Bishops’ commission rues EU bureaucracy, says migration must be ‘responsibly governed’
November 12, 2015
Reflecting on Europe’s future, a commission of the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe criticized the EU’s bureaucracy, lamented anti-Christian persecution and the rejection of Christian values, and called for “wise pragmatism” in dialogue with Islam.
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The Commission Caritas in Veritate, named after Pope Benedict’s 2009 encyclical and chaired by Archbishop Giampaolo Crepaldi of Trieste, said in a November 11 statement that “ideologies today are trying to remove from Europe its values and divide it into supporters and opponents of models built not on the common history of Europe, but on theory.”
“Continental institutions are suffering from the tension between the identities of peoples and the dimension of bureaucracy, which usually responds to abstract parameters and is led by officials often distant from the real life of Europeans,” the bishops continued. “Sometimes the practice of the European institutions is seen by the peoples as arrogant.”
“Not to respect life and the family also means creating conflict and weakening peace,” the bishops added. “The same is true for the contempt or even persecution of religion, above all the Christian religion, or an education of young people in moral anarchy.”
Stating that “migration must be prudently and responsibly governed and not suffered,” the bishops said that Europe cannot “exempt itself from a common commitment to tackle this emergency not just in the so-called welcome of refugees but also and above all by a foreign policy of effective contrast to the depraved interests of those behind this phenomenon.”
“The Catholic Church which is present in the different European nations knows well that its first duty is the proclamation of Christ to the Europeans, because the first factor of development is the Gospel,” the commission concluded. “It knows how to do it in friendship with everyone, but with its own unique appearance, founded on the truth of the Lord Jesus Christ.”
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