Safeguarding the presence of the religious minorities, and doing so in such a way that “situations of tension or conflict with the majority religious confessions are not created”: that is the hope for the future European treaty expressed by Pe tro Stetciuk, vice-rector of the national University of Lvov (Ukraine).The fear is that other ‘walls’, like that of Berlin, will come to be created in Europe. An example of ‘peaceful co-existence, without divisions, comes from Lvov where a true and proper Catholic university does not yet exist: here there is a single national university in which Catholic professors also form part of the academic staff; they collaborate with lay teaching staff in a climate of “reciprocal exchange”. A European Constitution points out the vice-rector “already exists” and is written “in the heritage of two thousand years of Christianity”. Affirmation and recognition of the central value of human dignity, democracy and parliamentarianism, right to “local government” and to the safeguard of one’s own “national identity”: these, according to Stetciuk, are some of the fundamental principles that the new European Constitution ought to guarantee, together with the “principle of self-determination” and the safeguard of the “freedom to express one’s own thought”.
