THE BELIEF that religion and politics should be kept separate was “unrealistic” and “naive”, former taoiseach and former EU ambassador to Washington John Bruton said last night.
Such belief "pursued relentlessly" led to tyranny or the breakdown of democracy, Mr Bruton said during an address in Dublin last night at an event jointly hosted by the Jesuit quarterly review Studiesand the Catholic think tank, the Iona Institute.
Speaking as a practising Catholic who has been involved in politics, he said he wished to address the relationship that should exist between the Christian churches of Europe and the EU.
“As long as religious belief exists, and there is every reason to believe it will always exist, a secularist notion that religion and politics should be kept entirely separate is simply unrealistic, even naive. And naive beliefs pursued relentlessly, as they often are, lead toward either tyranny or the breakdown of the pluralism that is required for democracy to function,” he said.
Secularists “should beware of committing the same errors of immoderation, of the sort they justly condemn in churches in the past, in pursuit of their own cause today,” he said.
“For example, to seek to use the power of the state to remove every symbol or sign of religious belief from the public space would be just as immoderate as were past efforts to harness the powers of the state to push one religion on people.”
He said it was worth recalling that the European Convention on Human Rights, agreed to in 1949 before the EU came into existence, guaranteed to every European the right to “manifest his religion, with others in public or private, in teaching, practice, worship and observance”.
The EU “submits itself to the whole convention, including to this article about how people may exercise their religious freedom”, Mr Bruton said.
It was “not possible entirely to separate the religion practised by a significant body of its members or citizens from any political entity such as the EU, or vice versa”, he said. But there were “clear distinctions of function which must be respected, as the Lisbon Treaty puts it, the union ‘respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches’ and ‘shall maintain open, transparent and regular dialogue with these churches’.”
Equally, he said, the “churches have an obligation to respect duly constituted political institutions exercising their proper functions”.