The Jesuit European Office (OCIPE) celebrates its 50th anniversary

• Letter from Fr Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General
• Address by Fr Frank Turner, Director of Ocipe

From the beginning, Jesuits engaged with the European project, so influential in constructing a new politics, rooted in the search for reconciliation, peace and solidarity, after the devastation of the Second World War. In what was still a deeply divided continent, the impulse of the European Union has always been one of reunification, of reaching beyond destructive nationalisms.
As one contribution to the Church’s mission, the Jesuit European Office (OCIPE), was founded in Strasbourg in 1956, and now has offices in Brussels, Budapest and Warsaw. By kind invitation of Mgr Joseph Doré, we celebrate its 50th anniversary in Strasbourg on December 14th 2006 with a seminar and Mass of celebration.

The seminar will help us to review the history and objectives of the Jesuit European Office and look towards its future. The keynote speaker will be Senator Hubert Haenel (Senator for Haut Rhin, and President of the Parliamentary Delegation for the European Union). He will reflect on the continuing challenge for the Church in engaging with the European institutions. We equally hope to look at the tasks of service and witness required of the Jesuits and their co-workers in relation to Europe in the years to come.

This special event also signifies the complete relaunch of our website which you may find now at www.ocipe.info - take a look and delve into our comments on what is happing in Europe and the wider world!
If you wish to contact members from the Brussels office, you may do it now at surname[at]ocipe.info or via our generic address info@ocipe.info.

...Reported by Elaine Rudolphi, Brussels

 
Letter from Fr Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General

December 11th, 2006

Father Frank Turner, S.J.
OCIPE
15 rue de la Toussaint
F 67000 Strasbourg
FRANCE
 

Dear Father Turner, P.C.

I am very happy to greet you as you celebrate, by means of a conference and the Eucharist, the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of OCIPE. I offer my best wishes to your host, Mgr Joseph Doré. Since last year, as Archbishop of Strasbourg he has wished that this anniversary be celebrated with a certain solemnity, since it also indicates the importance of Strasbourg itself in the whole construction of Europe. I also extend warm greetings to Mr. Laurent Grégoire, the present President of OCIPE, to the present and former members of OCIPE’s staff, and to all of you who are friends of the Society of Jesus and of OCIPE itself.

OCIPE was founded by Monseigneur Weber, then Bishop of Strasbourg, in 1956, to ensure a Catholic presence by the Council of Europe. He entrusted Fr. Albert Le Roy, S.J. OCIPE’s first Director, with the task of fostering ethical reflection among European public servants and politicians, and making Catholics more sensitive to European issues. OCIPE was thus founded the year before the Treaty of Rome. What was then, therefore, still the ‘European Coal and Steel Community’ has passed through several different stages and has grown steadily. OCIPE has sought to also accompany this process of growth. The Brussels office opened in 1963. Those in Budapest and Warsaw were established as soon as this became possible, in 1991: this step expressed the clear intention to engage with a Europe committed to overcoming its deep divisions.

In its presence to the European project, OCIPE is essentially in the service of the Church. Early on, before COMECE was founded and also before the Holy See established its own diplomatic missions to the Council of Europe and the European Union, OCIPE served the Holy See and Episcopal Conferences of Europe very directly. The very title ‘OCIPE’ (which came to denote Office Catholique d’information et d’initiatives pour l’Europe) points to a willingness to take ‘initiatives’ in the service of a true European unity, from the perspective of Catholic faith.

Gradually, therefore, OCIPE in Brussels and Strasbourg began to engage with the Council of Europe and the EEC, later the EU, as they forged their own identity and vision. It did this, for example, through colloquia and conferences and through a journal, Objectif Europe, published through many years, from 1959 until it ceased in 1997, when OCIPE agreed to collaborate with COMECE’s publication, l’Europe au fil des jours, that has been renamed Europe Infos and became the journal now produced jointly with COMECE. The offices in Budapest and Warsaw, for their part, operated in the quite different context of post-communist countries preparing to become members of the EU, retaining an important outreach to their neighbouring states.

If the emphasis of OCIPE’s work has naturally shifted over the years, it has nevertheless been marked by the attempt to hold together four elements:

 practising advocacy (understanding this as a critical but constructive conversation, in the service of others, from the standpoint of fundamental convictions), with those at all levels responsible for shaping European policies;
 carrying out this advocacy role within the framework of respectful personal relationships with the officials of the institutions, rather than treating them merely as the ‘objects’ of lobbying;
 striving to apply to European issues, ideals and policies the discernment of spirits that we have learned from St Ignatius;
 ultimately, and as the basis of all else, representing in this environment the vision of the Gospel, while learning how better to witness within this demanding milieu.

OCIPE’s Vision Statement, now approved by the Conference of European Provincials, sums up this mission as follows: “OCIPE seeks to accompany the construction of Europe: in serving its personnel in their professional and spiritual discernment, in sustaining critical reflection from the perspective of Christian faith on European values and responsibilities, and in promoting Europe’s solidarity internally and with the wider world.”

OCIPE does not focus on some unique set of topics, nor does it have irreplaceable expertise. Its distinctive mark is that it operates within the networks of the Society of Jesus and the Ignatian Family – throughout Europe and beyond. So, for example, it cannot work effectively in isolation from Jesuit social centres and academic institutes, and such academic networks as Scribani or the Red Javier, though these links still require much strengthening. As it collaborated with the Holy See, the CCEE, Catholic International Organisations in the past, OCIPE considers as equally crucial that its mission is carried out in partnership in the future: notably with COMECE, with other groups of religious, with ecumenical partners, and with civil society organisations – especially those of Christian inspiration such as universities and development organisations.

In recent years, OCIPE has concentrated on important subjects within Europe itself: for example, the European Constitution, and the accession of the ten new countries (including Hungary and Poland) to the EU in 2004. New European topics can still require attention, as for example energy, on which OCIPE is working in association with COMECE. Now, though, a new key theme, even a whole dimension of work, is emerging. Since OCIPE is an institution linked to the social apostolate of the Society of Jesus, it aims to reflect the international priorities of this social apostolate. In other words, its reflections on Europe are now being directed in a special way to ‘Europe in relationship’ – especially, in promoting a relationship to Africa marked by solidarity, and what one might call an ‘exchange of gifts’. The Brussels office in particular seems to have a promising role of representing to the institutions of the EU the perspectives of other continents. This role needs to complement the longer-established work on ‘Europe as such’, not to replace it.

Such a task, of an effective work of representation at the European level, is evidently a challenge to the Society’s own structures of mission, since it symbolises the necessity of a mission that transcends the work of any single nation or province.

I express my gratitude for the support given to OCIPE for many years by the Conference of European Provincials. Beyond the obvious financial backing, the European provincials have missioned many Jesuits to OCIPE, even when the needs of their own provinces were acute. I also offer the gratitude of the Society of Jesus to other benefactors without whom the work could scarcely continue. These include episcopal conferences in Europe, whose support is a deeply valued sign of the bishops’ confidence in the ecclesial mission of the Society. In particular I must mention the Verband der Diözesen Deutschlands, which has long supported OCIPE with unstinting generosity. I also thank sincerely those bodies whose grants have recently financed a two-year pilot project on peace advocacy in relation to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

OCIPE, an organisation of modest size, nevertheless faces a big task, since the quality of life in Europe and beyond is radically affected by the vision and actions of the European political institutions. I congratulate all those who have worked faithfully over these many years, and promise my encouragement and prayer for the future,

Fraternally yours in Our Lord,

Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.
Superior General

 
Address by Fr Frank Turner, Director of Ocipe

STRASBOURG ANNIVERSARY CONFERENCE
December 14th 2006

My task is to link this celebration with OCIPE’s future - briefly. That is not easy, but I am not obliged to forecast the future. As Fr General wrote in his letter, read out earlier, we are, and will remain, an organisation of modest size. That being so, we do not only respond to key events and issues of the day (insofar as we are able and are mandated) but will always inevitably shape our choice of work by the talents and competencies that we have available – genuine but limited – while making the best possible use of the expertise of our partners and networks.

I thank M. Haenel for his very helpful reflections, though I make no attempt to respond instantly to the points he makes. From tomorrow, Friday, to Sunday we will hold a meeting of all our offices, Brussels, Budapest and Warsaw, along with P. Henri Madelin who works for OCIPE at the Council of Europe and Mme Esther Gauthier who represents us in this city: we will need to reflect together on M. Haenel’s presentation.

But first I must admit one challenge that I feel personally and keenly. As OCIPE, we wish to practice advocacy in the light of Christian faith. Father General’s letter gives a rich sense of what advocacy can and should be. But advocacy also presupposes competent analysis. OCIPE is not a research body and will often work by mediating the analysis of others, though even that requires us to be sufficiently competent to make responsible assessments about the quality of others’ analysis! We cannot avoid judging others’ work: both the work of the European institutions, politicians, officials, and the work of critics of those institutions, such as civil society and religious groups, and justice and peace organisations. But political analysis is hugely difficult. I often feel inhibited by a passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel The Gift, filled with Nabokov’s characteristic wit and his equally notorious contempt;

Shchyogolev launched on a discussion of politics. Like many unpaid windbags he thought that he could combine the reports he read in the newspapers by paid windbags into an orderly scheme, upon following which a logical and sober mind (in this case, his mind) could with no effort explain and foresee a multitude of world events (The Gift, Nabokov, p.159).

We want to avoid being ‘windbags’: but in a world filled with political and religious argument that is not easy. Lao Tze warned, ‘The one who knows does not speak, the one who speaks does not know’. My consolation is a saying of the apostles Peter and John in the Acts of the Apostles (4: 20), “We cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard”. Mere silence is not an option, and the risks of speech are no greater than the risks of evasion. As OCIPE we know we can bring a Catholic Christian sensibility and commitment to urgent human topics. And it is certainly urgent to explore the way in which key political entities such as the EU and the Council of Europe work for or against our sense of human unity. So we want to take the risk of articulating to the European Institutions, and also to our own publics, the oneness of Europe (East and West, prosperous and struggling) and between Europe and the world. Our programme is as general, and as demanding, as that. We need to do with this the greatest possible respect for those we deal with (listening at least as much as speaking), including for those who disagree with us, and those who would wish to deny faith-groups a full voice in such discussion: but we must equally speak the truths we can discern, in loyalty to those on whose behalf we commit ourselves, and especially those who suffer injustice.

So we need to hold two positions together. Firstly, we are committed to ‘the European project’. At its best the EU, for example, enables states to transcend their national identity and interests by exercising political authority together with other states; and by establishing economic arrangements that embody a trans national care for the weaker. Of course, like all institutions, the EU constantly falls short of its aspirations. But the aspiration itself, to construct by consent a new kind of political entity adequate to the realities of the modern world, is remarkable. Key questions around the Constitution, inter-governmentalism over against federalism, etc., can be summed up in this way: how far do the member-states wish to unify their political lives. I don’t think there is a ‘right answer’ to this question. But the states clearly do accept the need to work together, despite inevitably contesting for their national interests, and that acceptance marks a clear gain in consciousness. The ‘falling short’ (and St Paul in Romans 5: 12 insists that we have all fallen short) sets some parameters for OCIPE’s present and future work. I shall mention three.

One test of this consciousness relates to the integration of what Pope John Paul II called the ‘two lungs of Europe’ in a certain political identity (not necessarily a cultural identity, since the cultural identity of Europe is plural and irreducible, just as even single states often embody plural cultural identity – cf. Belgium, UK, India, Brazil ). So OCIPE is committed to taking as seriously as possible the Centre and East of Europe – and we will need to develop the potential of our three offices together for this purpose. In this sense, as a Jesuit provincial remarked recently at an OCIPE meeting, we are all now the ‘children of 1989’.

A second aspect refers to the values of the European project. To take just one example of the need for critique, one could identify a serious asymmetry in the EU’s institutionalisation. The aspiration to render it an effective and competitive market force is well-supported, by structures that are ‘federal’: thus the Commissioner for Trade is in effect ‘Trade Minister’ for the EU. But the declared objectives concerning social inclusion and social solidarity (that is, market-correcting or market-supplementing mechanisms) remain entirely within the control of the member-states. That imbalance suggests that the EU is still, at one level the nation-state’s concession to capitalism’. It is clearly understood that national economic policies are insufficient, but is not always understood how Europe can unite in living out values beyond capitalism. In such cases, market capitalism ironically confirms the Marxist assertion of an ultimate economic base to human life. But Christian faith cannot accept this anthropology. Similarly, when in November 2005 the European Commission presented to the Hampton Court (London) Council meeting just one single document, ‘European Values in a Globalised World’, the only value explored in detail was that of the EU’s economic competitiveness (over against China, India, etc) and the social arrangements necessary to sustain this competitiveness. On the contrary, we must insist – and argue intelligently – that economic relationships are only one aspect of a more fundamental set of human relationships and human purposes. Society is not an adjunct to the market.

Thirdly, Fr General has mentioned a certain shift in emphasis in OCIPE’s work, especially as it affects the Brussels office. Always remembering our partnership with other bodies such as COMECE, we want to put ourselves at the service of networks of Jesuit and Ignatian institutions throughout the world that seek justice and relate to the EU and the Council of Europe. For example, our most focused current project relates to the search for peace in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the effort to challenge conditions (such as the illegal and ruthless exploitation of natural resources) that threaten such peace. We have taken on this project, inspired by and financed externally through our emerging networks; and have done it for at least three reasons:-

 because the EU is deeply committed to supporting the emerging democratic government of DRC, after the most destructive world conflict since the Second World War;
 because Belgium is a key strategic country in this respect;
 as a pilot project to construct a long-term partnership (together with the US Jesuits) with the African Jesuits and their own lay partners.

To echo Pope John Paul, then, we see the two ‘lungs’ of our own work as

 contributing to the exploration and promotion of a sufficiently serious sense of European identity,
 strengthening the conviction that Europe actually has no identity except ‘in relationship’.

By way of conclusion, let me try to explain this double perspective. I grow as a person not in the measure that I enhance my individual well-being and security – though it would be stupidly wrong to ignore that – but according as I am enabled to transcend myself, by opening myself to the power and grace of God, and by welcoming others in my life for mutual enrichment. St Augustine eloquently made this point in his famous distinction between seeking self as the true good (that is, where necessary at others’ expense) and seeking the true good of the self (since this second, authentic good, can only be attained as others’ good is included in ‘my’ good). Can that fundamental principle of spirituality, and equally of the acknowledged psychology of personal growth, be applied to collectivities such as the EU? I believe it can, and that is why OCIPE is deliberately seeking to broaden its outreach in collaboration with others. Both individuals and collectivities have the same enduring struggle against failure, against what Christians call ‘sin’ – and both have aspirations to live a fuller and richer life. We will try to witness, to use our brains and networks, to promote the true good of Europe – which is attainable only in harmony with the true good of all.

Frank Turner SJ
14 December 2006

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