A very educational ready by Elena Attfield on a lot of stuff I didn't know about the importance of Catholics in starting the EU, and how its founding principals have been betrayed.

While the project of European integration of the past two-thirds of a century has revived countless debates about national sovereignty and migration, curiously little is still said about the conception of it borne by three of its pioneers and much of the political appetite of the time. Informed by a combination of Pope Leo XIII’s affirmation of the body-soul relationship between the State and the Catholic Church and the seemingly innocuous ecumenical model of Christian Democracy, Robert Schuman, Konrad Adenauer, and Alcide de Gaspari—the respective leaders of France, Germany, and Italy who are today revered as three of the European Union’s four principal founders—sought to heal the wounds of a war-torn and divided Europe with the remedy offered by the perennial social teaching of their universal faith.

Labels: catholic, politics

Something I had not really thought about but makes sense when you think about it, the ancients had a very different version of liberty than we do today, as a result of them being small homogenous cultures for the most part, and us having many different folks living together. Ancient liberty required a much more direct involvement in government, and allowed for one religious view, broadly accounted for, in government. Modern liberty, due to our commercial nature, is found in indirect government and freedom from interference.

Labels: philosophy, politics