‘Democracy owes its existence to Christianity’.
Do you know who uttered this phrase? It was not a monk retired to a mountain or a Pope. It is not written in the Catechism. Nor in the Vatican newspaper. These words were uttered by Robert Schuman, the primary founding father of the European Union, half a century ago.
It is rarely said, but the founding fathers of the European Union, from Jean Monnet to Konrad Adenauer to De Gasperi to Schuman himself, were fervent Christians. And they reflected this in all the steps they took to design their project for a united Europe after the Second World War.
The Treaty of Rome, the very founding agreement that gave birth to the European Communities, was signed in the Eternal City not by chance, but to make Europeans aware of where we come from and what unites us. The choice of Rome was not a whim. It had a meaning.
Nor was the flag that now adorns every public building in the European Union designed on a whim. Its author, a practising French Catholic, modelled it on the Virgin in Strasbourg Cathedral, who is adorned with a navy blue mantle and a crown of twelve yellow stars: the colours of the European Union.
All this seems forgotten in the age of political correctness. But it is not forgotten, it has simply been erased. It is no coincidence that in the discussions on the drafting of the 2004 European Constitution so much emphasis was placed on removing all mention of Europe’s Christian roots, not even in the preamble of that failed treaty.
I write this because in order to talk about the future of Europe, the first thing we need to know is where we come from. We need to know who we are in order to know what is good for us and what we want. Only then will we be masters of our destiny. Only then will we prevent others from writing our future without taking into account our needs, our concerns and our real challenges.
Right now, in Brussels and Strasbourg, the famous Conference on the Future of Europe is being discussed. We have been told that this conference is a process to modernise the European Union “based on the vision of European citizens”. Based on the vision of European citizens? Really?
Because when one looks at the European Commission’s proposal, what one sees is the same agenda point by point that the progressive elites have been trying to inject into Europe’s veins for decades: more globalism, more federalism, more climate change, more gender ideology, more immigration, more green pact, more prominence for the big multinationals and more money for their lobbies.
In short, more power for Brussels and less power for citizens and national parliaments.
Not even the health and economic crises we are going through has made these progressive elites reconsider their pre-pandemic priorities.
On the contrary: everyone can see how they are taking advantage of this crisis to accelerate the imposition of their agenda, with proposals and resolutions already telling us clearly about creating European taxes, transnational voting lists for the European Parliament, ideological conditions for access to EU funds and new sanctions for member states that don’t subscribe to this agenda.
Where is the vision of European citizens in all this? Nowhere. That vision is seen as dangerous, and that is why they are trying to neutralise it with new forms of censorship and repression of thought, such as these news verification networks that all say the same thing, always against the same people, and which the progressive consensus in Brussels wants to turn into the new Ministry of Truth.
There is nothing of the vision of European citizens in the plans of the progressive consensus for the future of Europe. And in reality, this is so because, for progressivism, the future is written in advance.
For them there is only one possible path and we must all walk it, until we reach that great progressive, egalitarian and global “paradise” where we will all be happy, equal… and grey. We’ll live thinking about money until it runs out, without God and without a homeland.
The doctrine professed by this left-wing consensus totally and radically denies human freedom and true diversity. For it excludes the possibility that there can be different paths and different solutions to the problems facing us human beings, both as individuals and collectively as peoples.
In the face of this, the conservative position cannot be one of mere resistance to the change proposed by the left. This is what the so-called “right” or “centre-right” has been doing for the last decades.
A cowering right-wing anchored in a myriad of complexes, incapable of defending its own vision of the world, destined to lose and concede one position after another like a retreating army. A right that has accepted its loss as permanent and exists only to be one step behind the left.
That cannot be our position. We cannot just be a negation of progressivism. We have to be an affirmation. The true affirmation of an alternative to all the negations of that progressivism.
To its denial of human freedom, to its denial of life, to its denial of truth, beauty and goodness. To its denial of the sovereignty and identity of nations; the only guarantee for authentic diversity.
We affirm that there is another modernity than the single path of progressivism. A model that is not only different, but far superior. There is another modernity and there is another Europe than the single, pre-established and grey path offered to us by the left.
There is a Europe that believes in freedom, not as a total absence of rules and limits, but as a positive and creative freedom. Because the mere destruction of ties – familial, cultural, religious and national – proposed by the left does not make human beings freer, but chains them to modern forms of slavery and dependence.
A Europe of nations defending their roots and traditions, of free, different and sovereign nations: we stand for voluntary cooperation, but we oppose progressive egalitarianism and uniformity.
Because it is equality on the cheap, an equality that can only be achieved by cutting off all the heads that stand out, by attacking excellence and merit, by destroying every hint of the creative spirit.
There is a Europe that believes in and defends the family as the basic institution and cornerstone of society and the nation. One that defends property.
