Europe and the Betrayal of the Faith

[T]here remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of, the Catholic Church.

Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish.

These words, written by Hilaire Belloc at the conclusion of his 1920 book Europe and the Faith, should be borne in mind as we consider the recent efforts to hijack the reputation of a future saint. At the closing ceremony of the diocesan inquiry into the life and heroic virtue of Alcide de Gasperi (1881-1954) on February 28, Cardinal Baldassare Reina described him as being “inclusive and forward-looking” and as one of the political “fathers of Europe”. In the euphemistic language of modernist babblespeak, “inclusive and forward-looking” means undogmatic and anti-traditional in terms of Church teaching. And in describing him as one of the political “fathers of Europe”, Cardinal Reina was equating the birth of Europe with the birth of what would become known as the European Union.

In doing so, he was denying implicitly the historical reality of the Europe of the Faith and endorsing implicitly the Europe of the faithless.

The less said about Cardinal Reina, the better, but what about the new saint-in-the-making, Alcide De Gasperi? In truth, and as we shall see, he was a loyal child of the Church and a devoted son of the Europe of the Faith who needs to be rescued from those who seek to claim him for their own heterodox theological agendas or globalist political platforms.

Born in 1881, De Gasperi was a lifelong devout Catholic. Greatly inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical, Rerum Novarum, which was published in 1891, he became politically active as a teenager advocating Catholic social teaching. In 1904, he was involved in the populist and localist student demonstrations demanding an Italian-language university in the Italian-speaking provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In the following year, he became editor of the newspaper La Voce Cattolica (The Catholic Voice) which called for cultural autonomy for Trentino and the defence of Italian culture in defiance of German imperialism and its efforts to subject the Italian majority in the Tyrol region to enforced Germanisation.

In 1911, he became a member of Parliament for the Popular Political Union of Trentino (UPPT) in the Austrian Reichsrat, a post he held for six years. With the outbreak of World War One, he was politically neutral in conformity with the calling of his Catholic conscience, sympathizing with the ultimately unsuccessful efforts of Pope Benedict XV and Blessed Karl of Austria to obtain an honourable peace that would end the war.

In 1919, he was among the founders of the Italian People’s Party (PPI), with Luigi Sturzo, a Catholic priest whose cause for canonization was opened under St. John Paul II in 2002. De Gasperi served as a deputy in the Italian Parliament from 1921 to 1924, a period marked by the rise of Fascism. Although he supported the participation of the PPI in Benito Mussolini’s first government in October 1922, he became increasingly alarmed at the Machiavellian methods employed by the Fascists to gain totalitarian power. He was arrested in March 1927 and sentenced to four years in prison. After serving eighteen months of his sentence, the Vatican negotiated his release. Thereafter, he would work in the Vatican Library until the collapse of Fascism in July 1943.

During the years in which he worked in the Vatican, De Gasperi wrote regularly for the review L’Illustrazione Vaticana, in which he argued that the defining political battle in the modern world was between communism and Christianity. In 1934, he rejoiced in the defeat of the Austrian Social Democrats, whom he condemned for “de-Christianizing” the country. Such was his opposition to such radical relativism and secularism that he declared in 1937 that the Church in Germany was correct in preferring Nazism to Bolshevism. As with his initial naiveté with respect to Mussolini’s Fascists, he would soon see the foolishness of choosing one secular fundamentalist ideology over another.

After World War II, he became Prime Minister of Italy from 1945 to 1953, which remains a landmark of longevity in modern Italian politics. The post-war and Cold War election campaign of 1948 was contested between two competing visions. On one side was the Catholic and conservative vision of the governing Christian Democrats led by De Gasperi; on the other was the secularist, relativist and socialist vision of the Popular Democratic Front. A popular slogan of the Christian Democrats epitomized the choice facing the voters: “In the secrecy of the polling booth, God sees you–Stalin doesn’t.” The Christian Democrats won the election with 48.5% of the vote (their best result ever). By contrast, the Communists received only half the votes they had in the previous election two years earlier.

In 1951, with De Gasperi’s support, Italy became a member of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the apparently harmless germ which would grow into the politically invasive toxic organism known as the European Union. It is for this reason that Alcide De Gasperi is shackled with the dubious distinction of being one of the “Founding Fathers” of the European Union. Yet the ESCS has nothing in common with the EU. As its name suggests, it was an agreement between several nations to cooperate economically and to promote a common economic market.

It was pioneered by another devout Catholic, Robert Schuman, who was inspired especially by the writings and encyclicals of Pope Pius XII, which condemned both fascism and communism. In addition, Schuman was a scholar of medieval philosophy, particularly of the writings of Thomas Aquinas. As a Thomist himself, he admired contemporary neo-Thomist philosophers, such as Jacques Maritain, and believed that democracy had its roots in Christianity. Schuman’s beatification process was begun in 1990 and he was proclaimed a Servant of God in 2004. In 2021, he was pronounced Venerable.

It is indeed ironic that these two tradition-oriented Catholics, Alcide de Gasperi and Robert Schuman, should be claimed by modernist cardinals as being “inclusive and progressive”. It is equally ironic that the “woke” globalists of the European Union can claim them as “founding fathers” of the monstrous anti-Catholic and anti-Christian tyranny which the EU has become. It’s all a long way from the simple economic cooperation that they championed in 1951.

Indeed, it’s such a long way that we is tempted to say that the abyss that separates the Catholic social vision that they advocated from the secularist tyranny of modern Europe is as wide as that chasm that separates heaven from hell.