Christ, not Rome

What exactly does Kenneth Zammit Tabona mean when he says that the "Roman Christian" religion is "moulded on the tenets of the Roman Empire" (April 10)? As far as I know, the Christian religion, whether in its Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant versions, is moulded on the teachings of Jesus Christ.

It is true that, after the barbarian invasions, St Gregory the Great organised the western part of Christendom roughly on the lines of the Roman Empire; but the "tenets" of the western Church were the same as those of the eastern Church, and were based on the teachings of Christ. And it is on those teachings, as well as on Roman law and Greek philosophy, that the "original European culture" was based, even if the drafters of the discredited European Constitution, to their shame, refused to acknowledge this.

As for Mr Zammit Tabone's other assertion, that "the triumphant Risen Christ is to be our icon and the Cross must be as empty as the Tomb that briefly held His body", what exactly is he suggesting? Is he saying that we should only think about the cheerful aspects of Christianity and forget that salvation came through the Cross?

For Christians the supreme value is love, which usually entails suffering, and the supreme anti-values are selfishness and indifference to others. It is Buddhism, not Christianity, that considers suffering as something to be avoided at all costs, and proposes nirvana, a state of tranquility achieved through detachment from everyone and everything, as the supreme value.

I too, like Mr Zammit Tabone, am against bigotry (not necessarily the preserve of religious people); but I think that the term "fundamentalist" is much abused. A fundamentalist Christian, to me, is someone like St Francis of Assisi, not one who goes around murdering "infidels" for not agreeing with him. In other words, he is a true humanist, and any attempt to contrast humanism with Christianity is specious. It is not an accident that some of the most famous humanists have been committed Christians. Neither is it an accident that the great visionaries who created the European Union - from Schuman, Adenauer and de Gasperi down to Jacques Delors - were devout Catholics, one of them even a candidate for sainthood.

Then again, I don't think that religious bigotry had much to do with "the hatred, war and unhappiness" that tore Europe apart for so many centuries. Rather, it was the mutual suspicion between the French and the Germans, even if this had its roots in the so-called Wars of Religion. It was fear of the Germans uniting that induced Catholic France to intervene continuously on the weaker side (often the Protestant side) during those wars, so that neither Catholic Austria nor Protestant Prussia could gain the ascendancy. And anyway, what had religion to do with the Napoleonic Wars and with the two Franco-German Wars that engulfed almost the entire world in the 20th century?