In recent years, with the expansion of the European Union, there has been a growing distrust among citizens towards institutions that they perceive as distant, occupied with developing rules that are insensitive to individual nations or even openly harmful to them. In many places, we encounter a general perception of European fatigue and aging—of a Europe that is now a 'grandmother', no longer fertile or vibrant. Consequently, the grand ideas that once inspired Europe seem to have lost their appeal, replaced only by the bureaucratic and technical matters of European institutions.
Pope Francis, address to the European Parliament, 25 November 2014, Strasbourg
When Francis compared Europe to an infertile grandmother, he likely did not mean to offend the many women beyond childbearing age who form the backbone of Catholic parishes worldwide, nor the women and men who do not consider childbearing the sole and primary metric of a woman’s worth, nor the world’s most powerful stateswoman, Angela Merkel, who, at 60, having become neither a grandmother nor a mother, nonetheless does not give the impression of a tired and aging person.
He and the Vatican’s Secretariat for Communication (the same one whose ascetically managed Twitter account @Pontifex has 4.8 million followers) likely simply wanted to ensure that the first address by a Jesuit Pope in world history would become the most cited and discussed speech by a European leader this year. This would then serve to 'shake up' a secularised European public, accustomed to high standards of material prosperity and globally becoming less competitive.
Pope Francis, head of the smallest country in Europe by territory, repeated to the 'city, the continent, and the world' a message that can be read in much more technical policy language in the documents—strategies, conclusions, and resolutions—of the European Union, which encompasses 500 million people, is rapidly aging, and plays an increasingly smaller role in the world: there are too few of us, we are living beyond our means, we are aging rapidly, our welfare model is not sustainable, inequality is increasing, and we must urgently and sensibly address immigration problems and invest in alternative energy sources and meaningful employment.
Except, unlike elected politicians who are desperately looking for ways to talk about these analytical conclusions (and the inevitably resulting decisions) with voters while maintaining hopes of being re-elected, Francis does not have to worry about re-election. In this sense, his 'kingdom is not of this world'. Of course, he must still reckon with 'this world' in his efforts to modernise his flock and in Vatican politics. When Francis proposed at the Catholic Bishops' Synod in October that the Church should be more open to homosexuals and divorced people, the conservative majority of bishops rejected it. However, this apparent defeat has hardly diminished Francis's authority.
Addressing European institutions in Strasbourg, which are at the vanguard of expanding the concept and practice of human rights, Francis did not moralise condescendingly about 'Gayrope', but instead praised the promotion of human rights as a 'central element in the European Union’s efforts to strengthen human dignity, both within the Union and in relations with other countries'. Of course, critics of 'selfish human rights' will cite Francis's call not to over-expand individual rights at the expense of the common good. Nevertheless, the Holy Father accepted a scarf in rainbow colours in Strasbourg with a grateful smile from the lesbian MP Lunacek, who is demonised by socially conservative circles.
Those who like to contrast 'the nation's traditional and Christian values' with 'foreign and imposed European Union values' might have been slightly confused by Francis’s praise for the role of European institutions. It is possible that the Pope, with his speech, also indirectly reminded everyone that the establishment of the European Union was once a common cause for Christian Democrats and Catholics belonging to various parties. In the entire 56-year history of the European Commission, its President has not been a Catholic or a Christian Democrat for only about 12 years. For the last 33 years, all Presidents of the European Commission (and the European Council) have been and continue to be Catholics. And in the corridors of Brussels, it is said that the chances of Dombrovskis and Katainen becoming President of the European Commission or the European Council were diminished precisely because they do not belong to the Catholic Church or the core of Christian Democratic politics.
In Francis's speech, topics important to him had to be heard by each of Europe's major political families. The centre-right (conservative and Christian Democratic) People's Party heard the message about transcendent human dignity, the family, and respect for human life at all its stages. The hearts of the socialists were warmed by words about poverty reduction, solidarity, and job creation. The Greens received a call for the European Union to be at the vanguard of global environmental protection and to reduce senseless consumption. Liberals, who are traditionally the most sceptical listeners to the Pope, were this time offered a wish to favourably accept immigrants and an assessment of the importance of human rights.
True, there was not a word about Ukraine, where 'children were falling from the sky' (Bishop Bulis) and where the war still continues. The Ukrainian case does not really allow one to agree with Francis's optimism that, after the disappearance of two confronting blocs, the words spoken by John Paul II in Strasbourg in 1988 are being realised—that 'based on sovereign and free institutions, Europe will one day fully embrace the borders gifted by geography and, even more so, by history'.
However, the people most pleased with Francis's speech were likely the philosophers. Members of the European Parliament and the media asked them to explain exactly how to understand such unusual things mentioned by the Pope as transcendent dignity, monads, functionalism, and a mentality of privatisation. For it would certainly be pleasant if one could continue the conversation about why in Europe, 'to keep democracy alive, one must avoid the many trends of globalisation that dilute reality, namely, angelic purism, the dictatorship of relativism, anti-historical fundamentalism, ethics without kindness, and intellectualism without wisdom'.
The Pope, of course, inspired, but life as usual continued immediately in Strasbourg. After long and stormy applause for the Holy Father, the members immediately turned to the next item on the agenda: 'Recommendation on the draft Council decision to approve, on behalf of the European Union, the Protocol to the Convention on International Interests in Mobile Equipment on Matters Specific to Railway Rolling Stock, adopted in Luxembourg on 23 February 2007'.
Article first published in the January 2015 issue of the magazine Rīgas Laiks