Praying for Europe

Right in the heart of the European District is a small chapel, the Chapel of the Resurrection. It is part of a former convent which sold up when the European Institutions came. Most of it functions as an archive for the European Institutions. One wing, the white bit to the far right, was retrieved, in extremis, by a determined group of Catholic EU officials, keen to maintain a visible Christian presence in the European quarter. 

It has a crypt chapel in which I go and pray sometimes, part of the exercise for me being to get clear in my own mind just how far we can see Europe as a spiritual value, to be worked and prayed for.

Three things were uppermost in my mind there today:

- That it is perhaps better to pray, not for Europe, something a bit impersonal and ‘out there’ (rather like the European Institutions themselves) but for ourselves as Christian Europeans, that we can find the Christian identity God wants –if he specifically does – for us and for Europe. Ultimately Europe, if it is to exist at all, must exist in our hearts and not just our minds. Despite a lifetime in Europe and a reading knowledge of ten European languages, I still struggle to define it there. 

- That any prayer for Europe, just like any prayer for ourselves or our families and communities, starts with confession: a clear recognition before God of exactly where we stand, with our weaknesses and failings. Prayer always begins with the brutal truth of the real situation, including recognizing that post-war European democracy is a spiritually messy, if unavoidable, compromise - I can come back to this in another post. 

- That the European powers that be want, it seems to me, to have the Christian churches basically as a sub-section of the social model (including picking up those pieces –or rather: people– who fall through the official social welfare net). Nothing against that, but if we limit ourselves to that, without loudly calling to account the Community authorities for the fundamental shortcomings of their godless structures, we are failing in our duty.