Roberto de Mattei: The EU has become a Dictatorship of Relativism
Professor Emeritus and renowned Italian Catholic historian Roberto de Mattei addressed a conference organised by Pro Malta Christiana on the 13th April at The Victoria Hotel, which centred on the theme: Europe: Christian Roots or Dictatorship of Relativism?
Roberto de Mattei observed that Europe was once the cradle of Christian civilisation thanks to the evangelisation of the pagan peoples of Europe by the Catholic Church with the fall of the Roman Empire. This led to the establishment of medieval Christendom in Europe, which was described by Pope Leo XIII in his encyclical Immortale Dei (1885) in these terms: “There was a time when the philosophy of the Gospel governed the states. In that epoch, the influence of Christian wisdom and its divine virtue permeated the laws, institutions, and customs of the peoples, all categories and all relations of civil society. Then the religion instituted by Jesus Christ, solidly established in the degree of dignity due to it, flourished everywhere thanks to the favour of princes and the legitimate protection of magistrates”.
Fast forwarding to the EU’s Treaty of Lisbon (2007) which gave the European Union legal personality, he lamented the refusal of the framers of this treaty to acknowledge Europe’s Christian heritage. Hence the great debate of our time in Europe, according to Roberto de Mattei, is not of a political or economic nature, but of a cultural, moral and ultimately religious nature. It is a question of the conflict between two fundamentally contrasting views: that of those who believe in the existence of immutable principles and values, based on the natural law inscribed by God in man’s nature. On the other hand, this view is opposed by the powers-that-be in Europe, who believe that nothing exists that is stable and permanent, but everything relates to times, places, and circumstances.
The European Union has been transformed into a continent where there are no absolute values and objective rights, and as a result, the will to obtain power of the individual, lobby groups and NGOs and secularist bureaucrats has become the only law underpinning the EU agenda, rightly denounced by Pope Benedict XVI as a “dictatorship of relativism” which has engulfed the whole of Europe. The same pope spoke, on March 24, 2007, of how Europe was sliding towards “an apostasy from herself”, and had forgotten “the universal and absolute values” which constituted her foundations. Roberto de Mattei affirmed that perhaps no concept is as appropriate as that of apostasy to denote the secularised Europe of today.
The denunciation of the relativist threat engulfing the nations of Europe was the leitmotif of Roberto de Mattei’s conference address. In its present state, the European Union has morphed into an Orwellian “Big Brother” which expresses its relativist dictatorship through psychological terrorism and judicial repression of sovereign nation states. He cited French president Emmanuel Macron’s insistence on enshrining abortion as a European human right as the latest aggression against human life, the family and what is left of the natural order in Europe.
Roberto de Mattei also listed secularist aberrations promoted by the EU masquerading as “human rights”, such as so-called “gay marriage”, free access to contraception, abortion, “hate speech” legislation, euthanasia, gender ideology and uncontrolled open borders among others. Additionally, he pointed out that since 1994, the European Commission has become one of the major partners in forcing the requirements of what it terms “reproductive health rights” with the clear intent to reduce the number of births both in Europe and in developing countries, related to the Cairo international conference on family planning (1994). It is hence abundantly clear, he added, that the European Union—as well as the United Nations—today trample over the foundations of natural law.
These pan-European trends must be opposed by all Catholics through prayer and civic action, and through the rediscovery of that natural and divine law which constituted the foundation of European Christian civilisation, formed in the Middle Ages in Europe. Roberto de Mattei’s address was punctuated by quotes from various papal encyclicals grounded in the traditional Magisterium of the Church, as well as the teaching of the great Catholic counter-revolutionary authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of which he is, in Italy, heir and continuator.
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