The EU and the Catholic Church

What if the EU is just a recreation of the Catholic Church? The EU is a bureaucratic system that sits in Brussels and is populated by high priests who are super well-educated, with multiple PhDs across Europe. They’re semi-elected and they sort of are the judgmental system and they’re the good people who dollop monies to all the countries, etc.¹

How are they different from the Universal Catholic Church at, say, 1250, where there is a centralized power of highly educated people who decide what goes where and who does what?² It seems to me that it took them 200 years after destroying the church, call it 1848, when we had the rise of nationalism. All that nationalism created the 20th century’s wars, all the secularism created all the wars, and all the sort of Nietzschean power, man. They figured out that they had to recreate the Catholic Church, Brussels, the EU, and the common currency, and that it is all the same thing, simply recreated.

Everything that the EU had to do was recreate all the things that the Catholic Church already built into place: schools, universities, diplomatic systems, working out who went where and what. What were the powers? What were the rules we were going to play by? Who gets to be the king? Who gets to be in office? What do we do with immigrants? They literally had to rebuild everything the Catholic Church did, but in a secular form.

Prior to that there was a separation of the spiritual and the earthly, right? There was ecclesiastical and secular and the kings and all this stuff with war were the secular part of the church, the secular part of the material world. The ecclesiastical was the church and they dealt with everything else. They dealt with charity, they dealt with the poor, they dealt with what you do with children, they dealt with administration, with keeping records, with birthdays, with baptisms, with all these rites and passages of time.³

Over time, with the rise of states, the states took them over because we had to sort of deny the source of God and have to deal with the corruption of the church. There’s always corruption as males, as men, as people, and so we had to change the rules of everything and then recreate it under this new system called the EU.⁴

I find it fascinating that we have to build these universal systems when we already had them, destroy them, go through a world where we have to rebuild them, and then figure out, “Oh I wonder if that system was working.” Now we have this EU that’s now buckling under its authority because it doesn’t have the peace that the Catholic Church had, which was the idea that the Church was created by Jesus Christ. The EU was not created by Jesus Christ. The EU is created by the United States or created by Europeans to deal with the horrors and catastrophe of the 30 years of the first half of the 20th century.

They sort of deal with that but they have no authority, right? The Catholic Church at least had the authority. There was an appeal to something greater. It was ordained by God. It was created by Jesus Christ: “Hey Saint Peter, I want you to build this church. You are the rock.” It has apostolic succession.⁵ The EU doesn’t have any of that so it has no divine right to sit on which is why it’s crumbling and can’t deal with what’s happening now. I find that interesting. Anyway I just thought of that as I was driving coming home from the gym.

1. For EU institutions, lawmaking, and the Commission’s role, see EU institutions and bodies; and how the Commission is appointed.
2. For papal administration, canon law, and appeals to Rome, see The Cambridge History of the Papacy: Vicar of Christ; and The Cambridge History of the Papacy: Canon Law.
3. For the distinction between spiritual and royal power, and the Church’s social role, see Letter of Pope Gelasius to Emperor Anastasius; The rise of the social state as a global model.
4. For the transfer of church infrastructure into the secular state, and the role of nationalism in modern war, see The Secularization of Poor Relief and Primary Education; The role of nationalism in the two world wars.
5. For the Catholic claim of apostolic succession, and the treaty-based and postwar foundation of the EU, see The Catholic Church is apostolic; and The principle of conferral; and The Schuman Declaration of May 1950.