Christians must influence EU policy by “getting involved on a day to day basis with its work”, former Taoiseach John Bruton has said.
In a speech last night jointly hosted by the Iona Institute and the quarterly review, Studies, Mr Bruton said that Christians “opting out of the EU in an effort to recreate a romanticised past would lead nowhere.”
Mr Bruton also pointed out that the newly ratified Lisbon treaty expressly calls for formal structures of dialogue between the European Union and the Churches.
The EU, he added, would not do this unless it believed that such dialogue was justifiable.
He also rejected the view that the EU was becoming a “cold place” for Christians.
This could only happen, he said, if religious believers “refuse to engage with the EU, either because they would prefer if the EU did not exist at all, or because they find it more comfortable to retreat behind a barrier created by exclusive ethnic nationalism.”
Mr Bruton also commended one of the core documents of the European People’s Party (EPP), ‘A Union of Values’, for its commitment to Christian Democracy including the right to life from conception to natural death. (Fine Gael is a member of the EPP).
And he praised the Catholic Church in Europe for its support of the EU and concluded that “people of faith have made the EU what it is today.”
The belief that religion and politics should be kept separate was “unrealistic” and “naive”, he added.
The relentless pursuit of such a belief led to tyranny or the breakdown of democracy, Mr Bruton said.
“As long as religious belief exists, and there is every reason to believe it will always exist, a secularist notion that religion and politics should be kept entirely separate is simply unrealistic, even naive. And naive beliefs pursued relentlessly, as they often are, lead toward either tyranny or the breakdown of the pluralism that is required for democracy to function,” he said.
“For example, to seek to use the power of the state to remove every symbol or sign of religious belief from the public space would be just as immoderate as were past efforts to harness the powers of the state to push one religion on people.”
It was worth recalling, he added, that the European Convention on Human Rights, agreed to in 1949 before the EU came into existence, guaranteed to every European the right to “manifest his religion, with others in public or private, in teaching, practice, worship and observance”.
The EU “submits itself to the whole convention, including to this article about how people may exercise their religious freedom”, Mr Bruton said.
