Vatican outraged as God is banished from Europe's rights of man
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Daily Telegraph - 08/02/2003

God has been banned from the European constitution to avoid causing offence.

All references to divinity were expunged this week from the newly revealed Article 2 on Europe's values and "the liberty and the rights of man", much to the dismay of Polish Catholics, Dutch Muslims and France's orthodox Jews, all united in deploring the spiritual emptiness of the new Europe.

Clearly stung, Valery Giscard d'Estaing, the lordly president of the Convention on the Future of Europe, offered some consolation yesterday, allowing that a reference to the Almighty might creep into the constitution's preamble, though carefully disguised as a cultural adornment competing with Zeus, Minerva and the Norse god Wotan.

But he offered no hope that Article 2 would be changed, confirming fears that the rest of the highly federalist text is already written in stone.

For Europe's beleaguered minority of churchgoers, now just 15 per cent, it is all of a piece with Mammon's crinkly euro notes, with abstract pictures of arches suggestive of nothing, so unlike the mighty US dollar inscribed "In God We Trust".

The derisory treatment of religion is a snub for the Pope, who interceded personally with M Giscard not to forget the "cement of that extraordinary religious, cultural and civic heritage that has made Europe great down the centuries".

Yesterday, the Vatican said it was appalled by the humanist text - which listed 16 articles as a first instalment of the constitution - deeming it "completely unsatisfactory" since it "went against the explicit desire of a great part of Europe's peoples".

The tight-knit "praesidium" of 13 commissioners, ex-prime ministers and MPs that decides behind closed doors what to put into the text drew on a paper entitled Let's Leave God Out of This by convention member Josep Borrell Fontelles, a Socialist from the Catalan bastion of the Left. Glossing over Christmas as a "pagan ritual" that celebrates the winter solstice, he said: "A lot of our values have been forged against the Church or the churches. We should remember the whole story: the massacres of the Crusades; the nights of St Bartholomew and the Inquisition's auto-da-fe; Galileo, the pogroms, and turning a blind eye to fascism.

"When it comes to democracy, human rights and equality, God is a recent convert. He was comfortable for centuries with slavery. Yesterday he still blessed Franco." This was music to the ears of the French and Spanish elites, each scarred by a long struggle against clericalism and to New Labour, which sided with the secular camp.

It was also welcomed by the Turkish government, which fears that any tilt towards religion could foster a sense of Europe as a "Christian club" - a view not shared by leaders of Europe's 14 million Muslims.