Beware of the "Soul of Europe"

Michal Semin

GUEST COLUMNIST, Prague

Editor’s Note: Remnant readers are by now familiar with the name Michal Semin—one of the most active traditional Catholics in Europe. While Michal spent many years fighting the Communists in his native Czechoslovakia, he has in recent decades continued his battle for truth against liberals and secularists in the Church in Prague. His fearless, no-nonsense approach to the Catholic counterrevolution has made him the nemesis of the Archbishop of Prague, in fact, and has put him squarely in opposition to proponents of the European Union, as well. Having spoken at several traditional Catholic forums in this country (including a Remnant Forum here in St. Paul some years ago), Michal has proven himself a valuable asset to American traditionalism. And, after co-hosting a Remnant Forum in Prague two years ago, he has also demonstrated his ability to bring traditional Catholics from both sides of the Atlantic together for constructive Catholic action, causing many of us to be quite pleased to have him on our team. Thus it gives me great pleasure to announce that Michal has launched an exciting new initiative which will, I believe, serve to build a lasting bridge between traditionalists here in the States and those in Europe. It is called St. Joseph Institute and here is its mission statement:

The mission of St. Joseph Institute is to educate Catholic men about their responsibilities and role in their families and in society at large. The St. Joseph Institute will promote Catholic home education and Catholic education in general through courses, lectures and articles. The same means will be used to educate the Catholic audience in principles of Catholic social teaching. The courses and lectures will be advertised and articles published on the St. Joseph Institute web page. St. Joseph Institute will serve as a bridge between traditional Catholics in the USA and Central and Eastern Europe allowing for common initiatives, pilgrimages, conferences and meetings. As the enemies of the family continue to grow in strength and number worldwide, this international cooperation of the Church militant is essential to the preservation and proliferation of the one true Faith.

For many years it has been my contention that the cultural question has not really been addressed seriously enough by traditional Catholic strategists, and that this is why we are losing many of our young people. We need to concentrate more on strengthening the family, encouraging fathers to take a proactive role in the fight, and wage all-out war on the MTV culture and all its works and pomps. Happily, this contention is enthusiastically shared by my friend Michal Semin and St. Joseph Institute, which is why it was my great pleasure to accept Michal’s invitation to become part of the SJI Advisory Board. For more information or to contribute to our exciting joint project with our European traditionalist allies, please write or send your tax-deductible donations to: Sacred Heart Trust, P.O. Box 44713, Phoenix, AZ 85018, U.S.A. MJM

When the Czech bishops became front-liners in the campaign for the integration of the Czech state into the structures of the gradually centralizing European Union in 2003, the European Union was presented as the only possible political, social and cultural option for Czech society. The Czech Bishops Conference had published and distributed a brochure displaying on its cover a black cloud in the sky, behind which the sun was rising. Every page of the brochure featured a photograph of the Czech bishops received here by Prodi in Brussels, and by whoever else in Strasbourg to demonstrate how well respected is the Catholic Church and its representatives in the center of European political power.

Those Catholic faithful (in fact, all the traditional Catholics) who campaigned against the entry into EU were dismissed as people with a ghetto-like mentality unable to take an active part in modern society. Bishops and liberal priests were on radio and TV expressing their enthusiasm about becoming a respected part of the integration process.

Whenever Prague’s Archbishop Cardinal Vlk (read “wolf”) was asked to explain the contribution of the Church to the process of integration into EU, he replied that the Church is the soul of Europe. For someone not well oriented in the PC language of the modern hierarchy, this phrase might be viewed as part of some program of re-Catholicization of Europe. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, the term “Soul of Europe” is one of the key phrases of the EU newspeak.

The President of European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, has at his disposal a group of Policy Advisers, one part of which focuses on “Dialogue with Religions, Churches and Humanisms”. This group is led by an Austrian Catholic, Michael Weninger, who boasts that he has on board the representatives of all important religions and philosophies. Interestingly, they are still unable to find a representative of the religion of Islam because of the disunity on the Islamic front itself.

When Weninger spoke in Prague at a conference organized by the Czech Bishops Conference in January 2003, he explicitly stated that their task is not to make Europe religiously uniform, as it was in the days of old Christendom, but that the “soul of Europe” will be born out of the complex process of the inter-mingling of the various religious creeds and philosophical worldviews within the context of modern religious liberty.

Here is this same Weninger, this time in Bad Homburg, Germany, 2002: “By this I mean that the European Union is a very colorful mosaic of different aspects, not only of languages, but also of ethnicity and religions. This plurality should be seen not as a danger to unity but as an element of richness. The European Union of the future can therefore be called a union in plurality as well as diversity. The fact that diversity will always exist should not only be seen as a challenge and a danger but also as an enriching plurality. Nevertheless, this plurality can only lead to unity through mutual understanding and respect, backed up by a serious trialogue. A constructive trialogue between Jews, Christians and Muslims can therefore play a vital role in building a Europe we all share.”

The role of religion in the European Union is to be governed by the basic documents of EU, especially those that deal with tolerance, pluralism and the principle of non-discrimination. This principle, which is explicitly recognized by the Chapter of Fundamental Rights of the EU, by which all the member states are to be bound, contains the infamous “right“ not to be discriminated against on the basis of “sexual orientation”.

This principle allows us to understand the recent sentence handed down against Ake Green, a Swedish Protestant pastor who must spend a month in prison after he was found guilty of having offended homosexuals in a sermon he gave in his church.

It is this “soul of Europe”, we have to be aware, that was invoked this October when the Italian candidate for European Commission, Rocco Buttiglione, caused a storm of protest after he called homosexuality a sin and highlighted the role of women as mothers. The liberals, socialists and the Greens in the European Parliament are now calling for his head.

Buttiglione is backtracking, as usual, according to the BBC on October 21: “I deeply regret the difficulties and problems that have arisen,” the Italian said in a letter to Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso. In his letter to Mr. Barroso, quoted by Reuters, Buttiglione said that he “did not intend in any way to offend the feelings of anybody”. He also assured us that his remarks reflect only his personal view and that it will not affect his acknowledged duty to defend the principle of non-discrimination and the Charter of Fundamental Rights as a whole.

Responding to threats from the Left, President Barroso assured the press that the "new commission will be absolutely opposed to any kind of discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender, religious beliefs." Barroso, by the way, was nominated to the position by the Christian Democrats within the European parliament. He seems to be more democratic than Christian, which is precisely why Leo XIIII, in his Graves De Communi Re (1901), made no bones about his strong reservations for the Christian democratic movement.

Back to Buttiglione, who is one of the most interesting members of the new EC candidates. He is considered to be a conservative Catholic and a personal friend of the Pope. He’s also the author of “Karol Wojtyla: The Thought of the Man Who Became Pope John Paul II”. In that book, in fact, he notes that there is a striking parallel between the methodological individualism of Ludwig von Mises or Israel Kirzner, which traces the economic phenomenon back to the individual agent engaged in it, and the personalism of Karol Wojtyla, which analyzes the fulfillment of human destiny through free action. Thus “a comparative reading of Mises’ Human Action with [Wojtyla’s] The Acting Person would be very engaging.”

For the American audience he might be more recognizable as a collaborator with the American neoconservative trio of Novak, Weigel and Neuhaus. It was in Crisis magazine, in fact, where he explained the Pope’s reasons for writing the encyclical Centesimus annus: “It seems that one of the many merits of the new encyclical Centesimus Annus is that it has fostered a much needed step forward in the dialogue between the Catholic Church and the American spirit” (July, August 1991).

Buttiglione also commented on Michael Novak’s book Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: “This book is a great contribution to the dialogue between the ‘American experiment’ and Christian social doctrine…. Of particular theoretical significance and lasting value is the chapter on social justice, in which Novak reformulates the traditional doctrine in a way that escapes the criticisms of both Hayek and von Mises.”

What a picture. A thinker and political actor, who, by the standards of traditional Catholic thought, is much in love with the spirit of modernity, comes under attack from the forces of that very same spirit.

Readers will recall the campaign of the Holy Father himself encouraging the Central and Eastern European Catholics to vote in favor of the European Union enlargement. I have talked to Poles who would have voted against the entry in the EU, but because the Polish Pope wanted Poland to join, the Polish Catholics became part of a supranational organization which persecutes Catholics for publicly expressing the Catholic teaching on homosexuality and family. How nice.

It almost seems that this Pope’s preoccupation with unity outside of the True Faith has no limits.

You might also remember the plea of the Holy Father to include the mention of God in the preamble of the European Constitution. Many good Catholics supported his plea, but I was not among them. Would you want to try to use the holy Name of God in an effort to legitimize a constitution which has ideological roots in the French Revolution and all the dogmas of modernity? The only “god” who gives the soul to this project emanates from the lodges, and the Holy See should recognize that. But that would mean that the Pope would have to have a substantially different attitude towards the modern world, able to lead a retreat from the Gaudium et spes mentality, the founding document of the conciliar surrender.

So, again, beware of the Soul of Europe. Things over here are not as they may seem over there.