Summer History & Heritage — #5 (week of July 11)

“The past is never dead. In fact it is not even past.”
American cities and towns, not to mention our fifty states, no longer believe they have
any communal right either to affirm or deny religious faith. Vestiges of the “old-time
religion” in public places (like prayer, Bible reading, manger scenes, or Christmas
carols) sooner or later come under fire and are challenged in the courts. Our judges
usually rule against the practices in question however time-honored, but it is really
liberalism, and not the Constitution, that conditions their verdicts.

In 2006, as reported in the most recent issue of Chronicles, one of the customary
religious symbols of Italy (crucifixes in the schools) was challenged by a Finnish
immigrant, who claimed various human-rights and church-state provisions agreed to by
the European Union were being violated. A lower E.U. court sided with the disgruntled
Finn, to the deep displeasure of most Italians. But this story has ended happily, for now
at least. On appeal, the European Court of Human Rights said that Italy need not
remove the crucifixes from the classroom walls.

What’s really interesting are the comments on this case by one of the jurists of the
Human Rights Court, Giovanni Bonello of Malta. Given the judge’s appreciative
reference to Mississippi’s William Faulkner (quoted below), Americans especially should
take note. Bonello declared that, “A European court should not be asked to bankrupt
centuries of European tradition. No court, certainly not this Court, should rob the
Italians of part of their cultural patrimony. . . . The Court has been asked to be an
accomplice to a major act of cultural vandalism. I believe William Faulkner went to the
core of the issue: the past is never dead. In fact it is not even past.”

Bonello went on to say that, far from an act of religious neutrality, getting rid of those
crucifixes “would have been a positive and aggressive espousal of agnosticism or of
secularism. . . . Keeping a symbol where it has always been is no act of intolerance by
believers or cultural traditionalists. Dislodging it would be an act of intolerance by
agnostics and secularists.”

The judge was not afraid to call the crucifix “a timeless symbol of redemption through
universal love.” Apart from the desirability of the E.U. itself and any of its transnational
rulings, it’s good to see a man of standing in the West publicly acknowledge the vital
importance of religious traditions, in this case Roman Catholicism, to a society. True
conservatives know such things must trump abstract ideals like “liberty, equality,
fraternity” and a hundred others (rights, diversity, democracy, tolerance, etc.). Indeed,
such ideals find their meaning and concrete expression only in a living tradition, a past
that never really dies.

Now if we modern Americans, and our leaders, could be infused with some of Judge
Bonello’s spirit, maybe “the land of the free and the home of the brave” could be
something other than a distant memory.