Cristina Odone
Cristina Odone is a journalist, novelist and broadcaster specialising in the relationship between society, families and faith. She is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Policy Studies and is a former editor of the Catholic Herald and deputy editor of the New Statesman. She is married and lives in west London with her husband, two stepsons and a daughter. Her latest novel, The Good Divorce Guide, is published by Harper Collins.
The ridiculous ban on crucifixes will have Italians falling out of love with Europe
By Cristina Odone Religion Last updated: June 30th, 2010
Banned from the classroom
My first classroom, in a convent school in Rome, was adorned with a wooden crucifix in a corner. We were 30 girls in the class, all Catholics who took our faith for granted. It was as much part of our lives as spaghetti and pop songs, and the notion that the small wooden image was an offensive imposition would have turned our schoolgirl giggles into loud laughter.
For today’s Italians, though, it’s no laughing matter. The crucifix in the classroom risks provoking a rupture with a European bureaucracy my compatriots have come to see as invasive and intolerant.The government is appealing to the European Court of Human Rights to overturn its judgement last year that religious symbols in schools are an infringement of human rights. The crucifix, that symbol of a supreme self-sacrifice, is supposedly unacceptable in a European culture that allows schoolchildren to download homophobic rap lyrics, watch sexist (and in Italy, semi-pornographic) TV programmes, indulge in crass consumerist competitions over designer trainers, sunglasses and iPhones.
Even the most hedonistic Italians realise that tolerance for porn but not for a crucifix is wrong. The government’s appeal today sticks up two fingers to a court of so-called human rights that does not recognise the right to religious expression. Italians reject the anti-Christian culture that has infiltrated this court, and beyond it, the EU.
Ten years ago, I took part in a conference organised by the then Pope, John Paul II, for European writers on religion. I realised that although ostensibly the Pope wanted us to celebrate the millennium, his real ambition was to reclaim the European project for Christianity. He saw that the Christian vision of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman had been hijacked by a cadre of bureaucrats motivated by federalism not faith. The shared values of Christian Europe, rooted in the Gospel’s message of love and forgiveness, had fuelled the post-war generation: the architects of the European Union had seen what secularist states were capable of, and were beginning to suspect that totalitarian (and equally godless) regimes could inflict even greater damage.
That was then. Today, Eurocrats have different fears: that Muslims are not treated like Christians, women are not treated like men, gays are not treated like straight people. They talk of “rights”, not right and wrong. And in their hierarchy of rights, the right to religious freedom sits somewhere at the bottom. Italians can’t stomach it. They may have taken their Catholicism for granted for centuries, but they don’t want some bastion of alien culture issuing diktats about where to hang their crucifixes. Suddenly, they’re ready to wage battle for their faith. Amen to that.
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