DEATH SUPPORT:

The new Europe: No Catholics need apply (GEORGE WEIGEL, 11/17/04, The Catholic Difference)

For years, Europe's secularists, and European governments led by France and Belgium, fiercely resisted any mention of Christianity's contributions to European civilization in the new constitution's preamble — a fight they won in June. So there were more than a few ironies in the fire when the constitutional treaty was signed beneath an enormous statue of Pope Innocent X in a room that also featured a colossal bust of the Emperor Constantine. Europeans can try to airbrush Christianity from their collective memory; it just can't be done.

What they can do, evidently, is bar orthodox Christians from senior governmental posts in the European Union. That, at any rate, is the unhappy conclusion to be drawn from the recent Buttiglione affair.

Rocco Buttiglione, whom I am privileged to call a friend, is a distinguished philosopher, a successful governmental official, a devoted husband and father — and a serious, intellectually sophisticated Catholic. He is, in addition, a brilliant conversationalist (one of only two men I know who, in their third or fourth language, speak in complete paragraphs extemporaneously); a skillful teacher; and a wonderful human being whose only vice, to my knowledge, is a penchant for what may well be the foulest-smelling cigars in all creation. Still, Europe is more civilized about such things than the puritanical United States, so Rocco's cigars have not been an impediment to his public service. But that is precisely what his Catholicism has become. [...]

What kind of polity is it that doesn't want a man like Rocco Buttiglione looking after the administration of justice and the protection of human rights?

A polity in which too many people believe that the God of the Bible is the enemy of human freedom.

A polity in which too many people believe that freedom is license.

A polity in which "anti-discrimination" has become the excuse for active discrimination against Catholics and others whose moral convictions ill-fit the relativist-secularist opinion mainstream.

A polity, in other words, like the new Europe. The demographers tell us that Europe is dying, physically. The Buttiglione affair tells us that Europe is now on life-support, morally and culturally.

Now there's a plug that should be pulled.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 12, 2004 4:19 AM