Europe has become too “fearful and self-absorbed,” - Pope Francis

 

In a major address to the European Parliament on Tuesday, Pope Francis warned that Europe had become too “fearful and self-absorbed,” and that it needed to recover its confidence and give “acceptance and assistance” to people fleeing war and poverty,(New York Times reports.)

Asserting that Europe had lost its vitality and often seemed “elderly and haggard,” the pope took a swipe at technocrats who seek to draw together Europe through rigid rules and regulations, warning that “the great ideas which once inspired Europe seem to have lost their attraction, only to be replaced by the bureaucratic technicalities of its institutions.”

But the pope also embraced one of the favorite themes of populist politicians who are hostile to the European Union. He warned that the 28-nation bloc faced “growing mistrust on the part of citizens toward institutions considered to be aloof, engaged in laying down rules perceived as insensitive to individual peoples, if not downright harmful.”

Public discontent with the European Union’s bureaucracy, widely seen as wasteful, elitist and self-serving, helped propel France’s far-right National Front party and several other once-fringe nationalist groups to strong gains in May elections for the European Parliament. In France, the National Front came ahead of all other parties.

The European Parliament, which meets both here in this city near the German border and in the Belgian capital, Brussels, has become an emblem of the waste and detachment from ordinary people’s concerns. Those worries have drained support from the so-called European project, a half-century-long push for greater integration.

Francis, an Argentine who last year became the first non-European pope in more than a millennium, spent less than four hours in Strasbourg, the shortest foreign trip by a modern pope. After addressing the European Parliament, he spoke to the Council of Europe, a second European assembly based in Strasbourg with a palatial building, little authority and virtually no resonance with the general public.

The last time a pope addressed the European Parliament was in 1988, when Pope John Paul II faced heckling from Ian Paisley, a Protestant pastor and member of the assembly from Northern Ireland. Paisley accused the pope of being “the Antichrist,” and secularists denounced him over his insistent warnings that Europe faced ruin if it did not recover its Christian roots.

Francis, by contrast, faced no such disruptions and instead stirred repeated rounds of applause from members of Parliament.