LATE last month Pope Francis paid a four-hour visit to Strasbourg, France, just to tell the European Parliament that Europe has become a grandma: She is old, feeble and unable to conceive, let alone give birth to a better European future.
The continent is stuck in a sclerotic free-market system (which is not a system by definition, except the parts of it that are intricately regulated to prevent free-market abuse). The European free market continues to dismantle the welfare systems that are Europe’s only redeeming feature. And it wasn’t even a European Union idea, but an ultranationalist German one. Its modern form was established by Prince Otto von Bismarck, the architect of the Second Reich, which was established after it scored its first victory over the French at Sedan—a victory proclaimed from the Hall of Mirrors in the Palace of Versailles. Feed, clothe and educate every German, so that he or she becomes a fighting and productive machine who wants nothing more than to be everything a German can be, and then send him or her off to war. After two World Wars that almost ended with German victories but for the intervention of the United States in the first and of the Soviet Union in the second, all of Europe became convinced that, to be strong, you need strong people, not rich people, who are rather useless in the national scheme of things. Thus, the European welfare systems emerged, of which the Scandinavian are the epitome.
“The great ideas that once inspired Europe,” Francis said, “seem to have lost their attraction only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.” This includes the European Parliament, which he was addressing. Further aggravating this, Europe traded its principles of peace and fellowship for profit—say, of Germany at the expense of Spain, Portugal and Greece—and infected European consumers with an uncontrollable mania to spend on nonessentials and fomented among industrialists the casual habit of treating men and women as mere cogs in a machine, just so to repeat the cycle of profits, consumerism and workers’ exploitation.
Francis also denounced the persecution of religious minorities by Europe’s trading partners in the Middle East—e.g., Turkey, which is conniving with the Islamic State (IS) to exterminate a huge Kurdish minority that wants its own state; Saudi Arabia, which sympathizes with the IS for its Sunni beliefs; and the United Arab Emirates, which is supporting the IS in its efforts to topple Syrian President Bashar al- Assad, who opposes an oil pipeline to Europe to reduce its dependence on Russia for that commodity. Even if all three are pretending to be opposed to the IS, who are, most probably, US assets against Assad, who will likely oppose his country’s transmogrification into an Israeli protectorate.
“Communities and individuals today find themselves subjected to barbaric acts of violence,” Francis said. “They are evicted from their homes and native lands, sold as slaves, killed, beheaded, and crucified or burned alive with the shameful and complicit silence of so many,” including a leftist member of the European Parliament, who said the pope was better off saying Mass in the famous Strasbourg Cathedral, instead of using the parliament as a venue to express his humanitarian view. No one was surprised by the leftist’s remark; the man is a neoliberal European, which is, to say, an idiot.
But Francis refused to even look in on the famous cathedral. Indeed, he has no time for religious rites or gaudy architecture when he needs time to address the reason there are religious rites in the first place: To save people and make this world a better place, so it merits what Christ promised: Its transformation into the kingdom of heaven—material, yet unending; truly human, yet immortal.