Germany’s deputy foreign minister has said his country is “observing the developments in Hungary with great attention and some worry.” The Council of Europe has also issued a scathing attack. Hungary’s crime? To draw up a new Constitution that (a) invokes God in its preamble, (b) protects human life as from the time of conception, and (c) defines marriage as the “conjugal union of a man and a woman based on their independent consent”. Opponents complain that Hungary’s new constitution violates “our common European values”.
The Institute commented: Shrill opposition to Hungary’s new democratically-approved constitution on account that it might violate our deliberately vague ‘common European values’ only shows how fast the European elites are disappearing up their own platitudes.
But given some political leaders’ general disregard for our Christian roots, the reaction is not surprising. Back in 2003, liberals sneered as John Paul II warned that “Europeans give the impression of living without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony entrusted to them by history. It is no real surprise, then, that there are efforts to create a vision of Europe which ignore its religious heritage, and in particular, its profound Christian soul.”
With grave foresight, the soon-to-be-beatified Pope affirmed that European institutions have “as their declared purpose the defence of the rights of the human person”, which begins with “everything that concerns human life from the moment of its conception to natural death and to the family based on marriage.” These, he underlined, “are the foundations on which our common European home rests.”
And yet Germany and others choose to deliberately ignore these historical foundations, seeking to impose their own ideological platform instead, completely reinventing and remoulding the human person as they go along.
Benjamin Harnwell, Chairman of the Dignitatis Humanae Institute, said: “Relativism, revisionist socialist ideology and militant secularism have clearly made Germany and much of the EU blind to reality. Not only are they ‘worried’ about Hungary’s efforts to uphold Europe’s deepest and authentic values, but their deepening suspicion of the democratic process is starting to show signs of pathology.”
