''By origin the European Union is a deeply Catholic institution. Its
six-member precursor took in the main Catholic powers of Western Europe,
apart from Fascist Spain; even part-Protestant Germany was led in by
that devout Roman Catholic Rhinelander, Konrad Adenauer. The Union’s
close historical avatar, the Holy Roman Empire, aspired to an imperium
that, if not wholly Roman, remained as firmly of this world as papal
power itself. In the 19th century,
ultramontane Germans feted Pius IX’s declaration of pontifical
infallibility as a riposte to Bismarck’s failed Kulturkampf against the
Catholic Centre Party. Even ‘subsidiarity’ – the EU norm whereby
decisions supposedly devolve to local level – has a strong lineage in
Vatican social doctrine, latterly parroted by popes such as John Paul
II, but with roots in Aquinas. Much of that doctrine owed less to
fondness for families and civil society than hostility to European
sovereigns as adversaries of the pontifical superstate. In this light,
the caesaropapist Henrician reformation emerges as the original Brexit..''
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