Italian politician Rocco Buttiglione, a conservative Catholic and confidant of Pope John Paul II who was recently denied a position in the European Union's Cabinet for having called homosexuality a sin, found a receptive audience in Washington last week. "In Europe, it is fashionable to be anti-Christian," Mr. Buttiglione told the American Enterprise Institute.
Mr. Buttiglione, Italy's minister for relations with the European Union, recently led an unsuccessful effort to have the Continent's new constitution include an acknowledgment that Christianity played a role in the development of Western democracy. "I wanted to add the Christian roots in the constitution in order to make it clear that this Europe is the Europe that has arisen out of Solidarnosc," he said. He was referring to the Vatican-backed trade union Solidarity, which in the early 1980s inspired the collapse of communism in Poland and began a revolution that spread throughout Eastern Europe. "This is the spirit of Europe [that constitution writers] did not want to recognize. They wanted a Europe that goes back to the anti-clericalism of the Third French Republic," Mr. Buttiglione said. |