If the citizens of Europe are to mobilise behind the project of unification, then the European Union must embrace policies that protect human dignity and safeguard the environment, EU bishops said last week. Finding ways to combat climate change, the bishops said, lay "at the crossroads of concern for political leaders and for Christians in Europe".
Comece, the Brussels-based commission representing Catholic bishops from the European Union, has cautiously approved the EU's controversial new Lisbon Treaty, but criticised the EU's failure to engage support and understanding from European citizens.
"Although the question of the institutional mechanisms may be solved soon, the crucial question of the aims and meaning of the European project is still open, and the answer remains unclear for many European citizens," Comece said. "The subject of the plenary assembly enabled the bishops to reflect on two fundamental values which could guide European unification, remobilise the support of citizens and be translated into concrete EU policies: respect of human dignity and safeguarding Creation."
The statement was issued on 7 March at the end of a three-day spring session in Brussels, devoted to "Incarnation of the common good in EU policies of the twenty-first century". It said the commission's 24 members had discussed the "institutional and political revival of Europe" after the Lisbon Treaty signed at the EU's December summit, which is expected to come into force in 2009 if ratified by member states.
The Treaty has caused controversy in Britain because Prime Minister Gordon Brown has ruled out a referendum on the Treaty's ratification.
The Comece statement added that its Dutch president, Bishop Adrianus Van Luyn of Rotterdam, had criticised Brussels for the confusion behind "the day-to-day business of politics", warning that the "vast majority" of Europeans could "no longer recognise or fathom why things are going in one direction or another".
"We are now all aware that, as a rule, the ‘how' questions are the easiest. It's harder to answer questions that start with ‘why'," Bishop Van Luyn said in his address. "Behind politics resides metapolitics, which forms the values upon which all political action is based, above and beyond party lines."
Launched in 1980, Comece represents more than 1,000 Catholic bishops from the EU's 27 member states, with observers from Croatia and Switzerland, and has two vice-presidents, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin and Bishop Piotr Jarecki, a Polish auxiliary.
In May 2006, it appealed for ratification of the EU's stalled Constitutional Treaty as the "best hope for reforms" for the bloc, which expanded to a combined population of 488 million with the January 2007 admission of Bulgaria and Romania. Meanwhile, in a report last November, it proposed a strategy for supporting marriages and families, which would include changes in tax, labour and housing laws.
In its Brussels statement, the commission said the bishops had reflected on long-term challenges outlined by a "Horizon 2020-2030" group set up by EU heads of state and government, and had called on EU institutions to "express clearly their understanding of human development envisaged in the European unification process".
It added that they had also debated "demands of human dignity in the context of changing employment patterns" with the European Commission's social affairs director-general, Jérôme Vignon.
A Comece spokeswoman told The Tablet that the statement amounted to an "acceptance with reservations" of the Lisbon Treaty, which has been widely criticised for repeating formulations contained in the discarded EU Constitution.
Comece's Irish secretary-general, Mgr Noel Treanor, is stepping down in June after 15 years as executive head of the commission to become Bishop of Down and Connor in Northern Ireland.
Fonte:Jonathan Luxmoore , The Tablet, 15.03.2008
