Twenty-six years after the visit of Pope John Paul II to the European Parliament in Strasbourg prompted one of Ian Paisley's more memorable anti-Catholic diatribes, Pope Francis visited the parliament yesterday.
The mood was altogether different. While a handful of MEPs had objected to his visit, arguing religious leaders should not address a secular parliament that is supposed to represent 500 million citizens of different backgrounds, the atmosphere was on the whole upbeat, positive and respectful.
The current pope's visit differed in other ways to that of John Paul II. While the Polish pope praised Europe as the "beacon of civilisation", a more critical stance was evident in Pope Francis's address to MEPs yesterday. Noting that the world had changed greatly in the quarter of a century since Pope John Paul II's visit, Pope Francis said the world had become "less Eurocentric".
“Despite a larger and stronger union, Europe seems to give the impression of being somewhat elderly and haggard, feeling less and less a protagonist in a world which frequently regards it with aloofness, mistrust and even, at times, suspicion,” he said.
As the first pope from the Americas, Pope Francis addressed the parliament yesterday not as an EU insider but as someone with a global perspective. The EU needed to “keep democracy alive” for its citizens but also to keep the individual at the centre of its work, he told MEPs.
His reputation as a left- wing champion of the poor was also borne out by his speech, which touched on unemployment, migration, and ecology.
He called on the EU to maintain its work as a promoter of sustainable agriculture, a call quietly welcomed by the Green group. He urged MEPs to tackle unemployment and “restore dignity to labour” by ensuring proper working conditions for people, in a nod to the parliament’s significant socialist and liberal wing. And he also tackled the issue of migration, calling on the parliament to ensure the Mediterranean does not become “a vast cemetery”.
But alongside his strong political statements, the pope also reminded his audience of the Catholic Church’s stance on contentious topics such as abortion and euthanasia, both of which are practised in countries in the EU.
Noting that men and women “risk being reduced to mere cogs in a machine that treats them as items of consumption to be exploited”, he said the result is that “whenever a human life no longer proves useful for that machine it is discarded with few qualms, as in the case of the terminally ill, the elderly who are abandoned and uncared for and children who are killed in the womb”.
He also suggested Europe should embrace its Christian roots in response to growing extremism, arguing a Europe “capable of appreciating its religious roots” would be “all the more immune” to the extremism spreading globally.
In conclusion he told MEPs to build a Europe that revolves “not around the economy”. For many disillusioned citizens across the EU his words are likely to ring true.