How the Vatican Has Subverted Democracy in Europe
By Muriel Fraser

The General Assembly of the European Humanist Federation was held at Conway Hall, London on 19 and 20 June, 2004. Not surprisingly, discussion of the implications for Humanism and Secularism in Europe of the new European Constitution agreed that week by European heads of government was high on the Agenda. Although the Constitution still has to be ratified by each of the 25 European states, its provisions are effectively already in place. The following article is based on a briefing paper prepared for the EHF General Assembly by Muriel Fraser of the UK National Secular Society.

The Roman Catholic Church attempts to negotiate concordats – binding agreements between church and state – with every state wherever and whenever such an agreement is politically possible. In this, the Catholic Church is not alone. The Lutheran Church in Germany and the Orthodox Church in Georgia have also reached such agreements. Even the Seventh Day Adventists have said they want one too if a future concordat is signed between the Vatican and the Czech Republic.

Concordats differ in detail from state to state, as they codify already existing church privileges, and try to add a few more as well. The churches like to claim that these agreements are innocuous, because they mostly just restate what is on the law books already. But this argument is spurious. A key element of the concordats is that they remove church privileges from democratic control. They do so by requiring that the concordat can only be altered by the mutual consent of both parties. Since one of the parties to a concordat is a church, it is hard to imagine them agreeing to forgo any privilege once established.

A concordat is signed by the two parties even before it is ratified by parliament – a reversal of the procedure for normal laws which is permitted only because a concordat purports to be an international treaty. The Vatican’s pretensions to statehood are then used by other religions to demand equal treatment. This legislative manoeuvre raises two problems. First, it trivializes the content of the concordat: members of parliament are asked to ratify a fait accompli, and this tends to reinforce the idea that the whole thing is just a simple matter of tidying up and modernizing earlier legal arrangements. Secondly, this retroactive vote can be used to place time constraints on the parliamentarians: in the case of the Brandenburg Concordat, the vote was scheduled for two days after the signing, which allowed busy members of parliament insufficient time to read it over thoroughly and seek expert legal counsel.

In Georgia, the contents of the concordat with the Vatican were kept secret. However, at the last minute, when the Vatican Foreign Minister had already arrived to sign it, the event was called off. The cancellation appears to have been due less to democratic scruples than to opposition from the Orthodox Church, which already had a concordat with the state and didn’t want to see similar privileges granted to a rival.

The only example to date of democratic resistance to a concordat has been in the Czech Republic. Two reasons have been cited: the first was historical. The death of Jan Hus on 6 July 1415, martyred by the Catholic Church, started the Czech Reformation. The second reason was that the Catholic Church had taken advantage of the restoration of democracy to Czechoslovakia in 1989 to recover vast amounts of real estate formerly owned by the state.

In Germany, there has recently been a rush by both Catholic and Lutheran churches to push through concordats with all of the country’s sixteen states. One reason for this is clear. Church membership is declining and the churches can no longer claim to represent the majority of the German population. This is an embarrassment for the churches, which have traditionally justified their power and privileges on the grounds that they were ‘the people’s church’ and as such could speak as the moral voice of the people. A concordat with any state offers the church a way out of the problem of declining membership. It enables the church to subvert the inconvenient principle of majority rule, because it is an agreement which can be entered into by parliament, but cannot be unilaterally altered, or revoked by it. A concordat is thus a way of crystallizing church privilege, including access to massive state subsidies, even as its membership is decreasing, and of locking these subsidies in. Once a concordat is in place there is no longer any possibility of reducing state support – ever.

However, the Vatican has another, more ominous reason for its rush to negotiate concordats within the European Union at both the state and national levels. Once their privileges have been codified they will be cast in stone by Article 51 of the European Constitution. To quote Christian Eyschen, Secretary General of the French Freethinkers speaking on France Culture last December:

“When Article 51 says the European Union will respect ‘the various forms of relationships between the Churches and the States’, that means that it will protect them by integrating them into Community Law, which is superior to the various national regulations. When the ratification of the constitution is achieved, every relationship between religion and State – the concordats; established Churches and State religions; the clerical statute of Alsace-Moselle; Church taxes; the offence of blasphemy – all that will be integrated into Community Law...That is why the Vatican is urging states across Europe to endorse Concordats before the final ratification of the European Constitution. This is the result: of the 25

Member States of the European Union, 14 have Concordats with the Vatican. And most of the other Member States have established religions!”