Papal Thought on Europe and the European Union in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

I'm sending out a cry of love to you, old Europe: find yourself again, be yourself, discover your origins, revive your roots, revive those authentic values which make your history glorious and your presence beneficent on other continents. (John Paul II, 1982) ‘Europe’ has been treated in a number of different ways in papal thought in the twentieth century. At first, under Benedict XV and Pius XI, European unity was presented as the only means to avoid wars and to tame aggressive nationalisms. With Pius XII, Europe became a vision, founded on a sacred past where ‘Faith’ and ‘Truth’ had been given by Christ (and the Catholic Church) to the peoples of Europe. The pope's role was unceasingly to defend federalism, and to condemn communism and Cold War politics. The popes of the 1960s and 1970s recast Catholic doctrine on Europe as a new utopia, imbuing Europe with a new concern for the situation of Eastern Europe. They aimed to revive the opportunity for all European peoples to live in a secure, democratic and developed continent thanks to the protective cultivation of Christian values. John Paul II took the view that a common Christian identity pre-existed de facto and was outside any institutional union. Europe had always lived as a ‘spiritual miracle’. The Christian heritage of Europe had to be heard, transmitted and respected both by individual European states and by the Union; otherwise the risk was that the unity project would fail and Europe would disappear, falling into decadence and permissiveness.

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