Summary
Is it not surprising," he demanded last year, in an address given to mark the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome, "that today's Europe, while hoping to be seen as a community of values, more and more seems to contest that universal and absolute values exist?" Its militant secularism, in the opinion of the papacy, is doubly a betrayal: first, of the undoubted fact that many of the founding fathers of the European project, men such as Konrad Adenauer or Robert Schuman, were devoutly Catholic; and second, and more profoundly, of the continent's onetime identity as "Christendom.
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Extract
Europe's First Revolution
As the first decade of the third Christian millennium draws to an increasingly troubled close, the verdict of historians on its significance can already be anticipated. Two themes will predominate. The first, exemplified by the present carnage in the financial markets, will be the quickening of the west's decline relative to China and India; the second, not entirely coincidentally, will be the tensions in the relationship between the west and the Muslim world.
A grim irony, that so many of the defining crises of the 21st century should have emerged from a swirl of identities and misunderstandings that reach back ultimately to a distant, medieval past. The attacks of 11 September 2001; the presence in Iraq and Afghanistan of what Osama Bin Laden is certainly not alone in describing as "crusaders"; the rise of anti-immigrant, and specifically anti-Muslim, feelin...See the full content of this document
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