Europe At The Crossroads

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

When Prime Minister Vladimir Spidla of the Czech Republic made a state visit to the United States in 2003, the European Union (EU) was considering a “constitution.” In spite of considerable opposition, the constitution’s supporters succeeded in making sure that the document made no mention of Europe’s Christian roots — in fact, they opposed even the mention of religion.
At an informal dinner, I asked Prime Minister Spidla to explain this view, which he supported.
“I have just returned from Athens,” he told me. “It is there, and not in Rome, that Europe finds its true roots.”
Welcome to the Europe of the Unknown God (Acts 17:23).
In the years since, the EU has been perpetuating that argument in countless ways on multiple fronts. Today it is a full-fledged war.
If PM Spidla loved Athens so much, why didn’t he understand Aristotle’s simple principle of cause and effect? When Christendom is ripped from its Christian roots, what must come to pass? What is left?
Robert Cardinal Sarah answered that question bluntly in a recent address in Poland. Europe “is now plunging into nihilism,” he observed, turning away from the flesh-and-blood realities of history and nature to embrace instead vapid content-free abstractions. “Europe, built on faith in Christ, cut off from its Christian roots, is now in a period of quiet apostasy,” he said.
Wanderer readers are familiar with Poland’s reaffirmation of the Catholic faith, when over a million Poles prayed the rosary on the Feast of Our Lady of Victory, begging Our Lady to keep Poland Catholic and free.
Now Poland’s neighbors have joined in the call to preserve Christianity. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban has rejected the demands of the EU bureaucracy that all EU members allow unlimited immigration from Islamic countries.
The diktat from Brussels, the EU’s “capital,” is an “attack on our sovereignty,” says Orban, who two years ago pointed to his country’s unique history:
“When it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones [in Europe] who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.”
The new arrivals, said Orban, “have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. . . .
“I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see.”
To what is Orban referring?
Polish Minister Mariusz Blaszczak recently observed that “the migration crisis is the most serious problem affecting Europe” and that the crisis was caused “by the irresponsible acting of some European leaders.”
And those leaders are rapidly losing the support of their people. Traditional establishment parties are losing all over Europe. Scotland, Catalonia, Italy’s Northern League, Germany’s Bavaria — the list is growing every day.
A week ago “over 95 percent of residents of Italy’s Lombardy region voted in favor of greater autonomy for the region during a nonbinding referendum,” President of Lombardy Roberto Maroni said.
Meanwhile, Europe’s left just keeps on drifting. The Republic of Ireland honors the murderous terrorist Che Guevara. Sweden is quickly becoming the rape capital of the world. Since 90 percent of the assailants are identified as “foreigners running in gangs,” Sweden tries to placate them with a stamp featuring a mosque.
In Germany, terrorist Jihadis are so numerous that police assigned to monitoring them routinely take weekends off. And last week, Italy’s foreign minister said that migration seen in the Mediterranean “is only the tip of the iceberg of an exodus that may end up being of biblical proportions.”
Even the commercial world is catching on.
Supermarket giant Lidl airbrushes a Christian cross from a church on its Greek food packaging “in order not to hurt the sensibility of non-Christian costumers.” Nestlé follows suit with its Greek yogurt.
Where voters have a voice, they speak. In Austria, two conservative parties will join in a government for the first time in memory, leaving the socialists in the opposition and the Greens out of Parliament altogether.
In the Czech Republic, Andrej Babis, known affectionately as the “Czech Donald Trump,” was elected prime minister a week ago Sunday, and immediately called for other European countries to join him in a coalition to stop illegal immigration into their countries.
Every EU country allowing such immigration has suffered a staggering rise in sexual assaults, with Afghans apparently the most prominent aggressors (American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan saw firsthand the rank perversion rampant among Afghan Pashtuns, but were forbidden to stop it or even to mention it).
Unfortunately, the EU has responded not with firm and decisive programs to protect its people, but by telling journalists not to interview “extremists” about the massive problems, nor to mention the ethnicity of apprehended criminals.
Great Britain has voted to leave the EU, but Intelligence Director General Andrew Parker recently reported that terrorist operations are already “at a scale and a pace we have not seen before.” London is now a more dangerous place than New York City.
Renowned Middle East expert Bernard Lewis is blunt. Muslims “seem to be about to take over Europe,” he tells The Jerusalem Post, and future prospects are grim. “Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?” he asks.
What does all this mean for America? Like the EU state-controlled media, U.S. Opposition Media are as silent on the mortal threat to Europe as they are regarding our own immigration crisis. Dr. Angelo Codevilla doesn’t see the U.S. to be so far gone as Europe, but “Europe’s unsustainable socioeconomic model — bureaucratized economies, social welfare, and demographic decline” are a warning to the U.S.
“Mass migration into Euro-American civilization,” he writes, “especially people from the Muslim world who neither share in nor sympathize with that civilization — is accelerating the crisis. Confidence in the future is being replaced by the sense that living as before will be impossible.”
On October 1, Pope Francis spoke to a group of migrants in Bologna, calling them “the warriors of hope.”
But if they are “warriors,” against whom are they waging war?