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The EU: consciously anti-God
To experience the chilling deadness of the European leadership class, all you have to do is look at televised proceedings of some European national legislature or some EU body. The death-chill extends from the sterile, Howard Johnson-like design of their legislative chambers (stripped of anything suggesting a national tradition or the majesty of the law, or indeed of any aesthetic or humanly comforting quality), to the bureaucratic, post-human language these officials use, devoid of any discernible or concrete meaning, to their dead facial expressions. When I first became aware of this phenomenon some years ago, I thought, these people have utterly rejected God and are dead. The sense of, not just the absence, but the positive cancellation of any human life and personality was so palpable it was like something in a science fiction movie about humans whose bodies have been taken over by aliens. Here is information from Mark Steyn at the Corner which backs up my intuition:
… the American left are a bit slow fully embracing this but in the European Union the secular religion is more or less the established church—the church as state, so to speak. I’ve had conversations with three senior EU officials in recent years in which the words “post-Christian Europe” were used approvingly. These men hold that a religious faith is incompatible with progressive society, which is why the Europols resisted a reference in the mooted EU constitution even to the Continent’s Christian past. A former Swedish deputy prime minister dismissed the proposal as “a joke” and a French Socialist called it “absurd.” Over here, the left is wary of such open contempt, at least publicly. In private, they can sound very European …In this light, Pope Benedict’s demand that the EU constitution contain a reference to Europe’s Christian foundations was the height of liberal naivite. Having approved the growth of the evil EU entity every step of the way, the Vatican suddenly wanted the EU to paste a little Christian smiley label on its facade in order to make everyone feel that the EU was ok after all. At the time I said, no pretty labels, let the EU stand forth in its true demonic nature. Meanwhile, if the Vatican had been truly Christian, it would have stood apart from and denounced the EU project all these years, instead of following obediently in its trail. But why should we be surprised? What, after all, is the EU but the political expression of the cult of secular man proclaimed by Pope Paul VI at the closing session of the Second Vatican Council in December 1965?
[The Church] was also much concerned with man, with man as he really is today … with man totally taken up with himself, with man who … not only makes himself the center of his own interests, but who dares to claim that he is the principle and final cause of all reality … man who makes himself God…. [W]e also, we more than anyone else, have the cult of man… [T]he Catholic faith exists for humanity.Joseph Ratzinger was of course a strong supporter of Vatican II including its cult of secular man. But when, 40 years later, the political project expressing that godless vision reached maturity, Ratzinger was shocked, shocked, that it coldly refused to offer any lip service to Christianity. And what’s worse is, if the EU had given such lip service, Ratzinger would have been satisfied.
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