Vatican proposes EU as example of Social Doctrine

[grotto]

A project supported by the European Union’s PEACE IV Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body www.seupb.eu

 

[PickyPicky]

EU environment policy, including policy on engagement in the wider international environment protection agenda is discussed at Environment Council meetings. The Council is comprised of Ministers with responsibility for environmental matters, including climate change

What on earth is the point you are making?

 

[PickyPicky]

This project is supported by the European Union’s PEACE IV Programme, managed by the Special EU Programmes Body (SEUPB) with the aim to engage young people from both sides of the border and communities. Through workshops and shared learning the participants will gain an awareness of the impact a ‘hard border’ had on communities and individuals, culminating in the young participants interviewing and recording “older” border resident’s experiences. The digital recordings and material collected will be made available here on the project website.

European Union’s Peace IV project

What on earth is the point you are making?

 

[Ridgerunner]

when the settlers first came here they killed off thousands of indigienous through disease.

Actually, they probably didn’t. By the time the early settlers arrived, the disease plagues were already in process; nearly over in fact. The earliest explorers brought them long before, and the Indians spread them through their trading territories. White settlers often entered totally uninhabited areas, not realizing the natives had died out perhaps 200 years before.

But it was inevitable. If one boatload of Indians had someday reached AFrica or Europe or Asia and returned, the result would have been the very same. Sooner or later, the peoples would have made contact, and plagues would have been the result. Europe, Asia and Africa had traded diseases with each other for millennia, but not with those living in the Americas. So Europeans, Asians and Africans had relative immunities the Indians had not developed.

 

[PickyPicky]

I have heard these critisims many times

There was no criticism in my remark. Just history. Whether right or wrong, justifiable or not, understandable or not, the US conquered the indigenous nations, absorbed their territories, and destroyed their independence. I am not arguing the morality of that, simply saying that made the US an empire.

 

[Vouthon]

I have not a whit of comprehension as to his meaning either.

My working presumption is that he thinks the fact that the EU has an environmental policy is, for some reason, bad???

As for his ravings on a “hard border” in Ireland and EU peace initiatives over there, I will leave that to @(name removed by moderator)

 

[Vouthon]

And, though it goes without saying, the weight of American historiography actually backs up the description of this expansionism as having the character of “empire” (and cited by me earlier in this thread).

So, your remarks should not be interpreted as those of a foreigner unfairly casting aspersions upon US history from a remove.

 

[grotto]

The European Union has a big role in what is taking place - and your message is one of “look away, nothing to see about the European Union”. What happens to these countries that get taken over in all areas belonging to a land of the people? Do you get it now?

 

[Vouthon]

Join the club.

 

[Vouthon]

The latest from Sky News politics correspondent Beth Rigby:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1124396682655993856

A nice, succinct round-up of the current state of play.

All eyes are now set upon the EU Parliament elections at the end of the month (where we get to see how Britain’s political realignment might fit in with the general mood or trends, if any, across the rest of the continent).

But before that, we have to begin in earnest with the campaign, here in the UK, for that election. It’s going to be really, really interesting - for want of a better word.

Full steam ahead lads and ladies!

 

[PickyPicky]

The European Union has a big role in what is taking place - and your message is one of “look away, nothing to see about the European Union”.

I’m afraid I don’t recognise this as being a message of mine.

What happens to these countries that get taken over in all areas belonging to a land of the people

I’m afraid I don’t understand what you are saying here.

Do you get it now?

Nope.

 

[Vouthon]

Yeah, that has since become apparent.

 

[PickyPicky]

Oh, I think wenches are welcome, too.

 

[Vouthon]

Lads, ladies, ladettes, men, and yes wenches

 

[Johann_du_Toit]

The EU (or rather it’s predecessor the European Economic Community) may have been a model of Catholic social teaching in 1957, but it has become a perversion of everything it’s founding fathers intended.

Instead of subsidiary it has a highly centralized bureaucratic (and undemocratic) top down form of government. Certainly the great Catholic men who initially championed European unity, like Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer (who believed in limited government and were anti-statist) would never have approved of this.

Instead of Christian unity it is a champion of gender ideology, abortion, militant secularism and SJW causes. Not to mention unfettered illegal immigration of people from certain parts of the world who reject Europe Christian identity.

 

[Vouthon]

@Johann_du_Toit

The last jibe - SJW “social justice warrior” - is a compliment in my eyes. But the former “gender ideology, abortion and militant secularism”: nothing but tired old CAF slurs used to shut down debate.

Abortion is a national issue in Europe, not an EU competence, and approaches to it thus vary widely between the member states - from outright ban in Malta, to heavily restricted in countries like Poland, to free and accessible within the appropriate term limits for countries like Sweden and the Netherlands.

There is no EU legal precedent akin to Roe vs Wade 1973. Member states decide their own abortion, euthanasia etc. law.

Even EWTN in the US recognises that your allegations are patently untrue:

https://www.ewtn.co.uk/article/41314/brexit-through-the-eyes-of-a-catholic-politician

Brexit Through the Eyes of a Catholic Politician​

What do Britain’s Catholic politicians make of the 2016 referendum decision, which has now descended into what might be viewed as a constitutional crisis for the U.K.?

Charles Tannock, a Catholic and a British Conservative member of the European Parliament (MEP), summed up what many “Remainers” think when he told the Register, “Brexit means a poorer, more isolated U.K., with its peoples deprived of the freedom to live, work, study and retire anywhere across 30 countries, and [it] has caused a deeply divided country and political class.”

Tannock added, “It means being a rule-taker for much of U.K.’s economy but no longer being in a position to influence matters in everything from medical licenses, to environmental, labor and financial regulation. … It means damage to U.K.’s NHS, as EU doctors and nurses stop coming as they lose their secure rights to practice in U.K.”

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

Fearing the unraveling of the current British constitutional arrangement, Tannock went on to add, “So far I have not identified one positive thing about Brexit. It could mean the potential breakup of the U.K., with an independent Scotland and a reunited Ireland.”

Tannock sees Brexit as “a selfish and destructive act by the U.K. against the EU.”

He said, “Fortunately, no other EU 27 country is tempted to follow the U.K., having witnessed the disaster of Brexit and realized that so many lies and false promises were made by Brexiteers to deceive the U.K. electorate during the referendum campaign.”

What light, if any, does Catholic social teaching shed on this debate around national sovereignty, supranational structures and the idea of subsidiarity?

Tannock thinks Brexit reflects some of the stands of the 16th-century English Reformation.

“To me, there is this desire to re-establish an English rather than British nationalist narrative, which they’ve masked as ‘British exceptionalism,’ which is seen by some Brexiteers as a second Reformation rejecting Catholicism, which traditionally bonded England to Europe,” he said. “Loyalty to the pope in England as a ‘foreign prince’ will always be seen as suspicious by hardline English nationalists.”

“This partly explains the hostility felt by ‘Brextremists’ toward Ireland, which stayed loyal to the EU, and who, deep down, cannot accept and regret Ireland’s independence and sovereignty and hope Ireland can somehow be reabsorbed by the U.K. or, more precisely, by England.

As Tannock told the Register, “The EU is a secular organization, and rightly so, but it has brought all religions and none together in the project of building Europe, so I believe Catholics should support it. Matters of conscience to Catholics like abortion and euthanasia are national, not EU competences, so you cannot bring that into the argument; and Catholic countries like Poland and Malta have different laws in these areas from many other member states.”

 

[Vouthon]

Certainly the great Catholic men who initially championed European unity, like Alcide de Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer (who believed in limited government and were anti-statist) would never have approved of this.

I am very familiar with the thought and political vision of the founding fathers of the EU, including Alcide de Gasperi, Robert Schumann, Konrad Adenauer and Jean Monnet, all Catholics. Your right to the extent that the founders “had been defenders of citizens’ rights against aggrandised centralising nation-states” but entirely wrong in that they worked to create a firmly supranational, federal Europe.

They were guided by a combination of what the Germans called Das Abendland (the ‘Christian West’) and Christian Democracy in a secular, humanistic context: “understood as a supranational and symbolic space between Bolshevik Russia and capitalist America…As any truly Catholic (i.e. universal, from the Greek, khatolikos) position must be, it was contrary to nationalism. In the context of the Cold War, this view played an important role in the political revamping of post-Second World War Western Europe, in the ‘European’ thought and language of Christian Democracy and the commitment to the project of European integration” (“The Politics of the Abendland: Christian Democracy and the Idea of Europe after the Second World War” Rosario Forlenza, Cambridge University).

See, from the aforementioned Cambridge University study:

Three Catholic Christian Democrats – Adenauer, Schuman and De Gasperi – outlined the European project of integration, which eventually would become the EEC and thus ‘Europe’. Not by accident did they hail from the very margins of their respective nation states – a shared formative existential experience, often an active carrier of mutual trust and political and cultural meanings.

All had been marked by the sometimes brutal homogenisation of the late-forming nation states, Italy and Germany. All had been defenders of citizens’ rights against aggrandised centralising states: De Gasperi of the rights originally accorded by the Habsburg Empire to the citizens of the Trentino; Schuman of the separate rights of the former Reichsland Lothringen; Adenauer of a Catholic Rhineland against a heathen republic. De Gasperi had studied in Vienna and served in the pre-1918 Austrian Parliament’s lower house (Reichsrat); Adenauer had been mayor of Catholic Cologne, very much on the margins of the Reich; Schuman’s family had fled Lorraine from Germany to Luxembourg.

National sovereignty was neither a value in itself for them nor a pre-condition for creating political meaning in the way it had been for Max Weber. On the contrary it was something to be feared.

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

These leaders advocated subsidiarity and personalism, traditional tenets of Catholic social thought. They likewise advocated a Europe united in its ‘Christian-humanist’ heritage, which they sometimes coupled with other political-ideological traditions (Jacobin republicanism, for example) in an intellectual reconciliation. De Gasperi constantly referred in his speech to Christianity, and its lessons of ‘fraternity, unity, and social values’ as an inevitable and compulsory requirement for the construction of Europe. On 21 April 1954, at the European Parliamentary Conference, he explained:

If with Toynbee I affirm that Christianity lies at the origin of this European civilization, I don’t intend by that to introduce any exclusive confessional criterion in the appreciation of our history.

I merely wish to speak of our common European heritage, of that shared ethical vision that fosters the inviolability and responsibility of the human person with its ferment of evangelic brotherhood, its cult of law inherited from the ancients, its cult of beauty refined through the centuries, and its will for truth and justice sharpened by an experience stretching over more than a thousand years.

It was perhaps Adenauer who reshaped the Abendland discourse in post-Second World War Europe more than anyone else. At the NEI congress of Luxembourg in 1948, he located in the Rhenish region, rather precisely between the East of France and the West of Germany, both the core of the Abendland and a community that was already imagining the cosmopolitan Europe coming into being (im werden).

Here, Adenauer drew also on his critical involvement in the politics of the Weimar period. In 1919, as a mayor of Cologne and pro-European activist of the Catholic Zentrum, he had evoked the foundational myth of the Rhine, ‘where in the next decades German culture will meet that of the Western democracies’.

When le général famously spoke of a Europe ‘from the Atlantic to the Urals’ he was in fact conjuring up, quite in line with the Abendland tradition, a continental western European bloc based on a Franco-German entente that could stand on its own both militarily and politically: a Europe independent from the United States and Russia. In short, his vision of a French-led Europe came close to the ‘reunited Carolingian Christendom envisioned by most of the founders, but achieved by more organic means’.

(continued…)

 

[Vouthon]

The idealised vision of the pre-modern and pre-national Catholic ‘West’ offered an excellent solution to the thorny issue of nationalism, not only in its German form. In 1951 Schuman cast the international system of the nation states in theological terms as a ‘heresy’, endorsing the Abendland charge against Protestant nation builders. The Reformation, Schuman wrote in a bi-lingual publication edited by the European Movement and directed to American readers, had shattered the religious homogeneity of the continent and entailed the birth of nations whose ambitions had increasingly degenerated into bloody confrontation. The affinities here with the Abendland ideology, as articulated in the interwar years, are striking:

The original outline of a united Europe was that of Christian, medieval Europe under a twin authority – a spiritual one personified by the Papacy, a temporal one embodied by the Emperor, head of the Holy Roman Empire. This unity withered after more than six centuries of existence, when the Renaissance weakened religious ties; the Reformation likewise disrupted religious unity and the Empire lost its prestige to newly sovereign nations. Europe split into a large group of states whose interests and aims conflicted to such a degree that fierce battles ensued

In the narrative of Christian Democracy, the order of European history and civilisation had been destroyed by modern nationalism and then by its association with the authoritarian political theologies of fascism and Nazism. Furthermore, political Catholicism had long experienced the nation state as a homogenising force threatening communities, from the churches to families. Taming nationalisms and nations, healing the European civil war and overcoming the past through close cooperation beyond the borders of nation states were explicit goals of the Europeanism of Christian Democracy.

As early as 1913 De Gasperi envisaged the institution of a cogent and structured system of nations and states under the protective and unifying wing of a common supranational political organisation, which would tame the conflicts engendered by nationalism and maintain peace among nations. Nations, the Italian explained, would retain freedom of action, decision making and self-government in their own specific matters.

De Gasperi here harkened back, and made explicit reference, to the political philosophy outlined by Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) – the ‘Supreme Poet’ of Italian literature – in his 1313 treatise On Monarchy (De Monarchia). In any event, for Dante in 1313 – and for De Gasperi in 1913 – the ‘universal Monarchy’ (or the respublica Christiana) had to rest on the principle of Christian universalism and on the function of mediation exercised by the pope in the conflict between the emperor (sovereign) and the states.

(continued…)