It wasn’t very long ago that the European Union was denounced as a “Popish plot”. If only. True, the Treaty of Rome of 1957 marked the high tide of Christian Democracy, a political movement based on Catholic social teaching; and yes, five of the six signatories went from the Capitoline Hill to the Vatican for a blessing from the Pope.
But it was sadly not Catholic social thought that provided the framework for the transformation of the European Economic Community into the European Union. It was not the face of St Thomas Aquinas that looked east after the fall of communism, but that of Friedrich von Hayek in the form of free-market shock therapy. It will not work out well, and we’re better off out of it.
