Religious and European: An Unacceptable Combination?
Remarks by Rocco Buttiglione
December 8, 2004
Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording
MR. SIKORSKI: I'm Radek Sikorski, Executive Director of the New Atlantic Initiative. Welcome to NAI. Welcome to the American Enterprise Institute. I see many familiar faces, and those of you who have been to our events before know that the New Atlantic Initiative is about enlarging Euro-Atlantic Institutions. We were founded in 1996 at the Royal Castle in Prague.
But it's also about nurturing the community between Europe and the United States. We also look at developments in Europe itself, and at the debate about what Europe is. Is it a civilization? Is it a community of values? Is it a community of standards? How does Europe respond to the challenge of multiculturalism, of mass migration between civilizations?
Earlier this year we've had the enactment of the French law of banning over religious symbols in schools. That's very interesting because it's an attempt to create a sphere, a public space in which members of some religions would be equal with other fellow citizens, and I personally have to tell you I have some sympathy with that French law.
But on the other hand, we also have had a debate on the European Constitution, which came down on the side of not including even a historical reference to Christianity's past contribution to European civilization. So where are we in Europe? Are we simply responding to multiculturalism by applying a strict separation of church and state, or have we gone so far as to make it virtually impossible for men of faith to hold public office, and for religion to play any part in the public sphere. And I think L'affaire Buttiglione puts all these issues in a very sharp focus, and I hope we will hear more about it.
This country has a long tradition of accepting political refugees. Just this year, Roger Scruton is one from England on the account of banning of fox hunting, but it's not every day that we have political refugees who are of ministerial rank, such as Mr. Buttiglione, who has been Chairman of the Italian Christian Democratic Union since 1995 and a member of the Italian Parliament since 1994. He was elected to the European Parliament in 1999, and became minister of European Affairs in 2001. He was also appointed by the Italian Government as a nominee to be the European Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security at the European Commission.
Before his involvement in Italian politics, Mr. Buttiglione was a professor in philosophy, social ethics, economics and politics at the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein and at Saint Pius V University in Rome. He has delivered lectures all over the world including at the Catholic University of Lublin in Poland, which awarded him an honorary degree in philosophy in May 1994.
He's a member of the editorial board of numerous magazines, and the author of books, among then Karol Wojtyla--otherwise known as John Paul II--The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope.
We are very grateful for the opportunity of hosting Minister Buttiglione, very grateful to the Acton Institute and Father Sirico for making it possible. Minister Buttiglione is here to receive the award from the Acton Institution.
I would just like to finish my remarks and pass on the floor to our guest by quoting the corpus delicti, the quote, the statement from Minister Buttiglione that the European Parliament found so offensive as to hold up the appointment of the entire European Commission for the sole purpose of excluding Mr. Buttiglione from being confirmed. And it is this. The question was about Minister Buttiglione's criticism of homosexuality. Answer: "I shall remind you of an old and perhaps not completely unknown philosopher, a certain Emmanuel Kant from Koenigsberg, who made a clear-cut distinction between morality and law. Many things may be considered to be immoral that should not be prohibited. In politics we do not renounce the rights to have moral convictions. I may think that homosexuality is a sin, but this has no effects on politics unless I say that homosexuality is a crime. In the same way, you're free to think that I am a sinner in most areas of life, and this does not have any effect on our relations as citizens. I would regard it as an inadequate consideration of the problem to pretend that everybody agrees on moral matters." This is the offensive statement.
Minister Buttiglione, please, the floor is yours.
MR. BUTTIGLIONE: Well, thank you for this wonderful introduction that gives me more merits than I deserve, and let me express first of all my joy at being here at the American Enterprise Institute, where I have so many friends, and I owe to my friends in the American Enterprise Institute much if not all of what I know about United States.
And I want to make you sure I am not a political refugee, not yet.
[Laughter.]
MR. BUTTIGLIONE: Not yet. But I can envisage that if we lose the struggle that we are leading now in the European Union, you might have political refugees in this country for reasons of conscience, because what is at stake is an idea of the identity of Europe, but also at the same time, of the identity of a democratic society. In this sense--well, on one hand I might say that the Buttiglione affair makes it clear that there is wide gap, wide and widening gap between the United States and Europe. I would like to say this for your sake, but I suspect that it is not true, and that you may have in your own country the same problems that we have in Europe. Also, you have won a brilliant victory, and you have suffered a significant defeat just in the same days. But the nature of the clash, perhaps we could say that it is also a clash of civilization. I think it's similar in Europe and in the United States.
What is the issue? Do we want to have a free society in the traditional liberal sense--and "liberal" here does not mean what liberal has come to mean in the language of today. For now we'll just say in the weak sense of the word. In a liberal society in this sense everybody has the right to commit sin, and priests and philosophers and whoever thinks he has a good reason to do that, have the right to say that sin is sin. And the respect for your right of doing what I think to be wrong depends upon my respect for human freedom. This is very clear. If you look to the gospel you'll see there is the attitude of Jesus in front of the adulterous woman. He does not tell her, "Go and continue, go on, look for another lover, or go back to the lover you had before." He tells her, "Go and do not sin again." So there is a difference between right and wrong, between good and evil.
At the same time he tells all of the other, "Wait a minute, we have not the right to kill her, to sentence her, to condemn her, because you are sinners just like her. Perhaps you are not adulterous, but there are Ten Commandments, not only one, and you stand in need of God's mercy."
In a liberal society, as I understand it, we all stand in need of God's mercy, and there is a clear-cut distinction between sin and crime. And for instance, homosexuality cannot be considered as a crime. It falls within the private sphere of each individual, and the state does not have the right to stick its nose in that sort of thing.
There is another idea of democracy that is growing in Europe, but also in the United States. It is linked to the so-called multiculturalism, and I think in fact you have imported it from France. Is Deridot(?) a name that has a meaning here in the United States? I think so, and if you look at Deridot's works you'll see there another idea of democracy. The idea of democracy is that nobody has the right of making a distinction between good and evil, right or wrong. There is no hierarchy(?) of values. This means that there are no values because values imply a hierarchy(?). We have all to remain at the surface of our lives. We cannot go into depth. Man should not search for truth, because if we search for truth and we happen to recognize something as true, then we cannot say that all things have the same value. We discover that some things have positive value, some things have a negative value.
The new form of politically correctiveness does not just imply that you must always find a way of saying what you think that is not offensive to others, but implies that you have not the right of thinking, and we have not the right of thinking ethical issues or religious issues.
Shall we say that this is a kind of hostile separation of church and state? I would not say that. It seems to me, rather, that what they want is a society in which there is a new religion, a new official religion, a new civil religion. Go to the library and get a copy of Le Contract Sociale, The Social Contract of Rousseau, and read the chapter on the legislature. There you find that in order to be a part of the political community, you have to alienate all of your personality in the reality of the state, and you receive back your right from the state. And also in the religious field, you have a civil religion, the religion that is needed in order to make the state work.
If you go and read John Locke, you'll find that Locke says that we never alienate all of our freedom, not even when we get married.
[Laughter.]
MR. BUTTIGLIONE: That is the most stringent form of community, but even when you get married, you do not alienate all of your freedom, much less when you constitute the community of the city or of the state or of Europe or any other community. You alienate only as much of your rights as is needed in order to make it possible for the larger community to function, to be a factor. And you constitute broader communities only to do things that you cannot do at your immediate individual level or at the level of smaller communities.
By the way, this principle, not the principle of Rousseau, this principle, is enshrined in our European Constitution, that is called Subsidiarity Principle. But this principle is challenged. Some want to have a new orthodoxy, a new official religion. It is not a (?) religion. It is a religion that forbids to have values, that forbids to affirm anything as true, but it is nevertheless a religion.
And this religion is not based on the respect of the liberty of the other. I can disagree with you. I can think that what you do is wrong. I may think that you are committing sin. And yet at the same time in the political sphere, I may be ready to give my life in order to preserve the liberty of committing sin, because if you are not free to commit sin, you are not free to exercise virtue, and you are condemned not to be a model subject, you cannot be a model subject without freedom. This is the essence of our faith in freedom and the reason why we believe in democracy, not because we think that there is no truth and that all positions are equivalent, but because we believe in human liberty, we believe in the dignity of the human person.
They don't. Their battle for democracy is moral relativism, and if you are not a moral relativist, you are a second-class citizen. I do not want to emphasize my personal affair. After all, I have only renounced to a seat in the European Commission. There are things more valuable than a seat in the Commission, your faith, your conscience, first among them. And I was a friend of Yugi Papusco [ph]. Do you remember Yugi Papusco? Well, he was a martyr. He gave his life for his faith. So I do not want to emphasize my case. But it is significant because it is part of a trend.
Do you know what is the greatest danger to human freedom according to the European Parliament? Do you know what is the country that has been condemned more often by the European Parliament for violation of human rights? You might think China. I am a friend of China, but it is a matter of fact that the number of death penalties in China is appalling. It is not China. You might think Cuba. Well, the number of death penalties in Cuba is smaller, but also Cuba is much smaller than China. And there are many violations of human rights. You would be wrong.
The greatest danger for human freedom, according to European Parliament, is the state of the Vatican. You have 30 resolutions against the state of the Vatican, 15 against China, 6 or 7 against Cuba, and many important dictatorships have none. And there is a reason for this. They see the defense of objective truth, or objective human values as the main enemy.
When I was a young man, a boy, I read a book of Gilbert Keith Chesterson. Some of you may have read the same book. The title is: The Sphere and the Cross. And the story is the story of a passionate atheist and a passionate Christian who want to struggle against one another. And of course there's a reason they do, and we would not do that. But there is a certain nobility in it, because they affirm objective truth, and all society mobilizes itself and the state falls prey to (?) in order to avoid that they might struggle against each other. The idea is religion, even philosophy, the conviction of the existence of objective truth may create struggle, opposition, and therefore, we should destroy any conviction on an objective truth.
It comes to my mind--I was talking of the times when I was young. When I was young I wrote also a doctoral thesis on Bruno Bauer. Nobody of you knows who is Bruno Bauer. Well, most professional philosopher don't, so don't be ashamed of that. He was a friend of Karl Marx, and he entered with Karl Marx in a controversy on the Jewish question. And what was the solution to the Jewish question proposed by Bauer and by Marx, with some differences, but the main substance was the same? Well, in order to destroy--to solve the Jewish question, you have to destroy Judaism and Christianity. When you have no more Christianity and no more Judaism, you will have no Jewish question.
It seems that we are going back to that same kind of thought. We much impose absolute relativism. We must destroy all existing religions. And only then we may have peace. It is not a theoretical construction. A pastor in Sweden has been sentenced to one month in jail for having said that homosexuality is a sin. In France there was a law proposal, sending in jail up to four years, anybody who said that homosexuality is a sin, which makes life very difficult for Catholic priests, but I suspect also for many Jewish rabbis and pastors of other Christian denominations.
A free society is a society in which we are free to commit sin and we are free to say that sin is sin. If one of these pillars falls, then society is no more free. So we have a consistent trend, mainly of Marxist origin. Marxists accepted that Marxism was wrong under the condition that nothing is right. And the distinction between right and wrong is abolished due to the intellectual history of (?), its transition from Marxism to deconstructionism.
I think we have to react. I do not want to exaggerate the level of the defeat we have suffered. We have lost by one vote, so I shall not say that the European Parliament. We lost by one vote. And I think that if we better organize ourselves we can win the coming battles, but we must be better organized.
And I wish to thank United States. You cannot imagine the impact of the result of American elections in Europe, because America is modernity, and what takes precedence in America will take precedence in Europe in 10 or 15 or 20 years. And now the European left all of a sudden had to discover that America is religious, that ethical issues are relevant to politics in America, and they live in the fear that this might prove true for Europe in the coming years. Needless is to say that their worry is my hope.
[Applause.]
