THE ICARUS BAR

Perhaps the motto for our meeting might be Seamus Heaney's direction for the uncoding of all landscapes of ‘things founded clean on their own shapes, / Water and ground in their extremity’. We are gathered, this weekend, at an extremity of Europe, if not at the margin. But where would one find Europe's centre? A politician might choose Brussels, but a banker or a businessman would more likely opt for Frankfurt. There is no parable more poignant of the predicament of modern Europe than that provided, in the departure area at Frankfurt airport, by what journalists call a watering-hole, labelled in proud lights: ‘Bar Ikarus’.

There are, of course, other candidates for Europe's centre. It was from Rome, in 1991, that a hastily assembled Synod summoned ‘Europe’ to make a ‘choice for God’. No one seems quite sure what this means but (at least in England) suspicion of ‘Maastricht’ is, in part, bound up with half-formed fears that ancient and imperial forces gather strength, that caesaropapal banners are somewhere being unfurled. Meanwhile, in quite high places in the Catholic Church there seems to be, as Jean-Louis Schlegel recently remarked, ‘a marked ambivalence, not to say ominous confusion, over the notion of secularisation’.

Brussels? Frankfurt? Rome? The list of candidates for Europe's centre might now be extended to include Budapest, or Cracow.