Europe: light and shade” “

The “2005 Report on religious liberty in the world”, published by the charity of pontifical right Aid to the Suffering Church (ASC) and presented in Rome on 30 June, describes a situation that has positive and negative sides at the planetary level; and even in Europe it reports many problematic situations: episodes of “ethnic and religious intolerance”, fraught relations between national governments and churches, new “secularist pressures”, but also positive examples of peaceable communion between different faiths and courageous “legislative interventions in defence of freedom of worship”. Atheism, secularism, social tensions. “The impetus of atheism has not been exhausted, even 15 years after the collapse of the Soviet empire. Belarus is one of the emblematic cases of this: there the tight state control on any expression of worship tends to suffocate the religious feeling of the population”. The 2005 Report takes into consideration a huge range of “indices” of freedom of cult and reports, country by country, the new laws on the matter, any socio-religious conflicts, and the progress registered at the level of cohabitation and mutual respect between the religious communities. The Report does not lack cases of “persecution of administrative type”. In other cases, “intolerance assumes nationalistic tones, as in Russia, where bureaucratic obstacles prevail, albeit in a situation characterized by improvement in ecumenical relations between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church”. The long and detailed study published by ASC remarks, again with reference to Europe, that “with the emergence of new political leaderships that replace the old philo-Soviet nomenklatura, greater space for religious liberty seems to be opening, as is happening at the present time, albeit timidly, in Georgia”. Yet sharp tensions between Christians and Muslims remain in the Balkans, while “the abandonment of republican secularism is progressing very slowly in Turkey, without any prospect of a real shift in attitude that could come with the legal recognition of the Christian religious communities”. Religious symbols: the French case. According to the experts of ASC, “a new wave of secularism has been triggered in France, with the approval and implementation of a law that prohibits religious symbols from being displayed or worn in schools”. “The same objective is being pursued” in Germany, with various local or regional provisions. According to the Report, these provisions, “conceived to combat the emergence of Islamic fundamentalism, do not seem to have proved effective, nor have other models of cohabitation based on multiculturalism, as in Holland and in the United Kingdom”, where periodic explosions of violence, especially involving the Moslem communities, are registered. With regard to France, in a situation “of general tranquillity of interfaith relations and the substantial freedom of worship guaranteed by the Constitution”, the Report points to “an attitude of active or secularist separation adopted by the Republic towards religious groups and events”. In fact, the so-called About-Picard law of 2001, which introduced limitations to the right of association for religious purposes in the presence of abuses of various kinds (a law censured by the Council of Europe), has now been compounded by the law on the banning of religious symbols in schools in 2004. “Negative reactions have been expressed by almost all the religious communities – says the Report -: by the Catholics, Muslims (the religion mainly targeted by the new law) and Indian Sikhs, by virtue of their obligation to wear the turban at all times”. Spain: drastic changes. Spain represents a case in itself. There “the situation of harmonious relations between the Catholic Church and the government has suffered a drastic change after the electoral victory of the Socialist Party on 14 March. The Spanish premier, Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, began to realize his electoral promises regarding the family, the right to life and homosexual unions”. According to the ASC, “the attitude of the bishops is reactive, but, even in the new situation, it remains characterized by the search for dialogue”. The government of Madrid “has not permitted the teaching of Catholic religion to be obligatory”, amending the law passed by the previous government. “In relation to the Moslem communities the attitude of the government is more open and willing to make concessions, such as the recognition of the teaching of Islamic religion in state schools”. Ethnic and religious intolerance growing. Over the last few months the mass media have reported numerous episodes of ethnic and religious intolerance, especially anti-Semitic in origin, but also directed against Christians and Muslims. The shocking series of attacks in Holland has had a huge impact in the media. “Tensions exploded following the death of film director Theo Van Gogh, killed by the Islamic fundamentalist Mohammed Bouyeri in Amsterdam on 2 November; this was followed on the following day by a exchange of gunfire between the police and a group of Islamic terrorists in The Hague”. This led in turn, in the space of a few days, to the arson attacks on the mosque in Utrecht, the Islamic centre in Breda and the Mevlana mosque in Rotterdam, a “city where a pamphlet was also found containing threats against Muslims”. “Gradually the tensions were allayed, though observers fear that even a single case of violence could generate extremist manifestations of intolerance”. Less dramatic tensions, but indicative of the same tensions, have been registered in Poland, Great Britain and Hungary. Cyprus and the Balkans, regions at risk. The island of Cyprus and the Balkan region remain at the centre of enduring phenomena of ethnic and political conflicts that have concurrent repercussions on the religious freedom of the entire population. The division of the island of Cyprus between the Greek-Cyriot part (the larger part, with over 80% of the population) and the Turkish-Cypriot part, unrecognised by the international community, seems for the time being to be without any solution. In this regard, the Report points out: “As regards the Christian religious confessions [in Northern Cyprus], over the last thirty years of occupation 68 of the 82 churches have either been transformed into mosques, as has also happened to the Cathedral of St. Nicholas at Famagosta, or have been destroyed to uproot the religious identity of the country”. Rather similar problems are registered throughout the former Yugoslavia. Emblematic is the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where “religious intolerance persists, as a direct reflection of ethnic intolerance”. Three ethnic-religious communities co-exist on the national territory: an Islamic Bosnian majority (40% of the population) and the Serb-Orthodox and Catholic-Croat minorities (respectively 31% and 15%). “If most citizens identified themselves on the basis of their religion up till the 19th century, with the rise of Balkan nationalism the country began to identify itself in ethnic-religious terms, a tendency increased during the Communist period, when the regime frowned on confessional allegiances” and the majority of the population identified themselves instead “on the basis of the ethic group to which they belonged or simply as ‘Yugoslav’. After independence and war, the religious element has revived, and that is why members of religious orders or of the Christian or Islamic clergy are often victims of revenge attacks, vendettas and acts of violence instigated by ethnic factors”. The same tensions, sometimes accentuated by the prevalence of one ethnic group or one religious confession over others, are also registered in Serbia-Montenegro, Kosovo, Macedonia and Slovenia. Turkey remains “under observation”. If the problem of the “sects” has powerfully emerged in Lithuania, in other countries negotiations are in progress for the return of ecclesiastical properties confiscated by previous governments (e.g. in Georgia, Romania, Turkey and Ukraine). Equally delicate, also because the relations between politics and religion intersect, are the problems registered in two countries: Belarus and Turkey. In the first case, the “tight control that the government authorities maintain over minority religious groups” is at the centre of attention. Turkey, on the other hand, remains “under observation” throughout Europe, in view of the forthcoming opening of negotiations for EU accession, planned for 3 October. The Report on religious liberties notes that the recent constitutional reforms “have modified Turkey’s judicial system, abolished the special tribunals and any constitutional reference to the death sentence, and explicitly introduced the principle of the equality between men and women”. The level of respect for religious minorities, however, remains “wholly unsatisfactory. Christians are in fact debarred from access to civil or military institutional roles; the possibility of building churches is practically zero; and, in spite of the secularism of the Constitution, the religious communities have no civil recognition and therefore cannot possess anything”. The prime minister Recep Tayyp Erdogan has received the Catholic bishops of the country, “who made two requests: the legal recognition of the Church and the setting up of a mixed commission to prepare and implement the future juridical statute”. New accords between States and Churches. The research of ASC also reports a series of cases in which new relations between Church and State are registered: some in a positive sense, others more negatively in terms of respect for religious liberty. Belgium, Greece, Portugal, Serbia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Ukraine are cited, for various reasons, in this list. Various problems in Church-State relations occupy the foreground: the recognition and safeguard of minorities (especially Islamic or, as in Armenia, Jehovah’s Witnesses), the possibility to build places of worship, the introduction of religious education in state schools, the introduction of social security benefits for clergy, and the definition of forms of concordat between Church and State, as in Portugal in 2004. “With this accord – says the Report – the Portuguese Bishops’ Conference receives legal recognition and the Church obtains the recognition of full freedom of religion, worship, ministry and evangelization, and also becomes the beneficiary of a percentage (5 per thousand) of the income tax that citizens choose to allocate to her every year”.