Europe’s “Civilizational Erasure” happened when it snubbed John Paul II

By Peter Wolfgang ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 06, 2025

“Trump Administration Says Europe Faces ‘Civilizational Erasure,’” reads a headline in the New York Times yesterday. According to the subheading, “America’s goal should be ‘to help Europe correct its current trajectory,’ the administration said in its new National Security Strategy.”

Leaders in Europe are not happy to see the unpleasant truths about them spoken aloud in the new U.S. Strategy. But I am. This has been decades in the making. They should have listened to Pope St. John Paul II when they had the chance.

The Times reports:

In a section called “Promoting European Greatness,” the document offers a searing critique of America’s closest allies. It warns that Europe is on a path to becoming “unrecognizable” because of migration policies that it claims are undermining the national identities of European countries.

“We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence,” says the document. That seems a worthy goal. Who could disagree with it? A lot of people, apparently. Here’s how the Wall Street Journal puts it:

The document underscores how radically the Trump administration is reshaping traditional American foreign policy, and it is likely to deepen divisions in the trans-Atlantic alliance, which has largely kept the peace in Europe since World War II and promoted Western values across the world.

“It essentially declares outright opposition to the European Union,” a British historian tells the Journal. “It’s a frontal attack on the European Union,” an Italian member of the European Parliament tells the Times.

The critics refuse to grasp the new realities that the Trump Administration is facing head-on in its security document. Or to understand that they, the critics, are part of the problem.

When the Wall Street Journal writes of a trans-Atlantic alliance that promoted “Western values” after World War II, I know what that they mean. I was a teenager during the last decade of the Cold War. It was a source of pride to see the U.S. and our allies fight for the captive nations behind the Iron Curtain to have the same liberties we have in our Bill of Rights.

But that was forty years ago. I don’t know what the phrase “Western values” means anymore. If it still means essentially the same things as the U.S. Bill of Rights—free exercise of religion, free speech, a free press, etc.—count me in. If it means pushing the Sexual Revolution on the rest of the world, count me out.

Increasingly, “Western values” seems to mean promoting the Sexual Revolution at the expense of the Bill of Rights. If “Western values” now means the very opposite of what it meant forty years ago, I say the hell with it. Europeans can complain to American newspapers about “outright opposition to the European Union” and “a frontal attack on the European Union” all they want. When I read that “European Union Imposes Recognition of ‘Homosexual Marriage’ On All Member States” even though “Almost half of the European Union countries have not legalized same-sex marriage,” outright opposition and frontal attacks on the European Union strike me as well-deserved.

How did we get here? I think it was the EU’s snubbing of Pope St. John Paul II’s request in 2003 that God or Christianity be mentioned in the preamble of the EU’s Constitution. The mere fact of mass migration to the West is not, by itself, the issue. The root issue is that the West is not having enough babies to replace itself because it has lost the faith that birthed and formed its culture and, consequently, has no hope for the future.

Under those circumstances, mass migration from a more confident culture was inevitable. The issue is not people with a different skin tone coming to Europe. The issue is the change in culture, not race. When the Scottish are being told by their government that they could be breaking the law for praying in their own homes, or a woman is arrested in the U.K. for praying in her own head outside an abortion clinic, or an Irish comedy writer is arrested at London Heathrow Airport for tweets that criticized gender ideology, what exactly is America still defending Europe from? We defeated the USSR and our allies went commie on us anyway.

Indeed Europe, to some extent, lost its cultural confidence—and its faith—in the world wars and never got it back. That is part of why the U.S. has had to be its protector ever since. But the thing we thought we were protecting was, at most, the Christian Democratic Europe of, say, Konrad Adenauer and Alcide De Gasperi and Robert Schuman. Not the anti-Christian Europe accurately described by Vice President J.D. Vance in his Munich speech and, now, by the new U.S. National Security Strategy.

The only way to avoid civilizational erasure is to have a civilization in the first place. That does not mean a blood-and-soil paganism. It means a return to the Christian faith and morality that made Western Civilization what it was and could be again. It means rediscovering that extra thousand years of cultural ascendency between the Fall of Rome and the Enlightenment that the European Union removed from its own story when it rebuffed Pope St. John Paul II’s polite request to include a reference to the faith that built Europe in the preamble to the E.U. Constitution.