Some of the parties that won majorities in Britain, France and Denmark in last month’s European Parliament elections were “not only populist but nationalistic and xenophobic” according to the president of the commission of EU bishops’ conferences, COMECE.
The UK Independence Party and France’s National Front were prominent winners in the poll, but Cardinal Reinhard Marx did not cite any parties by name. He said the policies of victorious anti-European parties were “unacceptable for Christians and a threat to the peaceful coexistence of the peoples of our continent”.
Marx, who is Archbishop of Munich and a member of Pope Francis’s group of eight cardinal advisers, warned national politicians against making Brussels a scapegoat. “Europe is and remains, despite any criticisms on some specific points, a project of peace and reconciliation” and as such was “accompanied and supported positively by the Catholic Church,” he said.
The cardinal added that the Church would continue to lobby European institutions to defend human dignity, support a socially conscious economy, fight unemployment and support fair immigration and environment policies.
A poll for the French Catholic newspaper, La Croix, showed that 21 per cent of practising French Catholics voted for the National Front, below the national level of 25 per cent support for the far-right party.
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