I begin these few words by returning to the year 2004, when after a very nasty campaign by an alliance of secularist activists comprising many of the usual suspects, the appointment of the distinguished Catholic statesman and academic Rocco Buttiglione as a European Commissioner was prevented. At the time, the Italian Justice Minister Roberto Castelli denounced Buttiglione’s opponents as “fundamentalist” anti-Christians. And so they were: but the incident was simply taken by Catholics as confirming what we already knew: that the EU had become an intrinsically secularist and anti-Catholic organization. Early last month, it looked as though the same thing was about to happen again, when a campaign by another group of fundamentalist anti-Christians, including the European Humanist Federation, the International Lesbian and Gay Association, ILGA - Europe, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation was getting well under way against the appointment of the “conservative” (ie faithful) Catholic Maltese deputy Prime Minister Dr. Tonio Borg as the new EU Health and Consumer Protection Commissioner, on the grounds of his “staunchly conservative and outdated” views on homosexuality, divorce and abortion (in other words, on the grounds that he was a believing and practising Catholic). On November 28, it was announced that to everyone’s astonishment he has actually been appointed. Does this presage some kind of policy change? I suppose that given the fact that even as small a country as Malta is entitled to have a Commissioner appointed, and that unlike Italy (which has plenty of secularists to go round, many of them lapsed Catholics) there are very few Maltese non-Catholics available for appointment. It’s a country of strong believers, God Bless them, as I know from my own personal knowledge over many years. Very few Maltese secularists actually get anywhere. All the same, it’s still a surprise. Over recent years, the EU has attempted to write its Christian roots out of its DNA, and despite the firm Catholicism of many of its founding fathers, it now tends to exclude openly practising believers, as far as possible, from positions of power and influence. When, in the end, the European Union cooked up a “Constitution” as one stage towards the eventual achievement of a united European state, it contained no mention of Christianity in its historical preamble, despite the fact that for more than two years, Pope John Paul II had urged EU member nations to include some kind of acknowledgement of Europe’s Christian roots. Several members, including France, Belgium and Finland, argued against a religious reference, preposterously maintaining the need for a separation of church and state—as though simply acknowledging Europe’s Christian roots did anything—or was intended to do anything—remotely like Christianising its corrupt and turgid institutions (if only). The then Cardinal Ratzinger took up the campaign for some kind of EU acknowledgement of the Christian origins of European culture in a lecture given the day before Pope John Paul’s death. We must, he said: