and ‘all its works and empty promises’.

Would that they would learn instead from the likes of Marcello Pera and Jurgen Habermas.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Pera. He begins with Thomas Jefferson (a deist, not a Christian) who maintained that basic human rights must be seen as the gift of God.

Pera says this is something Europe has forgotten.

He adds: “The main flaw of liberalism today is that it has retreated into a solely political and procedural dimension and has forgotten that it is also a tradition with a rich, specific ethical content rooted in European and American history — a history of which Christianity is an essential part. Modernity has resisted and waged war against the Church, while feeding abundantly on its Christian heritage. Its very exaltation of the individual pays secular homage to the Christian message that man was created by God in order to discover the truth about himself and the world.”

Perhaps our Minister for Education could do with reading Pera’s book?