Social Justice Puts Catholics at Heart of Europe

It’s hardly charitable to enjoy the idea of Jean-Claude Juncker and European parliament president Martin Schulz squirming, but I must confess that I do. I’m no more anti-federalist today than I was yesterday but when the head of the catholic church chides an organization as bloated and unimpregnable as the EU, something must appeal at least to your funny-bone.

One can imagine the tone of voice the pope would have used during his address to the EU Parliament being less strident and bellicose than Europhobe voices like that of Nigel Farage (though that didn’t stop Farage from clumsily hi-jacking the pope’s address for his own political ends), but it was withering nonetheless. And it was a timely message too, as the approaching UK general election makes the entire EU argument a much more febrile affair with different political and sociological agendas battling for dominance, that the simple humanitarian considerations formed Francis’s speaking truth to power on this occasion.

But the undeniable moral authority of the new pope, his fearless targeting of EU institutional shortcomings and muscular reform in The Vatican itself will go far in making the catholic church more relevant to modern life, especially as strong language like, “…the unborn and terminally-ill are treated as objects in Europe”, sparing nobody’s blushes.

Referring to the EU as an elderly and inhumane bureaucracy, Pope Francis denounced the EU for its “rather selfish lifestyle marked by an opulence that is no longer sustainable and which is frequently indifferent to the world around us”. Adding to the Eurocrats’ obvious discomfort, further scorn was heaped on the monolithic EU overseeing the turning of democracy into “…uniform systems of economic power at the service of unseen empires”.

This was the first non-European pope for 13 centuries telling it like it is, but with the accent on social justice rather than national or even regional interests. And it is refreshing.

Previous popes might well have been accused of double standards, were it not for the fact that Francis has wasted no time since the start of his papacy in launching his own Night of the Long Knives to clear out Vatican deadwood and high-ranking bishops and cardinals over whom suspicions of corruption and active mafia connections have been seen to hover. In a special feature on the Vatican in The Spectator dated 23 August this year, it is clear that the former superior of the Argentine Jesuits, Jorge Bergoglio will be nobody’s pushover.

For those who see Rome’s greatest obstacles and/or sins to include child abuse, views on sexuality or abortion and euthanasia, it will be of little significance that the new pope is ferociously engaged in getting his own house in order. The Spectator piece rather wittily points to the pope’s continually glancing at his watch during ceremonies as being not so much indicative of his jesuitical dislike of ceremony, but more of his awareness that at 77, he has limited time to achieve so much badly needed reform.

No… those impatient for such outward signs of reform as embracing gay marriage must see that without wholesale change of the sclerotic, opaque and indolent Vatican administration must see Francis’s reforms – and his spirited attack on the European Union – as genuinely momentous. For if a church bound by two millenia of tradition can earnestly desire positive reform, and from within at that, then mountains can indeed be moved. They must see too that without it, no other change can be forthcoming, and the mountains might simply crumble.

As for the Frankenstein’s Monster that is now the EU apparatus, one suspects that being able to see only as far as its own self-preservation and (increasingly doubtful) systems of economic power, has actually become its raison d’être. And there is nothing political or religious about that. That is simply degeneration.

.