This essay was adapted from a speech given at the National Conservatism conference in Brussels on April 16, 2024.
Some years ago, I was riding in a car with a French friend and our boys, taking a road trip from Paris. We started talking politics, and I cut loose with some whining about the European Union. My friend surprised me by how vehemently he defended the EU, not on the basis of any kind of high idealism, but for one simple reason: it has kept the peace in Europe.
Whatever the problems with the EU, he said, the fact that it has saved Europe from a third suicide attempt makes enduring them worthwhile.
Arriving at our destination early that afternoon—the military cemeteries at Normandy—brought home my friend’s argument with particular impact. It caused me to realize how very different history feels when war is fought not across an ocean, but in your own backyard.
The EU has undoubtedly played a major role, perhaps the leading role, in making European nations too integrated to make war on each other.
This is why the Catholic bishops of the European Union released a statement not long ago intended to guide EU voters in the upcoming parliamentary elections. It is a fairly anodyne document, intended to urge voters to support the EU and its goals for a unified Europe.
Said the bishops, mushily:
[W]hat is important is that we vote for persons and parties who clearly support the European project … We know that the European Union is not perfect and that many of its policy and legal proposals are not in line with Christian values and with the expectations of many of its people, but we believe that we are called to contribute and improve it with the tools democracy offers us.
This dull statement takes on hard edges when you consider which political parties the bishops are telling voters not to choose: those of the national conservatives—a catch-all term taking in nationalists, populists, and sovereigntists.
This is insane. It’s not the national conservatives who threaten Europe. It’s the status quo that these churchmen support.
As we know, three of the four founding fathers of what became the European Union were distinguished Catholic statesmen. Robert Schuman from France, Konrad Adenauer of Germany, and the Italian Alcide de Gaspari were all giants, and faithful sons of the Church. They dreamed of a Europe united through Christian democracy. In his book For Europe, Schuman wrote:
Democracy owes its existence to Christianity. It was born the day that man was called to realise in this temporary life, the dignity of each human person, in his individual liberty in the respect of the rights of each and by the practice of brotherly love to all. Never before Christ were such ideas formulated.
Yet Schuman, whose cause for sainthood is underway, also wrote:
Democracy will be Christian or it won’t exist. An un-Christian democracy is a caricature which sinks into tyranny or anarchy.
When Schuman, then the French foreign minister, made his famous 1950 declaration proposing the creation of a united Europe, he was speaking to and from a continent that was still recognizably Christian. Alas, the collapse of European Christianity in the post-war world is a depressing story that hardly needs elaborating here. According to research published a few years ago by the Catholic sociologist Stephen Bullivant, “Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and probably gone for good—or at least for the next 100 years.”
This is not the fault of the European Union. Still, the EU acts as both a reflection of Christianity’s collapse and as an accelerant to its demise. It is a terrible irony of history that the European project, launched primarily by faithful Catholic statesmen, has now become a key antagonist to what remains of European Christianity.
Take the sanctity of life. Earlier this month, the European Parliament voted to add abortion to the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights. The vote was mostly symbolic, but it is a clear signal of where the EU’s governing class wishes to lead the entire union.
More concretely, the European Court of Human Rights ruled last year that Poland’s ban on eugenic abortions, thanks to a constitutional court ruling, violated the human rights of Polish women. The Human Rights court said that Poland’s judicial reforms raised significant doubts about the legality of the ban. Along those lines, the European Parliament appealed to the European Commission to invoke the “rule of law” mechanism to suspend payments to Poland until and unless it legalizes abortion.
We are likely to see more of this kind of thing, including around euthanasia. What European abortion and euthanasia advocates can’t achieve politically, they will seek to achieve by using the administrative power of the EU purse in Brussels. Why do the bishops support this barbaric system?
Consider also the EU elites’ anti-Christian views on the meaning of marriage, the family, and even the human person with regard to gender. In 2022, the European Commission referred Hungary to the European Court of Justice over a law meant to protect Hungarian children and minors from LGBT material in schools and media. The EU governing class considers Hungary’s traditional Christian view of marriage, family, and sexual morality to be anathema.
Brussels will not rest until Hungarian kids have the opportunity to be queered, like other enlightened European children. Again: why do the bishops support this barbaric system?
On both issues of the sanctity of life, and marriage and sexuality, EU policies clearly violate Church teaching. But the greatest threat to Europe’s survival is one in which the Church is on the same side as the EU elites: migration.
Pope Francis unambiguously endorses open borders. Last fall in Marseille, he called any reference to a migration crisis in Europe nothing but “alarmist propaganda.” On an earlier occasion, referring to migration, he said that it is a sin “to refuse to encounter the other.”
You have to be blinded by sentimentality not to see how the migration crisis is tearing Europe apart. An open-door migration policy has turned Sweden into Europe’s gang-war capital. Its government is now deploying the army to try to restore law and order to what was a short time ago one of Europe’s most peaceful and stable societies.
Many of these unassimilable migrants are Muslims. Let me be clear: no one should ever despise another man for his religious beliefs. That humane principle, though, should not blind us to the immense difficulties involved in integrating Muslims into European life.
Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israeli civilians, European capitals have seen appalling anti-Semitic demonstrations by Muslims. In London, police have repeatedly been observed deferring to the hateful mobs, likely out of fear.
You want to know one European capital that has not had to put up with this Islamic fanaticism and Jew-hating? Budapest—capital of a country that controls its borders, and that has not allowed a large Muslim migrant community to take root.
It often seems to me that Hungary is almost the only European country that takes preserving its culture seriously. The Hungarian government says it has no intention of abiding by the new EU migration pact. In the European Parliamentary debate about the legislation, Hungarian MEP Balazs Hidveghi said that the debate is “about whether or not we are able to preserve our European identity, our way of life, norms, culture and traditions.”
He’s right about that. The European Union is a supranational vehicle for globalism, sexual revolution, open borders, and Islamization. Why are the bishops blessing this? In fact, if Europe is going to survive—and especially if the Christian faith is going to survive in Europe—voting for nationalists, populists, and sovereigntists has to be part of the solution.
Few people in Europe want their countries to leave the EU. But it is urgent that the powers of Brussels and Strasbourg be rebalanced and restrained by reform that gives more authority to nation-states within the EU.
From a Christian point of view, nations like Hungary, whose people still have faith in Christian democracy, are places where the values of old Europe are still defended. It is true that politics alone cannot restore the Christian faith to Europe. But politics can create the conditions under which Christian life can continue and be revived.
In these dark days for European Christianity, voters should recognize what the Catholic bishops won’t: that on the political front, the best chance the faith has lies with parties that advocate for decentralization, and that defend national sovereignty.
Europe needs a new St. Benedict, a new St. Boniface, a new St. Gregory the Great—European men of the Church who had courage and vision. By contrast, these churchmen today satisfy themselves by blessing the anti-Christian system that is leading to what Schuman warned would be a tyrannical caricature of democracy.
The Catholic founding fathers of post-war Europe believed that Christian democratic politics could help heal a continent wounded by war. Today, though, too many church leaders are content to be hospice chaplains blessing the euthanasia of European civilization.
