Autor: Weigel, George

Buch: The Cube and the Cathedral

Titel: The Cube and the Cathedral

Stichwort: Christophobie in Europa (8 Gründe; J. Weiler)

Kurzinhalt: When Weiler argues that resistance to any acknowledgment of the Christian sources of Europe's democratic present is a form of Christophobia, what precisely does he mean?

Textausschnitt: Christophobia

72a Before getting into that, let's pause for a moment on Joseph Weiler's provocative usage, "Christophobia." When Weiler argues that resistance to any acknowledgment of the Christian sources of Europe's democratic present is a form of Christophobia, what precisely does he mean? He means, in fact, eight things. Taken together, they form an ideological mesh that, in Weiler's judgment, makes it virtually impossible to see, much less acknowledge, the possibility that Christian ideas, Christian ethics, and Christian history have had anything to do with a Europe committed to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. (Fs)

73a The first component of Christophobia is the twentieth-century experience of the Holocaust, and the conviction in European intellectual and political circles that the genocidal depredations of the Shoah were the logical outcome of Christian anti-Judaism throughout European history. A Europe saying "Never again!" to Auschwitz and all the rest must therefore say "No" to the possibility that Christianity had anything to do with a tolerant Europe. (Fs) (notabene)

73b The second (and Weiler listed these eight in no particular order of magnitude) is what he calls the "1968 mind-set." The youthful rebellion against traditional authority that made "1968" a more long-lasting phenomenon in Europe than in the United States (which, during the same year, experienced the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, vast urban riots, the collapse of the Johnson presidency, and Woodstock) continues today, in one form or another, with the graying veterans of 1968 now well established in European parliaments, cabinets, universities, literary salons, and the media. Part of the rebellion of 1968 was its rebellion against Europe's traditional Christian identity and consciousness. To complete 1968 through the processes of European integration and constitution-making means to complete the erasure of Christianity from any significant place in the European public square. (Fs)

74a The third component of Christophobia, Weiler proposes, is formed by a psychological and ideological backlash to the Revolution of 1989 in central and eastern Europe. Here was a nonviolent revolution that did more to expand the zone of democracy in Europe than anything since the defeat of Hitler-and it was deeply, even decisively, influenced by Christianity; preeminently by Pope John Paul II but also by Lutherans in the old East Germany, Christian Czechs of various denominations, Romanian Reformed Christians, and Baptists in Poland and Czechoslovakia, all working with their secular fellow dissidents to overthrow the old order and bring democracy to Stalin's external empire. This, Weiler suggests, was a wrenching experience: a revolution for democracy inspired in no small part by Christians and carried out against the embodiment of hypersecularism in modern politics-communism. The shock to the sensibilities of the people of 1968, many of whom were not exactly stalwarts in the anticommunist cause, was severe. Denial, in the form of this facet of Christophobia, followed, and follows. (Fs)

74b The fourth component of contemporary European Christophobia is more overtly political: continuing resentment of the dominant role once played by Christian Democratic parties in postwar Europe-not only in places like Germany and Italy, where the Christian Democrats were major players electorally, but in the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community, then the Common Market, then the European Community, and so forth. Years in the political wilderness, when the Christian Democrats were riding high, combined with a deliberate forgetfulness about the Christian Democratic inspiration of the European project, have left scars on the European left and among European secularists that form part of their Christophobia today. (Fs)

75a Then there is Europe's tendency to parse everything in left/right terms-and then identify Christianity with the right, which is the party (as the left sees it) of xenophobia, racism, intolerance, bigotry, narrowness, nationalism, and everything else Europe must not be. (Fs)

75b The sixth source of contemporary European Christophobia, in Joseph Weiler's judgment, is the resentment toward the late Pope John Paul II evident among secularists and Catholic dissidents. The late pope's undeniable role in igniting the revolution of conscience that made possible the Revolution of 1989 in east central Europe, his support for democracy in Latin America and East Asia, his global defense of religious freedom for all, his remarkable reconstruction of Catholic-Jewish relations, his opposition to war and abortion (not to mention his enormous personal authority and his popularity with young people)-all of this was very, very hard to fit into the story line of late modernity or postmodernity as crafted by European secularists and dissenting Catholics. They insisted that John Paul II must have been a premodern man, of whom nothing serious could be expected in aid of Europe's democratic future. The alternative possibility- that John Paul II was a thoroughly modern man with an alternative, and perhaps more penetrating, reading of modernity-simply cannot be entertained. (Fs)

76a In the seventh place, Christophobia in Europe today is fed by distorted teaching about European history which (as often happens in the United States) stresses the Enlightenment roots of the democratic project to the virtual exclusion of democracy's historic cultural roots in the Christian soil of pre-Enlightenment Europe. Believers as well as nonbelievers have internalized this metanarrative; so it is, perhaps, little wonder that the preamble to the European constitution once proposed to take a giant leap from the Greeks and Romans to Descartes and Kant in describing the historical sources of contemporary European democracy. (Fs)

76b Finally, Weiler suggests that the aging children of 1968, now middle-aged and soon to be retired, are upset and confused by the fact that, in some cases, their children have become Christian believers. Those who grew up Christian and rejected both the faith and the Church in late adolescence or early adulthood are puzzled, even angered, by the phenomenon of their children turning to Jesus Christ and Christianity to fill the void in their lives. Having watched this at work in France during Pope John Paul II's World Youth Day in Paris in 1997, when virtually all of bien-pensant France was stunned by the massive turnout of young Catholics come to celebrate their newfound faith with their religious hero, I'm inclined to think that on this, as on the other seven points above, Joseph Weiler is on to something. But more on that experience a bit later. (Fs)