In the month of October, for sixteen years now, the Cardinal Van Thuân Observatory has published its 16 th Report on the Social Doctrine of the Church in the world (Available only in Italian). Every year around fifteen experts critically address the “problem of the year”, i.e. the most socially and politically relevant phenomenon which deserves our concerned attention. The point of view of these monographic analyzes is, naturally, the Social Doctrine of the Church, its principles, criteria and directives for action. In our time we don’t hear much about the Social Doctrine of the Church, an ecclesial knowledge that risks being forgotten in the rush to throw ourselves into things to do with generic criteria behind it. For this reason, the annual release of the Observatory Reports can be considered unique and deserves attention and promotion.
The theme of this year’s Report – as mentioned above is the devastated situation in which Europe finds itself. The title does not leave much room for the imagination: “Finis Europae. An epitaph for the Old Continent?”. In the 267 pages of the Report, published by Cantagalli, sixteen leading scholars, including two bishops, Monsignor Crepaldi, bishop emeritus of Trieste and Monsignor Jedraszewski, metropolitan archbishop of Krakow, conduct a ruthless diagnosis of the seriously ill, for some even in the terminal phase. The analysis focuses on all the main aspects of European life: the hatred of life of a continent that systematically kills its children and condemns itself to extinction, the uncontrolled immigration of those who hate us, the process of constitutionalization of abortion , the assisted suicide of Europe by the Davos Forum, the ideological homologation in the times of Covid up to the dependence of European healthcare on the WHO, the dirigiste bureaucracy of the Union which erases the rule of law, the position taken by the Church of Europe – now “chaplain” of the European Union – so aligned with the powers in place as to converge with them on hot topics such as gender, climate, and vaccination.
A particular focus is dedicated to the situation in Poland, where the new liberal regime wanted by Brussels is currently destructuring the Catholic civilization of that nation; of France, a country and a civilization in decline; of Germany, where green utopianism and immigrationism have grounded the locomotive of Europe; of Spain, which in a short time has aligned itself with the lifestyles of Western nihilism; up to Holland, where the desolation of generalized euthanasia prevails but there is also a glimpse of hope for rebirth.
Prof. Gianfranco Battisti, from the University of Trieste, addresses the problem in a very concrete way, dealing with geo-economics, geo-finance and geo-politics. Europe is within a broader context that sees it as weak and marginalized, divided internally between East and West, its destinies are linked to the stratospheric US debt, it will have chronic energy weakness depending on global strategies that surpass it, including the consequences of the war in Ukraine with the problems relating to the supply of gas, it is a “continent held hostage” by globalized financial capital, it is experiencing a real “agrarian conflict” with respect to which the Community Agricultural Policy proves inadequate and, indeed, counterproductive, given the “land rush” of the large global financial groups. In 2005, M. Leonard’s book Why Europe will lead the 21st century was published in London. That prospect, then evoked in the wake of the euro and the 2004 enlargement, soon evaporated and the decline is now intensifying.
Christophe Réveillard, of the Sorbonne, considers a very disturbing aspect. The European Union carries out a pedagogy of the masses, controls the European population above all through information technologies, educates towards the end of the European identity, is very far from creating a community of destiny, demolishes the tradition and sovereignty of the peoples who compose, does not even seek legitimacy or popular support but implements a technocratic governance without indicating any horizon that goes beyond material well-being. The tool to achieve this fluid uniformity is the principle of the primacy of European law over state law established by Article 17 of the Treaty of Lisbon, an exorbitant regulatory and procedural straitjacket towards the member states.
From the point of view of European culture and spirit, a contribution of notable value is that of Bishop Giampaolo Crepaldi who recalls how right here in Europe a culture was born for the first time not deriving from a religion but, on the contrary, of an irreligious nature , atheist and anti-Christian. For this reason, he says, it is precisely here in Europe, before in other places, that we need to carry out a “new evangelization” which is not an evangelization according to new criteria but a re-evangelization according to the Catholic tradition.
Sixteenth Report on the Social Doctrine of the Church in the world
FINIS EUROPAE. AN EPITAPH FOR THE OLD CONTINENT
(Available only in Italian)
Cantagalli, Siena 2024, 16,00 Euros.
Edited by Riccardo Cascioli, Giampaolo Crepaldi, Stefano Fontana.
Authors: Gianfranco Battisti, Paolo Bellavite, Riccardo Cascioli, Giampaolo Crepaldi, Lorenza Formicola, Marek Jedraszewski, Maurizio Milano, Christophe Réveillard, Mauro Ronco, Tommaso Scandroglio, Luisella Scrosati, Luca Volonté, Silvio Brachetta, Stefano Magni, Wlodzimierz Redzioch, Julio Loredo, Hugo Bos.
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