ABSTRACT
The ongoing process of European integration has led to an historically unprecedented degree of harmonisation of political, legal, and economic matters across the EU member countries. The peak of this development for the time being has been the replacement of national currencies by a common European currency in most member countries in 2002. While this process has also reached part of the cultural arena, such as the mass media, it has made little progress in the field of religion and politics, and in particular regarding church-state relations. So far, only a few trends of convergence are detectable, such as the basic recognition of the principle of religious freedom in the laws of the community, beginning with the 1976 decision of the European Court of Justice.1 But the member countries’ church law has largely been ignored by the European Union. Thus, the patterns of church-state relations have remained rather diverse from country to country and contrast sharply with both the current level of economic standardisation and previous levels of ecclesiastical harmonisation especially in the days before the Protestant Reformation.
