When histories of the twenty-first century are written an event taking place this month, May, 2019, will be seen as signaling the rebirth of historical Europe (as contrasted with the so-called European project, which is to speak of the secular liberal globalist E.U.) and out of that the development of a new Christendom. So it may be confidently forecast. The ground is prepared.
Besides the Old Continent itself, when the new Christendom emerges it will include countries of North and South America like our own, and elsewhere, whose customs, traditions and culture are rooted in their having been founded as outposts of Europe.
The customs, traditions and the culture of each country might be singular to it, but they had European Christian civilization in common. It was and is the greatest civilization the world has ever known. We have been living off its moral capital for two centuries as a man squandering a family fortune lives off the financial capital accumulated by his forbears. It is time to replenish this moral capital before all of it is spent. That is what begins this month.
The superiority of European civilization is owed to it being Christian, not to the genes of Europeans. One of its foremost champions today, a man who is himself a living embodiment of it, is Robert Cardinal Sarah, a black African. His Eminence has repeatedly stated that in our day the civilization is confronted by two great threats: Islamic jihadism and Western liberalism, which latter holds that men may and even should lead their lives individually and in society without reference to anything higher than themselves, as if God did not exist. It is by leading such lives that we have been frittering away our moral capital (and incidentally disarming ourselves for combating jihadism).
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, one of a growing number of European nationalist populist political leaders, understands that. It is why he describes the government he heads as an “illiberal democracy” It is also why its constitution declares Hungary to be a Christian nation.
Then there is Andrzej Duda, President of Poland. In his presence and with his prayerful participation, the country’s bishops ceremonially proclaimed Our Lord Jesus Christ to be King of Poland in 2016. What could be more “illiberal” than that?
When Austria’s young and dynamic Chancellor Sebastian Kurz invited the far right Freedom Party’s leader Heinz-Christian Strache to serve as Vice Chancellor, the two men ratified their political pact at the location outside Vienna where the Muslim Turkish military assault on the city was beaten back in 1683. By doing so, they affirmed the Christian character of Austria. More recently, when Austrian-born Muslims tried to return to the country after fighting for Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, they were told to forget it, they were on their own. The government has also shut down seven mosques whose imams were promoting jihadist radicalism.
We could go on in this vein, identifying countries, most of them in Central and Eastern Europe, whose nationalist populist leaders have acted in various ways to resist political and economic secular liberal globalism, but there are two points that want to be made.
The first is that Orban, Duda, Kurz, et.al. were all elected to office with margins provided by citizens who hadn’t voted in earlier recent elections because they couldn’t see any candidates representing them and their concerns. These were voters who felt they no longer had a voice in politics and that alien Muslim “refugees” from Africa and the Middle East threatened their way of life, their language, the way they worship, dress and eat — in a word, their culture rooted in Christianity.
Physical modesty becomes Christian women but the religion doesn’t require them to wear burqas. Christian markets sell pork and wine. Christians keep dogs as pets and for hunting and guard duty. On a higher level, there is no tradition of the novel in Islamic civilization. Muslims don’t compose symphonies. Their religion prohibits portraiture in painting. They have constructed notable buildings but nothing to equal Hagia Sophia in Istanbul when it was Constantinople or Notre Dame in Paris.
The voters of whom we speak also saw they were becoming poorer in comparison to political and social elites who were becoming richer. In sum, they felt their very identity as Hungarians, Poles, Austrians, etc., as well as material security, to be under the gun. As a result, they turned to their customs, traditions and culture as mechanisms of resistance against secular liberal globalism with its open borders and transnational economics. In electoral terms, all this translated into support for leaders promising to fortify their resistance — promising, in effect, to make Poland, Hungary, Austria, etc., great again.
The second point — and this is what makes this month important — these voters will certainly elect the same kind of representatives to the European Parliament on May 26.
Now, France and Germany, both with governments currently headed by globalists (Macron and Merkel) have the largest delegations in the parliament, but Italy’s redoubtable Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini has been busy forming alliances with other European far-right leaders during the run-up to May 26. These alliances will produce a bloc of perhaps as many as a third of the seats in the parliament after the election. Even if it is not that large, it will still be enough to blunt globalist measures. That is in any case. In the best case, the bloc will be large enough to begin to dismantle Brussels’s unelected globalist bureaucracy.
Either way, the post-World War II sway of liberal democracy will not be as total, a brighter future is about to dawn. However, it must not be mistaken for victory. That there is still plenty to be done was shown by the results of Spain’s snap national election on April 28. The country’s Socialists were returned to power, though as a minority government. Further, the far right Vox party, which didn’t even exist five years ago, did win twenty-four seats in the national parliament, and this despite its leader, Santiago Abascal, being barred from the election’s one television debate.
