Opening of Glenstal Conference

27 June 2006

The title I have been given for this introduction is one of those deceptively simple ones that can easily lure one into agreeing much too readily to speak on it. A quick and necessarily oversimplified glance around our world would give some idea of the complexity of the issues that it raises.

A question of the relationship and/or distinction between religion and society would, I suspect, be met with some incomprehension in much of the Islamic world, where society is religious and it is difficult to draw any line between them. For many Muslims, the idea of the secular state, which we tend to see as a high point of social evolution, is an abomination. The attempt to build society without reference to religion would appear to them as decadence. Muslim societies, like Egypt and Turkey, which try to build a secular state often find intense religiously motivated opposition to such a project.

In the United States, the relationship between religion and society varies widely according to region, class and so on, but it often appears in political discourse in ways that are very different from what would be normal in our part of the world. In Latin America, religion has been one of the strongest motivating forces behind liberation movements and one of the strongest motivating forces opposing them.

In Western Europe, on the other hand, there would be many who would say that the answer to the question is simple: religion and society are about two separate spheres which should be kept apart – the private and the public. Religious convictions are all very well, and everyone is entitled to their own view as to whether religion is a good thing, but if religious convictions are allowed to influence political, economic, social policies and choices, the result will be division and conflict

The more I think of it, the more it seems to me that the big challenge in the increasingly globalised world of the twenty-first century will be to arrive at some way of understanding how different world views should, can, (or perhaps do whether we are aware of it or not) influence our public choices and attitudes.

I just want to make some scattered remarks about our model of the relationship between society and religion.

Firstly, I would draw attention to an important reality about the new Europe. The religious map of what we think of as Europe is changing dramatically – and that is not just because of the arrival of large numbers of Muslims and members of other faiths and cultures. The Christian religious map is changing and this is especially true if we think of Russia as part of that picture. We are accustomed to thinking of Catholicism as being the largest Christian denomination in Europe. That will probably remain so at least in the short term, but now the second largest will be the Orthodox Churches.

That will bring with it a critique of many things that we either take for granted or regard as inevitable, or both. Most of them are emerging from having lived for decades in an atheistic society. They see another form of godless society emerging in the West. The Russian Orthodox participants at a recent conference I attended made it clear, that they view what is happening in Western Europe – the waning of religious commitment, participation and practice, the moral confusion, the decline in vocations, the all-pervasive secularisation with some dismay, not least because they recognise that the culture of Europe has been built on the combination of Eastern and Western, Slav and Roman. They remain proud of the influence of Byzantine thought in the West long after the break between East and West. They do not want to see it lost.

A particular example of the challenge that the influence of Eastern Christianity will bring to the new Europe is in relation to the question of freedom, human rights and human dignity. Their experience of the Communist years makes them very sensitive to these issues.

The Russian Orthodox Church, in association with other elements of Russian society, reflected earlier this year on these questions. They produced a declaration which was seen as an attempt to reformulate human rights in opposition to the Western understanding. But, though it did differ from the western approach, that was not the focus of what they sought to do:

“Their task was rather to give a Christian interpretation of some fundamental categories that move world politics today – those of human rights and liberties”.

The declaration is based on the idea that we cannot sensibly talk about human rights unless we begin with an understanding of the meaning and purpose of human life and freedom. It says, “Any separation of (human) rights from morality means their profanation, for there is no such thing as immoral dignity” It goes on to say that “We see as dangerous the ‘invention’ of such ‘rights’ as to legitimise a behaviour condemned by both traditional morality and historical religions” . Therefore, almost at the beginning of the declaration, it stresses we need to be clear that there are two kinds of freedom: “inner freedom from evil and freedom of moral choice. Freedom from evil is valuable per se, whereas freedom of choice becomes valuable and the person gains dignity inasmuch as the chosen alternative is good”.

This is remarkably similar to the concern of Pope John Paul that “Choices once unanimously considered criminal and rejected by the common moral sense are gradually becoming socially acceptable”. He pointed to the same concern as the Russian statement, namely that a coherent approach to these questions must begin with some understanding of the meaning of life and human dignity. He also pointed out that freedom is not just about choosing between possible lines of action; it is about how we relate to others and about what we are making of ourselves.

The ramifications of this new Orthodox presence will be very considerable – for instance in the dialogue between our stress on the individual and the Eastern insistence on the human person as essentially a being in relationship. At the centre of our understanding of freedom we need to recognise that it is about how we relate to one another and to God, as well as to the world we share. An individualistic understanding of freedom, therefore, is a contradiction. If I put the word ‘my’ before concepts like peace and justice and truth, I distort them. If these cannot be shared, they cannot exist.

Perhaps there is a deeper question here. It is not just in relation to human rights and dignity, justice and freedom that we have to build on an understanding of the meaning of life.

In Ireland and in other Western countries, we hear repeated calls for something called “leadership”. I often wonder what that would be like. Presumably we do not want a dictator; presumably we do not want a figure so charismatic that people follow him or her without reflection.

I suspect that what is meant is that we want someone to tell us where we should be trying to go as a society and how we should get there. Perhaps it is a cry for a sense of meaning and purpose. If so, the question arises, ‘is our kind of society capable of providing or of making space for such a sense of purpose?’ Does the presumption that religion and politics should be separate spheres not amount to saying that questions about the meaning of life have no place in political society?

Many years ago, Frank Sheed pointed to a paradox that arises when one imagines that the State as such could function as an educator. Everybody seems to agree that education is about forming people for life. But if you ask the State what is a human person, the State has to reply that this is a philosophical/religious question on which many different views exist among the citizens and which the State is not qualified to answer. If you ask the State what the purpose of human life is, it must give a similar answer. How, Sheed asks, can it hope to prepare persons for life when it knows neither what a person is nor what life is for?

Perhaps our western states, which try to keep what is described as the “divisive” issue of religion out of the picture, find themselves faced with the same dilemma: without a vision of what human life is and what its destiny is, the call for leadership can never be answered. The result is widespread disillusionment with politics and the political process. I suggest that this disillusionment is inevitable unless we find a way out of the dilemma.

And the way forward requires careful thought. The idea that it would be better to keep religion out of public life and public decision making arose for reasons that are very understandable in the light of the religious wars that have marred the history of Europe. Religion, even the Christian religion, has been misused, making it a coercive power rather than a proclamation of the God who is love.

In fact, on a less horrific level, we do well to try to analyse the slogan that often leads us to think that we should not allow our convictions to be visible or audible in the public sphere. People say, “It is not right to impose one’s views, particularly religious views, on others”.

The principle is entirely correct. In his message for the World Day of Peace this year, Pope Benedict quoted his predecessor, John Paul II: “To try to impose on others by violent means what we consider to be the truth is an offence against the dignity of the human being and ultimately an offence against God in whose image he is made”.

The role of the Christian Churches is not to be a substitute State or to be a rival to the State. In fact churches do not have, and would not wish to have, any mechanism by which we could “impose our views” on society.

Pope Benedict’s encyclical reinforces a point which is sometimes misunderstood. The social doctrine of the Church is not an ideology, not a political programme which the Church seeks to impose; it is theology. The Catholic Church does not seek to impose its views as to how society is to be organised:

The Church “does not intervene in technical questions with her social doctrine, nor does she propose or establish models of social organisation”. On the contrary, the words ‘teaching’ and ‘doctrine’ indicate that the Church is seeking to do something quite different from the State’s role:

“…it is not the Church’s responsibility to make (Catholic social teaching) prevail in political life. Rather, the Church wishes to help form consciences in political life and to stimulate greater insight into the authentic requirements of justice as well as greater readiness to act accordingly, even when this might involve conflict with situations of personal interest. Building a just social and civil order, wherein each person receives what is his or her due, is an essential task which every generation must take up anew. As a political task, this cannot be the Church’s immediate responsibility. Yet, since it is also a most important human responsibility, the Church is bound to offer, through the purification of reason and through ethical formation, her own specific contributions towards understanding the requirements of justice and achieving them politically… She has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice, which always demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and prosper”.

The Gospel vision does affect how we view society and its goals because it influences how we understand the human person. We see ourselves in the light of the Incarnation and Redemption with what Pope John Paul called “wonder and amazement”. We understand the goal of human life as infinitely surpassing human hopes and abilities and imagination, while infinitely fulfilling them.

Other people have other visions of the meaning and purpose of human life. They are the result of their search for truth and meaning and we Christians can recognise that search as being ultimately their sacred search for God. That is why we have an obligation to respect that search, to be tolerant and welcoming towards all fellow seekers. The foundation of our tolerance is not that we think that all sorts of people have all sorts of views and that in terms of our lives together in society these views do not matter greatly.

It matters enormously because it is that search for a truth and meaning that will make sense of life that is the real foundation for our common striving. To think that it does not matter is to tell people that their deepest questions and motivations are of no concern to our society and that can believe whatever they like, since it does not matter a lot.

There is a fundamental common base in our shared humanity, but if we try to build on that as a sort of lowest common denominator, we miss the richness and the reality of our commitments. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it like this:

“The abstract language of rights fails to enter into the depth of what Hinduism means to a Hindu, or Confucianism to its devotees. It suggests that the particularities of culture are mere accretions to our essential and indivisible humanity, instead of being the very substance of how most people learn what it is to be human. In particular, it understates the difficulty and necessity of making space for strangers – the very thing that has been the source of racism and exclusion in almost every society known to history”.

A society which does not recognise this will be one to which people cannot feel fully committed. It is also a recipe for a society which will be riven by unspoken and misunderstood divisions. It will be a society in which citizens who are aware of the importance of the religious tradition to which they belong will feel that they have been told to leave an essential part of themselves behind when they enter the public arena.

We need as Rabbi Jonathan Sacks expressed it, to be bilingual in order to live in a society, in which we know that people belong to all sorts of religious groups, cultural and philosophical traditions which give meaning and energy to their lives. What is more, these groups, particularly religious ones, embody that meaning and energy in the life of a community. Each of these communities has its own language. And we need to learn another language of citizenship in which we can discuss our vision for society in terms which make sense to those whose religious tradition or world view differs from ours. The danger is, and I believe we see it now, that if we have no underlying language, or think it irrelevant, our social discourse will be empty and ultimately boring and plagued by unacknowledged divisions wrongly thought to be of no importance. Bigotry is almost always the result of ignorance, not of a respectful desire to understand where the other is coming from.

Two years ago, the then Cardinal Ratzinger and Marcello Pera, President of the Italian Senate published a dialogue on whether European civilisation was dying or whether it might have a future. It was published under the title Senza Radici, (Without Roots). I think an edited version has been published in the US earlier this year. Some of the present Pope’s concluding points can serve as my conclusion:

“Multiculturalism, which is so passionately promoted, can sometimes amount to an abandonment and denial of what is one’s own, a flight from ones own realities. Multiculturalism cannot exist without common foundations, with out orientation points offered by one’s own values. It certainly cannot exist without respect for what is sacred. It involves going out to meet respectfully the sacred things of others, but we can only do that if the sacred, God, is not alien to ourselves. Certainly we can and should learn from what is sacred for others, but also, before the others and for the others it is our duty to nourish in ourselves respect for what is sacred and to show the face of the revealed God, the God who has compassion for the poor and the weak, for widows and orphans, for the stranger, the God who is so human that he himself became a man, a suffering man, who by suffering with us gave dignity and hope to our pain…

For other cultures of the world, there is something deeply alien about the absolute secularism that is developing in the West. They are convinced that a world without God has no future. Multiculturalism itself thus demands that we return once more into our own souls.

We do not see what the future of Europe will be. Here we must agree with Toynbee, that the fate of a society always depends on its creative minorities… Christian believers should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority, helping Europe to reclaim what is best in its heritage and thereby to place itself at the service of all humankind”.

METROPOLITAN KIRILL of Smolensk and Kaliningad, European Conference on Christian Culture, Vienna, 3-5 May 2006.

Declaration on Human Rights and Dignity, Adopted by the World Russian People’s Council, Moscow, 4-6 April 2006.

JOHN PAUL II, Evangelium Vitae, 4.

Cf., SHEED, F., Society and Sanity, Sheed and Ward, 1953, p.4.

BENEDICT XVI, Message for the World Day of Peace 2006, 9.

CSDC, 68.

DCE, 28a.

JOHN PAUL II, Redemptor Hominis, 10.

SACKS, J., The Dignity of Difference, Continuum 2002, p. 62.

Cf. SACKS, J., The Persistence of Faith, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1991, pp. 66-69.

RATZINGER J., in RATZINGER, J., & PERA, M., Senza Radici, Mondadori 2004, pp. 71f.