- Jules Gomes
VATICAN TURNS THE VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM INTO A CARDINAL VICE
Penitent: “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I am a nationalist and a populist. I hate globalism. I loathe the European Union and the United Nations.”
Priest: “My son, in the eyes of our Holy Father, this is a cardinal sin. Repent. Love the EU and the UN. Seek the salvation of the world by fighting climate change. For your penance say three Hail Marys and read Pope Francis’ speech calling for a new global supranational authority.”
Puzzled? Me too! I thought the only supranational authority ordained by God was the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. I’d assumed that homogenising the nations into a bland global McCity city was an act of hubris as in the tale of Babel.
I’m wrong, no? Pope Francis says I need a new supranational “legally constituted authority” to meet the great moral evils of “climate change” and “new slavery” and this Leviathan will usher in the Jesuitical Utopia to tackle “global challenges facing humanity, such as integral development, peace, care of our common home, climate change, poverty, war, migration, human trafficking, organ trafficking, the protection of the common good, and new forms of slavery.”
Cool, isn’t it, watching Bergoglio back in his boxing ring throwing punches at the bad guys? He socks a sucker punch to US nationalists like orange-haired Donald Trump. He slugs a concussion-causing uppercut to hipster-populist Matteo Salvini in his backyard. He jabs at the 17.4 million Brexiteers in Britain’s basket of deplorables who voted to leave the EU instead of joining Mutti Merkel in her Alle Menschen werden Brüder chorus of joy. Buzz off, you pesky populist pests!
Pope Francis says I need a new supranational “legally constituted authority” to meet the great moral evils of “climate change” and “new slavery.”
Last week, Vatican Pest Control moved in with “anti-populist proton packs” from Ghostbusters IV. The Pontifical Institute for Social Sciences held an international conference charmingly titled: ‘Nation, State, Nation-State.’
Its admonition was apocalyptic: “The world is facing today a growing threat of nationalist revival. Exclusivist national ideology leads to mutual rejection and enduring conflicts.”
The papal powwow assembled a battery of heavy artillery academics and clerics with Cardinal Walter Kasper delivering the keynote address: ‘Peace Stemming from Justice. Theological Reflections Between Men, Communities and Nations.’ Kasper fired the kill shot with his deadly equation: Nationalism is bad because nationalism produced two World Wars. He warned against populist and neo-nationalistic ideologies that “closed inside walls of isolation.”
The conference hasn’t published its papers, but if you do a background check on the speakers you have a cafeteria of progressive globalists. Sample Hans Joachim Schellnhuber for starters— he’s climate change guru and counsellor to the EU and Angela Merkel.
“We need a kind of ‘Climate Gandhi,’” Schellnhuber says in a 2014 interview.
Schellnhuber advocates a one-world government in a 2013 article “Expanding the Democracy Universe” calling for organising “global democracy” around “three core activities, namely (i) an Earth Constitution; (ii) a Global Council; and (iii) a Planetary Court.”
In another article he’s asking countries to relinquish “a good deal of national sovereignty” in favour of “powerful supra-national institutions.” Ach so!
“The borders of nation states have become almost irrelevant to global economic players,” which “can only be overcome by giving up a good deal of national sovereignty and establishing a true regime of global governance.” Hence, as “a prerequisite, the rather symbolic parts and pieces of the UN system must be transformed into powerful supra-national institutions: allons corriger le futur!”
Now you know which lexicon Pope Francis is dipping into for his vocabulary on “supra-national institutions.” Clearly, the gabfest is an intellectually credible global stage for Pope Francis to preach the gospel of globalism and attack the heresy of nationalism. On May 2, in his papal address, the Holy Father thumps the pulpit on his pet theme and speaks of how nationalism threatens migrants.
Clearly, the gabfest is an intellectually credible global stage for Pope Francis to preach the gospel of globalism and attack the heresy of nationalism.
The Pope’s few morsels about how the “Church has always exhorted men to love their own people and homeland” are sadly lost in the cascade of pro-migration and anti-nationalistic pontificating as he calls for nations to “move history by re-launching multilateralism, which is opposed both to new nationalistic pressures and to hegemonic politics.”
The Achilles’ Heel of the papal sermonising, in fact of the entire conference, is the blindness to the historic trajectory of globalism as imperialism and the biblical trajectory of divine opposition to the globalist ambitions of empires in the Bible. The recently published book on The Virtue of Nationalism by political thinker and biblical scholar Yoram Hazony would give the Vatican conference a run for their money. Why wasn’t Hazony invited to tell the other side of the story?
Hazony demolishes Kasper’s claim that nationalism caused the two World Wars. Paradoxically, the fuel in the gasoline tank was globalist aspirations similar to that of today’s EU.
Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote to his soldiers in 1915, “The triumph of Great Germany, destined one day to dominate all of Europe, is the sole object of the struggle in which we are engaged.” Hitler candidly expressed the view that Germany “must someday become lord of the earth.”
Hitler’s goal was a Third Reich, not a nation state—a global project inspired by the German Holy Roman Empire, with its thousand-year reign and Frederick III’s motto of Austriae est imperare orbi universo (Austria is destined to rule all the world). Hitler was Austrian, yet he trampled on Austrian nationalism with his Nazi Wehrmacht.
Ironically, it was American, British, and Russian nationalism . . . that defeated Germany’s bid for universal empire,” notes Hazony. “Even Stalin had abandoned Marxist claptrap about ‘world revolution’ in favour of open appeals to Russian patriotism.” Hitler was an Aryan supremacist, not a nationalist.
Hazony appeals to Sacred Scripture to argue the virtue of nationalism. Rooting political order in self-determining independent nations was an important feature of the Old Testament. The biblical God positioned his elect people against a universal political order brought about by a succession of imperial powers: Egypt, Babylon, Assyria and Persia (later Greece and Rome).
Each of these empires believed that their gods had entrusted them with a mission to “suppress needless disputes among peoples and to create a unified international realm in which men could live together in peace and prosperity,” Hazony writes. “Yet despite the obvious economic advantages of an Egyptian or Babylonian peace that would unify humanity, the Bible was born out of a deep-seated opposition to this very aim,” he argues.
Hitler’s goal was a Third Reich, not a nation state.
In fact, nationalism in the Bible acts as a brake on globalist imperialism, as God ordains national boundaries for Israel so they keep their hands off the lands of neighbouring kingdoms, which deserve their own independence!
The vision of prophets like Isaiah is not a supra-national body like the EU or UN imposing a McDonaldized political order on the world, but different nations retaining their independence and going up “the mountain of the Lord that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths” (Isaiah 2:3).
Instead of promoting the fake globalism of the UN and the EU, Pope Francis would do the church greater service by preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations to create an authentic globalism of the “great multitude that no one can number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” as the Church Militant readies itself to be the Church Triumphant standing “before the throne and before the Lamb” as in the beatific vision of the book of Revelation.
(Originally published in Church Militant. To comment on this piece click here)