{"id":2351,"date":"2007-03-28T10:29:04","date_gmt":"2007-03-28T10:29:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/the-pope-and-europe.html"},"modified":"2007-03-28T10:29:04","modified_gmt":"2007-03-28T10:29:04","slug":"the-pope-and-europe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/the-pope-and-europe.html","title":{"rendered":"The Pope and Europe"},"content":{"rendered":"

An acquaintance in Rome tells us that the big topic of conversation over there right now is the Pope’s speech last Saturday to a conference organized by the  council of European bishops on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. I linked one translation on Sunday, but in case you missed it, here’s Sandro Magister’s account and analysis, which includes the full text:<\/a><\/p>\n

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Fifty years after the signing of the Treaty of Rome, which in 1957 brought into life what today is the European Union, Benedict XVI has formulated a very severe diagnosis of the status of the continent. He has even come to the point of stating that Europe is falling into a \u201cremarkable form of apostasy.\u201d <\/p>\n

John Paul II also spoke of \u201capostasy,\u201d in the sense of the abandonment of the faith, in the 2003 apostolic exhortation \u201cEcclesia in Europa.\u201d But Benedict XVI has gone even further. He has accused Europe of being ever more frequently an apostate \u201cfrom itself, even before [being an apostate] from God\u201d: to the point of \u201cdoubting its very identity.\u201d <\/p>\n

The pope formulated this diagnosis while receiving in the Vatican\u2019s Sala Clementina on March 24 the cardinals, bishops, and politicians who were taking part in a conference organized in Rome by the Commission of the Bishops\u2019 Conferences of the European Community, COMECE, dedicated to the theme of \u201cValues and perspectives for the Europe of tomorrow.\u201d <\/p>\n

Among the Catholic politicians who spoke at the conference were the president of the Italian council of ministers, Romano Prodi; the president of Ireland, Mary McAleese; and the president of the European parliament, Hans-Gert P\u00f6ttering. <\/p>\n

Meeting the pope in a private audience, P\u00f6ttering \u2013 a German who in recent years fought unsuccessfully for the insertion of a recognition of the Christian roots of Europe into the constitutional treaty of the Union \u2013 invited Benedict XVI to go to Strasbourg to speak before the plenary assembly of the European parliament, as John Paul II did on October 11, 1988. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An acquaintance in Rome tells us that the big topic of conversation over there right now is the Pope’s speech last Saturday to a conference organized by the  council of European bishops on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. I linked one translation on Sunday, but in case you missed…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Pope and Europe - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/03\/the-pope-and-europe.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Pope and Europe - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An acquaintance in Rome tells us that the big topic of conversation over there right now is the Pope’s speech last Saturday to a conference organized by the  council of European bishops on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}