Europe’s Top Unifier

https://www.thetrumpet.com/article/13523.18.182.0/europe/europes-top-unifier

The Vatican’s Prophesied Role

The European Common Market has “so far … been unable to bring about full political union,” Herbert W. Armstrong wrote more than 40 years ago in his book The United States and Britain in Prophecy. “This will be made possible by the ‘good offices’ of the Vatican, who alone can be the symbol of unity to which they can look.” The Charlemagne Prize and the German paper indicate that a number of those with power and influence in Europe are indeed recognizing the unifying force of the Vatican.

They are also timely reminders of the Catholic Church’s deep, but little noted, ties to the European project. Most of the EU’s founders were staunch Catholics. To men such as Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman, Alcide de Gasperi, Otto von Habsburg and Konrad Adenauer, the European project was as much a religious ambition as it was a political one.

From the beginning, the Catholic Church put its religious and political backing behind the project. In 1962, Topic, a prominent British magazine at the time, wrote: “The Vatican, usually cautious over political changes not of its own inspiration, now considers the Common Market the work of divine providence. Not since the times of Spain’s Charles V has a Roman Catholic political force been so strongly welded. Not since the end of the Holy Roman Empire has the Holy See been offered a Catholic rallying point like the Common Market. If the ‘Pact of Rome,’ which created the Common Market, had been signed within the Vatican walls, it could not have favored the church more.”

The church’s role in uniting Europe goes back further still. Charlemagne used the Catholic Church to unify his empire 1,200 years ago. As the Catholic Encyclopedianoted, Charlemagne’s legacy was “the idea of a Europe welded together out of various races under the spiritual influence of one Catholic faith and one vicar of Christ .…” In fact, Charlemagne used more than mere “spiritual influence” to spread this one faith—tribes of other faiths were massacred.

This is the heritage the Charlemagne Prize revives, and it’s one that European leaders are very familiar with. History shows them that the road to European unity goes through the Vatican. That same history can also show us where that road eventually leads.