The Vatican has demanded that more weight be afforded for churches and Christians in the arrangement of Europe. The Vatican’s “foreign minister” Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo, said at the weekend, that Europe’s Christians must work against the pressures to push faith as a private affair into the social background, reported the Swiss Livenet.

Archbishop Giovanni stressed the enormous contribution of the church to the social and cultural life of Europe in the areas of health and education: “It would therefore be political err if Europe were to reduce the phenomena of ‘church’ or ‘Christians’ to an internal aspect of human experience, and thereby to a purely private affair.

Lajolo urged that Christians were underrepresented in political committees, the media and in cultural institutions, despite that four fifths of EU citizens are Christians.

The Archbishop said that they are at best tolerated, if not completely pushed back, as if they do not fit to a modern, secularised culture or as if their convictions were not “politically correct”.

Archbishop Lajolo urged that Christians should not allow their potential to influence to be simply pushed out or ignored “under the pretext of the so-called Laizity of political society”.

There are around 368 million Christians currently living in Europe.