It’s an interesting angle, to be sure, to be an American and read this story, but there it is: the European Court of Human Rights has declared that the public display of the crucifix in Italian public schools violates religious and educational freedoms. This is a touchy issue in the United States, too, to be sure; we’ve struggled ourselves for some time know to understand what the proper balance is between public religion and personal rights; is freedom to be understood as freedom from offense? At what point does a private distaste by a minority honestly become something that the majority need not only respect but take as a guiding principle? Such occasions do exist, and they need to be thoughtfully worked through. But I’m not here primarily to discuss that borderland. Of much more interest to me is a remark by Italian education minister Mariastella Gelmini  that “it is not by eliminating the traditions of individual countries that a united Europe is built.”

Hmm.

A united Europe is not built by abandoning culture.

As much as a good chunk of the continent might wish it were otherwise, Europe is unassailably the place most intensely formed by Christian thought and belief. The cross appears on the national flags of the United Kingdom, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Slovakia, Georgia, Finland Switzerland, Northern Ireland, Greece, Malta, and, until 1945, Italy. Christian culture to permeates European architecture, informs European philosophy, and straddles European toponymy. Christianity is the principal that defines Europeperiod as a distinct grouping, as a world unto itself, and as Pope Benedict has said time and again, Europe without the faith isn’t really Europe. It’s frankly something else entirely.

This issue strikes at a major fault line in the quest to build a federal Europe, a real European Union: what, exactly, makes Europe? How is Europe to be defined? And, more to the point, how is Europe to be united? It’s striking that a largely post-Christian Europe is striving to build a union without a real positive sense of Europe’s identity. The continent isn’t defined by its empires. It’s not defined by its ethnicities. Its not defined by political and civic culture, like the United States is; in one union you’ve got monarchies like Spain and the UK alongside fiercely secular republics like France and Germany, and in between places like Italy that have never been able to divest themselves of their religion no matter how hard they’ve tried, and frankly no longer really see the point.

So: to remove or not to remove i crocefissi becomes an icon (haha) of a massive split in the understanding of what Europe is and what it’s supposed to be. Gelmini sums it up very honestly; if the price of Union is the neutering of Europe and its heritage, there’d be nothing European about it. As has been pointed out time and again here at Saint Superman and elsewhere, the driving force of politics is culture, and a culture steeped even in vaguely Christian notions of justice, charity, and sacrifice is better than one that worships at the Unassailable Altar of Me. Europe is in flux; does it embrace the good in its past or cast everything off, crucifixes and all, until the empty churches themselves are torn down?