it enjoyed popular support because it delivered growth and prosperity, especially in its early years. But the last two decades have seen a big change. The treaty that set up the single currency obliged all member states of the now European Union, with the exception of Denmark and Britain who had opted out, to adopt it once they met the economic criteria. For the sake of the political dynamic, the cri- teria for joining were sometimes fudged. The more fragile economies struggled, especially when, faced with economic downturn and unemployment, they were bound by exchange rates and interest rates better attuned to the stronger economies than to their own needs. Over the same period, the EU welcomed in the newly liberated countries of eastern and central Europe. Their acceptance by the existing membership has been the supreme achievement of the European Union to date: a brilliant act of generosity in the interests of peace and stability. But it has been accom- panied by migration from the new member states on a scale that few anticipated. That in turn has contributed to massive social change. The resulting tensions have combined to turn public opinion away from support of the European Union and its institutions. None of us can know whether the European
Union could survive the break-up of the single currency. It looks for now as if the departure of some members is more likely than the demise of the whole project. And it may yet be that the crisis will finally bring about the central political governance necessary to make the currency a success. But the pressures of national public opinion make such a dramatic breakthrough very problematic.
G
reater democratic accountability looks to me to be a necessary con- dition of the European Union’s continued success but it is far from
clear whether the founding vision of the EU still commands popular support. The post- war motivations of Monnet look like ancient history 65 years on. The European Union is a secular organisa- tion but its founders were Christian Democrats and at its core are values rooted in the very Christian notion of solidarity. Its members remain 27 independent countries but with a shared belief in peaceful coexistence, democ- racy, social justice and responsibility to the poorer nations of the world. They have created an organisation that both
affirms the nation state and constrains it, and in which national governments do compro- mise for the common good. It has not worked out as its founders expected. But it has worked and, flawed as it inevitably is, it is hard to think of a better realistic alternative, both as a way of managing potential conflict between the members and of promoting their shared values and interests in a dangerous world.
■Sir Stephen Wall is a former Permanent Representative from the United Kingdom to the European Union and the author of A Stranger in Europe: Britain and the EU from Thatcher to Blair, published by Oxford University Press.
CLIFFORD LONGLEY
‘God works in even more mysterious ways than the medieval mind could imagine’
One of the most quoted parts of Pope Benedict’s addresses in Britain a year ago may yet turn out to be his most challenging. In his address in Westminster Hall he asserted that “the world of reason and the world of faith – the world of secular rationality and the world of religious belief – need one another”. He referred to “the distortions of religion” that can arise when “insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion”. So religion – the Catholic religion obviously included – needs purifying by reason. There is work here for a whole army of theologians and philosophers. It is surely time this radical papal challenge was taken up with alacrity. Secular rationality – “reason” in the Pope’s terms – must include science. Galileo’s rational explanation of the movement of the planets has to count as an example of reason purifying religion. It contradicted what was thought to be one of the truths of faith: that the Earth was the centre of the universe. Two centuries later Charles Darwin’s rational explanation of the origin of species contradicted the idea, to which the Catholic Church had fortunately never fully committed itself, that Genesis was a reliable account of the origin of everything. The “more than hypothetical” – to use Pope John Paul II’s words – theory of evolution began a revolution. For instance, the fact that the human race evolved from predecessor species over tens of millions of years poses problems for the doctrine of Original Sin as an event at a one-off moment in time, and hence for all those aspects of Catholic teaching that are derived from it, such as the Atonement. The belief that Jesus Christ had to die a horrible death in order to free us from the stain of Original Sin – “for us and for our salvation” – had a certain logic to it when understood as the necessary reversal of the Fall. But I have met ex-Christians or on-the-edge Christians for whom that was the tipping point where the internal coherence, and hence credibility, of Christianity started to unravel in their minds. Original Sin as a theory to explain
man’s inhumanity to man is a useful idea, but is it just a myth without factual basis? In the light of Darwinian evolution, there are a whole host of “who what why when where” questions. We need dogmatic theologians willing to ask them; and a green light from the supervisors of doctrinal orthodoxy in the Vatican to say they can and should. Catholic moral theology has a similar agenda, and a similar dilemma. The idea that sexual acts are “ordered” towards reproduction, and that sexual acts that are not are “disordered” and hence sinful, presupposes a divine blueprint for the human anatomy from which we may deduce moral norms. But Catholicism has rejected the divine blueprint theory, while retaining the moral framework that it gave rise to. It urgently needs redefining in terms that are compatible with evolutionary biology – with our understanding that human anatomy as we know it is the result of a vast process of mutation and adaptation, some of it random, over millions of years. For me, that does not undermine religious faith but enhances it. God works in even more mysterious ways than the medieval mind could imagine. One fruit of the purifying impact of rationality on theology was the Vatican II revolution in understanding religious freedom. Error may have had no rights, as the classical formula said, but people – even people with erroneous beliefs – certainly did. Other areas have benefited too.
Catholic Social Teaching’s emphasis on the family and the community, rather than the excessive individualism of post-Enlightenment philosophies, is being borne out by the latest findings of brain science, by advances in sociology, and by the findings of child psychology and psychiatry. They are all telling us that to be fully human, we need each other. Even economics has had to learn the lesson that “no man is an island”, and that the pursuit of self-interest, turned into a grand theory, is the road to perdition. The world has never had greater need for a Catholic faith that makes sense of reality. Then we could all go out among the gentiles and proclaim the Good News. If on the other hand we preach a theology of salvation that cannot be reconciled with known science, as in the case of Original Sin, or an attitude to sexuality that implies Darwinian evolution never happened, we are wasting our time. We cannot claim the right to question secular rationality, as Pope Benedict said we should, if we cannot allow secular rationality to question us.
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