God speed John Bruton on his mission to the US where he'll have to explain how the latest victim of the Treaty of Rome is apparently Rome itself.
No doubt the dogmatic, intolerant East Coast liberal intelligentsia will agree with the European Parliament - either that the Roman Catholic Church no longer has the right to keep its doctrinal positions on anything, or if it does, its adherents may not hold certain offices in Europe. However, the rest of the US - tolerant and God-fearing - won't understand this in the least.
Through all the many stages of the European Project, no one ever told us that being a sincere and honest Catholic was a disqualification to holding high rank. And the Catholic Church has not changed its position on homosexuality: everyone else has, but the church hasn't. I don't agree with it, but that's not the point. It has always had a strongly held belief in the sinfulness of homosexual deeds. The unsuccessful nominee for the Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner, the conservative Catholic Rocco Buttiglione, similarly believes that homosexual deeds are morally wrong - but he does not believe that the state should outlaw them.
However, the Orwellianly named Civil Liberties Committee of the European Parliament clearly believes that European politicians should have the civil liberty to believe and think what they want, provided their beliefs are just the same as the committee's. Two weeks ago, the committee voted that Rocco should not be appointed to the Commission because he believes that "homosexuality is sinful" and that "the purpose of marriage is for women to have children under the protection of a man." Even that précis is wrong.
He does not think homosexuality sinful - merely that homosexual deeds are. Moreover, most European marriages are still about the production of families, albeit catastrophically small ones.
And as for Rocco's belief that a man's duty in a family is to protect it - well, if the committee knows of a single woman who prowls downstairs, poker in hand, in the middle of the night to investigate strange noises, while her husband stays safe and snug in bed, it should bottle her in best left-liberal aspic, because in the real world out here, such wives are as rare as lesbian Popes.
There is one further criticism of Rocco: that he endorsed the Italian government's decision to expel large numbers of illegal immigrants. Well, that's what our Department of Justice has been doing quite a bit of recently, and until Europe agrees an immigration policy, sovereign states must continue to implement their own.
Needless to say, Sinn Féin's Mary Lou McDonald - God bless Shinners and their high moral ground - said she was against Rocco's appointment because of his "offensive" opinions. Ah me. If only we could discover her opinions on the Birmingham bombings, or La Mon, or Bloody Friday, or Claudy, or Whitecross.
The European Parliament, and much of the media coverage from it, have together shown us what a dogmatic, intolerant, secular orthodoxy now drives the EU, both politically and journalistically.
All those Scandinavian MEPS, the Helgas and the German Anna-Margarethas, with their feminist and egalitarian agendas, worrying their pretty little heads about the opinion of a single Catholic politician, when godless secularism is triumphant across a demographically declining Europe.
Now, being something of a godless secularist myself, I find nothing wrong with godless secularism - provided that it doesn't marginalise or impose its will upon the Christian denominations, their adherents or the beliefs which have been central to the creation of European culture since Benedict.
However, do you think Helga and Anna-Margaretha would have been quite so vigorous in their denunciations of the proposed commissioner if he had said exactly the same about homosexual acts and the place of men in the family, but he had been a Muslim? For one day quite soon, we shall have Islamic European commissioners, with social views which are far closer to traditional Catholic views (and Rocco's) than those of today's godless secularists. But I daresay, a Muslim declaring such things will be considered acceptable and proof of Europe's cultural diversity; though of course, whenever a Christian says them, and most especially a Catholic, they are proof that he is a bigot and an extremist.
And if current tends continue, the Europe that we know is doomed: you do know, don't you? With state-subsidised contraception and abortion across the EU, and with the full-time mother being an object of economic and cultural marginalisation, Helga and Anna-Margaretha probably have about 1.3 children (and three non-EU child-minders) between them. Meanwhile, the Muslim populations of Europe are showing no such reproductive continence. Moreover, their traditional values are repeatedly being reinforced through the practice of "marrying out": young Danish, Swedish or British Muslims of ethnically foreign origin continue to acquire religiously conservative brides from their ancestors' homelands.
Permanent changes have already occurred. The most regularly practised religion in England is now Islam. Wales has more Muslims than Methodists.
There are probably around a million Muslims in Greater Paris. Fifty years after mass Islamic immigration began into Europe, far from integration having occurred, distinctive and enduringly Islamic populations are now firmly established across the EU.
We can say three things about this. One is that it is true. Two, that according to the politically correct precepts of godless secularism, we shouldn't even refer to it. Three, the European Parliament would die a thousand deaths rather than discuss it.
Easier by far to destroy the career of a decent and principled Catholic politician who merely has the honesty to say what he believes.