Apart from the ongoing high-profile argument over the supremacy of EU law, there is another, ultimately more important, fight between the EU and Poland that any Catholic should be concerned about. This is the anti-Poland resolution, passed 319-214 on Thursday by the European Parliament in connection with the Polish approach to abortion law. It shows two things about the EU, or at least the elite who control it. One is that they cannot understand the idea of a society imbued with the teachings of the Catholic Church. The other is that they show, and seemingly wish to push willy-nilly throughout Europe, an alarming strain of anti-religion in general and anti-Catholicism in particular.

The motion, passed one year since the right to life was granted constitutional status in Poland (and thereby held to prevent “eugenic” abortions), is stark. It calls denying access to abortion “gender-based violence” and contrary to the rule of law. It characterises abortion as a “fundamental human right” that “cannot be subordinated to cultural, religious or political considerations”, and condemns the Polish Catholic think-tank Ordo Juris, which not surprisingly disagrees, as a “fundamentalist body” devoted to abusing religious values. It demands the Polish government legalise abortion (despite the constitutional restrictions on it) and remove all criminal sanctions attached to it. It then goes further and demands severe restrictions on the right of doctors and gynaecologists not to perform such operations for conscientious reasons (a right airily dismissed as too easy to “abuse”). And, having done all this, it says that all this is very much the business of the European Commission, which it calls on to produce a Directive legally preventing member states restricting access to what it coyly calls “sexual and reproductive health and rights.”

This is worrying on a number of levels. Even for non-Catholics and those who do not absolutely condemn abortion (say for severe foetal abnormality), the idea that the state should require medical professionals to act contrary to conscience is alarming. And on a simple question of moral autonomy, it is concerning that the European Union, an artificial polity that makes a virtue of not being beholden to any common religious, cultural, or social background of its own, is being pushed to legislate contrary to the wishes of elected governments in places where such traditions are strong. Poland and other EU states with strong Catholic traditions, such as Lithuania and Austria, have an entirely different moral and religious background from, say, the Netherlands or Sweden. The latter should not be called on to help the European Commission push through policies that go against their national religious traditions.

For Catholics things are worse. True, after Vatican II the conception of the Church as a political actor became less acceptable, yielding to John Paul II’s idea that the legitimacy of a government depends more on its observance of citizens’human rights. But there still must remain limits to the latter. To give the state legitimacy the rights embraced by it must be derived from, or at least be consistent with, the Church’s teaching, rather than rights laid down by (for example) aggressively secularist human rights organisations and UN treaty bodies. The European Parliament resolution demanding acceptance of a so-called human right to abortion that actually goes contrary to Church teaching, and indeed requiring that religion have no influence at all over public health matters, is hard to see as anything other than an indirect attack on the Church’s position in Polish society and a demand to sideline religion in favour of secular values.

Why such an attack? The problem is at bottom one of the understanding of religion. In Poland, during repeated foreign occupations by Prussia, Russia and others until 1918, and a rampantly atheist Soviet Union after 1945, the Catholic Church was rightly seen as a protector – perhaps the most important protector – of the country and its values.

Following independence, it naturally continued to be woven into the Polish state and society. Unfortunately this is just what those charged with administering the EU, overwhelmingly from “old” member states with little religious fervour or moral commonality, cannot comprehend. They cannot see the EU as anything other than a powerful umbrella organisation tasked with easing financial dealings and above all preventing future conflict. Further, in the absence of serious moral or religious commonality between the “old” states, they cannot see the future except as relativist and secularist, or religious groupings and differences as anything other than an obstacle to be cleared to make way for it.

The call to supplant the faith of two thousand years with the religion of the UN, human rights and cosmopolitanism is chilling. The people and the Church in Poland, not to mention those elsewhere, may very well see themselves as having the right and the duty to make a loud outcry at the very idea of such a thing.

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