Europe’s new president, Herman Van Rompuy, is little known outside his native Belgium. One of the few background facts about him circulating since his election is his opposition to Turkish membership in the European Union.  The operative quote, expressed in a 2004 speech when he was an opposition deputy in the Belgian parliament, is:

“Turkey is not a part of Europe and will never be part of Europe. An expansion of the EU to include Turkey cannot be considered as just another expansion as in the past . . . The universal values which are in force in Europe, and which are fundamental values of Christianity, will lose vigour with the entry of a large Islamic country such as Turkey.”

(Photo: Herman Van Pompuy, 19 Nov 2009/Sebastien Pirlet)

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict, said something quite similar In an interview with Le Figaro, also in 2004: “Turkey always represented another continent throughout history, in permanent contrast with Europe,” he said, and joining it to Europe would be a mistake. Europe is united by its “culture which gives it a common identity. The roots which formed … this continent are those of Christianity.”

Both these comments were made in the context of a debate about mentioning Europe’s Christian heritage in the EU constitution planned at the time. Some countries, most notably France, opposed any explicit mention of the traditional majority faith on the continent. The Vatican’s reaction was: “The Holy See cannot but express its distress over the opposition of some governments to the explicit recognition of the Christian roots of Europe. It is a question of disregard of the historical evidence and of the Christian identity of European peoples.”

Van Rompuy, a Christian Democrat, is a believeing Catholic who has no problem saying so in public. He attended a Jesuit high school in Brussels and the Catholic University Leuven. Back in 1985, he wrote a book entitled Het christendom. Een moderne gedachte (Christendom, a modern idea), which is now out of print.

(Photo: Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict), 10 April 2004/Max Rossi)

Van Rompuy’s personal blog (mostly in Dutch and French, some English) has a whole section on religion and several commentaries, articles and speeches posted on the blog deal with religous and philosophical issues such as  the Dalai Lama and Pope Benedict’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate or a discussion about love with the agnostic French thinker Luc Ferry.

This has prompted several European bloggers and commenters to slam him as having “no sensitivity whatever to Europe’s newer cultural diversity” or being “a Vatican puppet.” One blogger asked if the EU now had “a devout Roman Catholic leading a secular European Empire?”

Are we heading for another debate about Europe’s Christian roots? Or is it one thing, as his aides argue, to express views when one is an opposition politician and another when one holds a high office?

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The business of selling food that is halal, or acceptable to Muslims, is set to grow rapidly in Europe in coming years as more supermarket chains target the sector. Frits van Dijk, executive vice president at the world’s biggest food group Nestlé, told Reuters at the World Halal Forum Europe in The Hague that he expected the halal food business in Europe to grow by 20 to 25 percent within the next decade.

(Photo: Halal hamburger restaurant in Paris suburb, 10 Aug 2005/Jacky Naegelen)

The total European halal food market is currently valued at about $66 billion, including meat, fresh food and packed food, while the global market is worth about $634 billion.

“We are starting to see that these products are not just in speciality shops but are also starting to get into the mainstream of modern retailers,” said Van Dijk, pointing to Britain’s Tesco and France’s Carrefour, which stock halal goods.

Milk powder, cooking aids, seasoning and sauces are among the most popular halal products in Europe at the moment, while Nestlé has recently started selling a range of meat-based and frozen food halal products in France, Van Dijk said.

Read the whole story here.

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Photo; Irish “Yes” campaigners celebrate in Dublin, 3 Oct 2009/Cathal McNaughton)

Europe has become increasingly selfish and materialistic in the 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the heads of the Roman Catholic bishops’ conferences across Europe said at the end of their three-day annual meeting at the weekend.  “The crisis sweeping Europe today is serious,” they said in a statement after the session in Paris. They cited materialism, individualism and relativism as major challenges facing European society.

The bishops’ sober assessment contrasted with the upbeat mood that the overwhelming “Yes” vote in Ireland’s Lisbon Treaty referendum created.  It must be noted they drew up their statement before they’d heard the news from Dublin on Saturday. And their statement ended with a note of Christian hopefulness. Still, their diagnosis is so fundamental it’s hard to imagine they would have changed much in the text.

Here’s the way they put it:

“All that has happened since the fall of the Berlin Wall has been a great stepping stone in the European adventure… (but) twenty years later, we now see that the incredible European project, with a strong ethical basis, has greatly weakened… The hopes placed on building Europe have not so far been fulfilled. Here we take note of the influence of several factors:

• “The development of the European Union has gone hand in hand with a growth in consumption, at least for some people. The mere constant acquisition of goods will never fill people’s hearts… The rules of the market and competition will never give birth to the ideal.
• “Present society wishes to give to the individual every possible opportunity to exercise individual choice and to seek personal fulfilment. In doing so it risks simply locking the individual into the defence of self-interest or acquired benefits… A society in which each individual, each group, each nation defends only their own vested interests cannot but be the jungle… We should not be surprised then if mafia and terrorist organizations thrive against this background…
• “A pluralistic society often risks being tempted by relativism, and particularly by ethical relativism. Each person sets their own norms and claims their own rights. Social life can only rest on common rules, on a vision of humanity that does not change according to shifting lobbies or opinion polls…

“The crisis sweeping Europe today is serious. Low birth rates and the future of its demography do not lead to optimism. However, we do not intend to be prophets of doom. Things are not necessarily doomed to get worse! Our faith calls us turn our attention to the European society in which we live, and to gaze on it with hope.”

Do you think materialism, individualism and relativism are the main problems nagging Europe? If so, will it take more than the feel-good factor from the Irish vote to put “EU show… back on the road” again?

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"Happy is he who calls himself a Turk."

One of the first things that catches your attention when you drive out of the airport of Diyarbakir, the largest city in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, is Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's famous phrase engraved on mountain slopes in big white letters.

Bent on building a secular and modern Turkey after World War One, Ataturk carved a united Turkish nation out of the disparate ethnic and religious groups that inhabited the old Ottoman empire -- sometimes by forced "Turkification" as was the case with ethnic Kurds.

That once-monolithic nation state is slowly being dented as pluralism becomes an acceptable fact of life in Turkish society.

Turkey's announcement this week that it is preparing a "democratic opening" for Kurds has raised hopes the EU candidate country might launch bold reforms to end a conflict that has killed 40,000 people and brought pain to many more.

Cynics have been quick to point out the plan, which might include political, cultural and economic measures, is timed to pre-empt a "road map" that jailed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) leader Abdullah Ocalan has said he will announce on Aug. 15.

But regardless of its timing, there is no doubt that Turkey is changing.

Unthinkable only a few years ago, there is talk in Ankara's corridors of power of a "Kurdish initiative", an "Alevi initiative", an "Armenian initiative" and even a "Greek Orthodox initiative".

Ultra-nationalists and diehard statists are crying treason, fearing the dismemberment of the republic, and have accused the government of selling out Turkey to the European Union and the United States.

Some secular conservatives, always suspicious of a government with roots in political Islam, see change as part of a hidden plot to subvert Turkey's secular constitution and promote religion in public life.

Many of these changes have been motivated by Ankara's desire to join the EU and meet membership criteria, such as expanding rights to minorities and more free speech. Critics say the government is using the EU to advance its own agenda, and free the strictures on religious freedoms of Muslims.

But they also respond to demands from an increasingly dynamic, urban and diverse society open to global trends.

Bronze statues of Ataturk still gaze over Turkey decades after they were built but some of his ideals, such as a single Turkish nation using a single language, might be obsolete.

"Turkey belongs to the Turks," goes another of Ataturk's commonly cited phrases, but Turks are also more worldly.

The thriving middle class goes on holidays to Europe and other world destinations. News from all corners of the world is broadcast 24 hours a day. This has brought a different understanding toward diversity within its own borders.

The Kurdish, Alevi, Armenian, and Greek Orthodox initiatives reflect the growing pressure Turkey is facing to redefine a straightjacket notion of identity which no longer fits its society, analysts say.

Some newspapers have speculated the government is considering removing open displays of the "Happy is he who calls himself a Turk" slogan in the mainly Kurdish southeast to ease tensions. For years, Turkey's official ideology had rejected the notion that Kurds were a separate ethnic group and the display of the slogans was seen as an attempt at forced assimilation.

"Turkey still has a long way to go to solve these issues, but the fact that we have moved from the stage of chronic problems to that of initiatives is noted by everyone," Ibrahim Kalin wrote recently in the pro-government Zaman daily.

Controversy overshadowed events this month when European Union officials invited Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from 13 member states and Russia to a meeting on economic governance.  Most of the Jewish leaders invited refused to attend, saying they considered some of the Muslim organisations taking part to be radical and anti-Semitic. The Universal Society of Hinduism issued a statement complaining it had not been invited and declaring: “It was clearly an insult.”

(Photo: European Parliament President Hans-Gert Poettering (2nd L), Archbishop Diarmuid Martin (C) and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso (2nd R) address media in Brussels 11 May 2009/Francois Lenoir)

A spokesman for European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, who initiated the annual gathering with religious leaders five years ago, said the reason no Hindu representatives were invited was largely to keep the meeting focused. “This meeting also has to be sort of conclusive and lead to real debate — it’s not that we can invite 100 or 1,000 persons to have a huge conference on these issues,” the spokesman said.

The 20 high-level participants in the end included four representatives of Islam, a single Jewish organisation which did not join the boycott, and 13 Christian groups.

The controversy deflected attention from the particularly timely subject of ethical values and the global economic crisis. ‘Our society is bearing the full brunt of the consequences of the turbulence that has affected our financial system in the last few months, and the resulting economic crisis; these affect not only markets and investors, but also all of our fellow citizens on a daily basis,” Barroso said.

“In fact, as the crisis progresses, it becomes clearer and clearer that the time has come to reconcile economic governance with the fundamental ethical values on which the European project has been based for the last 50 years.”

Participants at the meeting encouraged the EU in its efforts to combat the economic crisis but also set out some demands.

“They also underlined the need to ensure that social justice remains at the forefront of policy making and in a moment when unemployment and poverty keep rising to very worrying levels, our societies should be able to act together in developing and implementing concrete measures to contain the effects of the crisis on citizens,” the European Commission said.

They also agreed on the need to revive “the sense of solidarity among Europeans of all creeds and convictions and inspiring more ethics in the behaviour of financial and economic operators.”

Working out how all this is to be done could be one of the EU’s next headaches. Do you think the EU can promote ethical values and solidarity in Europe?

DECANI, Kosovo - A visit by U.S. Vice President Joe Biden to one of the best known monasteries in Kosovo has again revealed a deep split in the church. A veteran of Balkan complexities from his U.S. Senate activism against Serbian aggression during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, Biden visited the 14^th century Decani monastery on Thursday afternoon to highlight the importance protecting the Serbian minority in Kosovo.

(Photo: Fr. Janjic with U.S. Vice President Biden at Decani monastery, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

Father Sava Janjic, sometimes called Decani’s “cyber monk” because of his embrace of the Internet, warmly welcomed the vice president, who had first visited there in 2001. “This is his second visit to this monastery which is one of the most important Serbian Orthodox sites in Kosovo,” Fr. Sava told Reuters in fluent English. “We sincerely believe his visit will help the preservation of Serbian Orthodox heritage in Kosovo and generally help the position of the Serbian people in Kosovo.”

However, the diocese overseeing Kosovo, which the church considers the cradle of Serbian Orthodoxy, issued a strong statement condemning the visit. “The U.S. vice president is visiting Kosovo as an independent state, to confirm forceful secession of Serbia’s territory and its hand over to Albanian terrorist who were not punished for numerous crimes against Serbian people, Serbian property and Serbian cultural and religious heritage,” the diocese said in a statement. “Does Joseph Biden want to confirm with his gesture that Decani is an American base in Kosovo, the same as Camp Bondsteel?”

“The Decani monastery unfortunately has become known for its acts against Serbia’s interests, becoming in a sense a base for anti-Serbian acting in Kosovo as confirmed by this visit.”

(Photo:Heavily armed U.S. Secret Service agents during Biden visit to Decani, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

The harsh words were the latest as the church seeks to sort out how to deal with Kosovo’s declared independence last year. The conservative acting church leader, Metropolitan Amfilohije Radovic, told Reuters in an interview last year that Serbs were treated so poorly in majority Albania Kosovo that future war was inevitable.

Fr. Sava did not want to address the latest controversy publicly, but noted the church leadership, the assembly of bishops meeting in Belgrade, had blessed the visit the day before Biden arrived. His monastery has in the past favoured a more moderate approach that includes dialogue with ethnic Albanian Kosovars, who are mostly Muslim.

Security was tight. In addition to Italian soldiers who normally guard what is the biggest Serbian Orthodox monastic brotherhood worldwide (with 30 monks), many secret service agents accompanied Biden inside the compound. Some heavily armed agents remained on guard as he went inside for talks, although a few took a tour of the church to admire its magnificent frescos.

Biden said he tried to bolster the monks by contrasting the often bitter racial tensions in the United States between blacks and whites when he started his professional career in 1968 and today when he serves as number two to the first black U.S. president barck Obama.

“I told the story to Father (Sava) today. They were down a little bit, they are feeling a little isolated, but wondering whether Europe is going to walk away,” Biden told Reuters and a few other reporters in an interview on Thursday night. “It’s going to take some time but we’ve got to stick with it.”

(Photo: U.S. officials at Decani church during Biden’s visit, 21 May 2009/Adam Tanner)

At the end of his three-day visit to Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, Biden said real integration among ethnic groups in the Balkans could prove even more difficult than it had been to end the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. “What we are talking about now is real integration, not just the elimination of carnage and brutality, but there is where it really gets hard and it’s going to take time,” he said. “Things are drastically better than when I was last here, with a long way to go and in a sense the hardest piece to go.

“This is a process … it’s going to take a while,” he told reporters covering his visit.”

Here’s the Reuters TV report on Biden’s visit to Kosovo and Serbia:

Here’s a YouTube clip showing Decani and Fr. Sava, who calls Kosovo the “Serbian jerusalem.”

Organisers have postponed a conference of Nobel peace laureates in South Africa after the government denied a visa to Tibet's spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who won the prize in 1989 - five years after South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu won his and four years before Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk won theirs for their roles in ending the racist apartheid regime.

Although local media said the visa ban followed pressure from China, an increasingly important investor and trade partner, the government said it had not been influenced by Beijing and that the Dalai Lama's presence was just not in South Africa's best interest at the moment.

The conference, ahead of the 2010 World Cup, had been due to discuss how to use soccer to fight xenophobia and racism.

"We stand by our decision. Nothing is going to change. The Dalai Lama will not be invited to South Africa. We will not give him a visa between now and the World Cup," said government spokesman Thabo Masebe.

Whatever the reasoning, it angered the Nobel laureates in a country which has prided itself as a model of democracy and human rights since the end of apartheid in 1994.

Nelson Mandela’s grandson, Mandla, one of the conference organisers said the rejection was tainting South Africa’s democratic credentials.

"The government needs to review its decision and come to the party," said Mandela, set to become a parliamentarian with the ruling African National Congress after the election in April.

Allowing a visit by the Dalai Lama could certainly have made relations with Beijing more difficult. Ties between France and China were badly strained after French President Nicolas Sarkozy met him in December, when France held the European Union presidency.

But banning the Dalai Lama has also created a storm that South Africa was unlikely to have wanted either.

Was the ban the right thing to do?

(Photos: Bernard d’Espagnat, 13 March 2009/Charles Platiau)

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant once wrote that he “had to deny knowledge to make room for faith.” The French physicist Bernard d’Espagnat hasn’t denied knowledge in his long career developing the philosophy that won him this year’s $1.42 million Templeton Prize. He was pursuing knowledge to better understand what we can know about the ultimate reality of the world. But just like his philosophy echoes that of Kant’s with its conviction that there are limits on knowing reality, his work leaves some room — he would say for spirituality — by saying that human intuitions like art, music and spirituality can help us go further when science searching to understand the world reaches the end of its tether.

D’Espagnat’s prize was announced at UNESCO in Paris on Monday. The quantum physics at the core of his work presents baffling insights about reality, but his philosophical conclusions from them sound like common sense. Science is an amazing discipline that opens vast areas of knowledge but cannot go all the way to explaining ultimate reality. There’s a mystery at the core of our existence that we can get a little closer to through the untestable but undeniable intuitions we have. That “little closer” still leaves a large black hole in our knowledge, but it is more than we have if we only rely on empirical science.

As often happens in cases like this, d’Espagnat was available for embargoed interviews several days before the prize was announced. I had the pleasure of meeting him on Friday at the Lutetia, a five-star hotel only a short bike ride from my more modest digs in Paris. Now 87 years old, d’Espagnat can look back on a long and illustrious career as a senior physicist at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, professor at the University of Paris (at its science hub in the suburb of Orsay) and guest lecturer at universities and conferences abroad. His latest book in English, On Physics and Philosophy, came out in the United States in 2006.

At the end, I asked what he would do with his prize money. After paying the taxes on it, he stressed as he started his answer, he would divide it into three equal parts. One would go to promote the study of “negative theology,” a theology that he says fits his spiritualist outlook and conviction that we can only describe God by concepts that say what God is not. The second part would go to associations helping the homeless. And the last third he and his wife would use to make their home more senior-friendly. “My wife is handicapped and she would very much like to remain at home as long as possible,” he said.

You can read our story here or consult the prize website for more information and an extensive collection of links about his work. Some excerpts from my interview with d’Espagnat are on the next page. Taking a page from Paul Krugman’s economics blog, let me put a health warning on it right away — (wonkish).

(more…)

The United States has decided to participate in planning meetings for the United Nations Conference on Racism in April in order to influence its final declaration. The conference, a follow-up to the 2001 meeting in South Africa that the U.S. and Israel walked out on because the draft declaration called Israel racist (that language was later dropped). Israel and Canada have already announced they would boycott “Durban II,” as the conference is being called, and the Bush administration was opposed to the conference. But the Obama administration has decided to wade into the debate in the hopes of getting a better result.

(Photo: United Nations General Assembly, 26 Sept 2008/Eric Thayer)

Apart from the expected criticism of Israel, this conference in Geneva is also due to be a showplace for a drive by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC) to have the U.N. condemn defamation of religion. The U.N. General Assembly voted for just such a condemnation last December, for the fourth year running. While the non-binding resolution urged member states to provide “adaquate protection against acts of hatred, discrumination, intimidation and coercion resulting from defamation of religions and incitement to religious hatred in general,” the only religion it mentioned by name was Islam. Western countries opposed that resolution as contrary to the basic rights of free expression and opinion.

In statements in December, the freedom of expression rapporteurs of the United Nations, the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the Organisation of American States (OAS) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR) have called on the United Nations not to issue any such resolution.

President Barack Obama wants to reach out to Muslims and foster better relations between Washington and the Muslim world.  Should he show this by softening the U.S. stand on defamation of religions?

(Photo: Saudi women pose with Obama cutout in Jeddah, 6 Nov 2008/Susan Baaghil)

UPDATE: The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that “the U.S. State Department set off alarm bells Sunday in the Jewish community by announcing that it would be taking part in consultations this week ahead of the conference” and the administration held a conference call with Jewish leaders to discuss the issue.  Read the full story here.

Liberation Theology has long been out of fashion at the Vatican, but its effects have lived on in Latin America. One is a tradition of foreign-born Catholic priests who went to the region to preach its message of justice for the poor and oppressed. But the falling number of priests in Europe and the United States and a turn away from this activist view of the Gospels has taken its toll. The clerics defending peasants against landowners and denouncing child prostitution, drug trafficking and illegal logging are growing old and the flow of foreign priests is drying up. There are Brazilian priests, but with family members living in the country, they are often more vulnerable to death threats.

Stuart Grudgings, senior correspondent in our Rio de Janeiro bureau, travelled to Abaetetuba at the mouth of the Amazon in northeastern Brazil to visit Italian-born Bishop Flavio Giovenale and other members of this disappearing breed of priests.

Read the whole feature here.

(Photo left: Bishop Flavio Giovenale, 11 Feb 2009/Paulo Santos)

(Photo right: Sunset over Abaetetuba, 28 Sept 2008/Paulo Santos)