Although it largely went below the radar in the United States, the European Union passed another milestone with the selection of Herman Van Rompuy as its first president (well, technically he’s president of the European Council!). Van Rompuy is the Christian Democratic former prime minister of Belgium, a man who is committed to Catholicism and European integration. In this, he follows in the footsteps of the great Christian Democrats who came before him, people like Adenauer, Schuman, and de Gespari. As Austen Ivereigh notes, this is a man who once gave a talk on Caritas in Veritate, and made the following remarks:
“According to [Catholic] social doctrine, the political community is at the service of the civil society from which it is born. Civil society represents the sum total of the goods, cultural or relational, which are relatively independent of politics and the economy. The state should make sure that the legal framework allows the social actors (societies, associations, organisations, and so on) to carry out their activities in total freedom; it should be ready to intervene, only if needed and in conformity with the principle of subsidiarity, in order that the interaction between freedom of association and the democratic way leads in the direction of the common good.”
Could you imagine an American political leader, of any party, giving such a speech? There is really no authentic Christian Democratic tradition in the United States, merely two variants of liberalism. What many forget is that the European Union was a fundamentally Catholic idea, twinning anti-nationalist instincts with notions of subsidiarity. We should support it.
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