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Late last year, Catholics and Protestants again joined together to urge that Sunday be legislated as an official day of rest. Their immediate goals include closing shops and restricting other business activities on Sundays.

Two religious organizations, the Commission of Bishops’ Conferences of the European Community (COMECE) and the Conference of European Churches (CEC), gained public attention during debate on proposed amendments to the European Directive 2003/88/EC, which deals with work schedule regulations. These two organizations, the first one Roman Catholic and the second one ecumenical (comprising a majority of the traditional Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches), were created primarily to interface politically with European institutions.

Article 5 of the actual directive (2003/88/EC) titled “Weekly Rest Period” reads as follows:

Member States shall take the measures necessary to ensure that, per each seven-day period, every worker is entitled to a minimum uninterrupted rest period of 24 hours plus the 11 hours daily rest referred to in Article 3.

If objective, technical or work organization conditions so justify, a minimum rest period of 24 hours may be applied.

The initiative proposed to add a third clause to this article:

The minimum rest period referred to in the first paragraph shall in principle include Sunday.

Interestingly, this wording is not new. It used to be part of a similar directive (93/104/EC) from 1993. But in 1996, the European Court of Justice annulled this phrase stating that “the Council has failed to explain why Sunday, as a weekly rest day, is more closely connected with the health and safety of workers than any other day of the week” (ECJ, Case C-84/94). That is why the 2008 initiative proposed an additional paragraph in the rationale at the beginning of the directive. The proposed paragraph (6a) would read:

The likelihood of sickness in companies that require staff to work on Sundays is greater than in companies that do not require staff to work on Sundays. The health of workers depends, among other factors, on their opportunities to reconcile work and family life, to establish and maintain social ties and to pursue their spiritual needs. Sunday, as the traditional weekly rest day, contributes to these objectives more than any other day of the week.

The common documents of COMECE and CEC explain the proposed amendments and seek to supply argumentation to rebut the finding of the European Court of Justice.

The directive was discussed by the European Parliament in mid-December 2008. The amendments proposed by COMECE and CEC and supported by several members of the EU Parliament were dismissed for formal reasons and therefore not even discussed. This fact suggests that the idea of legally imposed Sunday rest actually has little support in the parliament and especially in the EU Commission (a kind of European central government). The COMECE expressed its disappointment at the ruling in a December 17, 2008 news release. On February 11, 2009, the secretariat of COMECE issued a news release welcoming a new attempt by several members of the European Parliament to ask the House to approve a written declaration asking for “protection of a work-free Sunday as an essential pillar of the European Social Model and as part of the European cultural heritage.”

Although we recognize and support many of the values being urged by the proponents of Sunday rest legislation (such as family, health, ecology, and economic advantages), we regret that these initiatives do not take into consideration the consequences such legislation would have upon minority groups that observe a day other than Sunday as their day of religious rest.

Several European countries have traditionally had strong laws prohibiting shops from opening on Sundays and restricting activities that disturb the peace. The growing number of exceptions, pressure from large supermarkets who want to remain open on Sundays and the rather permissive and indifferent attitude of a large portion of Europeans helps to explain the position of the European parliament.

To date, all initiatives to legislate Sunday as a day of rest throughout the European Union have failed. This does not mean that proponents of this legislation have given up on the idea. On the contrary, we have witnessed an increasing number of articles promoting Sunday rest appearing in a variety of publications with the purpose of altering public opinion. For example, the January 25, 2009 issue of the Belgian Catholic weekly Dimanche published an article addressing the issue of shops opening on Sundays. The author of this article quotes, among others, Pope Benedict XVI, who wrote in his book Jesus of Nazareth that the struggle in favor of Sunday continues to be a part of the church’s concerns. In the same way, the COMECE’s December 17 news release called for further mobilization and the uniting of voices to promote Sunday rest.