“The E.U. Referendum and Catholicism" - UPDATE

Former Senior Lecturer in Law and Solicitor Anthony Hofler gave two talks in May at St Augustine’s, Solihull, to discuss “The EU referendum and Catholicism.”

Mr Hofler explained that his talks covered aspects of European law which are significant from a recognisably-Catholic viewpoint.

“Working from the fact that Catholicism is God’s word revealed to the world, and making appropriate references to the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church,’” he said, “in the first talk I highlighted evidence that EU Law illustrates starkly the spiritual waywardness and distorted priorities which prevail among European politicians and voters.”

“I also explained how the moral vacuum of relativism governs EU law, and accordingly secularism is sacrosanct, and how penalties are imposed on people who refuse obedience to contra-Catholic requirements.”

“During my second talk, I explained that when an E.U. Constitution was being discussed, not many years ago, there was considerable resistance to the inclusion of any reference to God or even to the fact that Christianity had been the dominant philosophical influence in the history of Europe.”

“So the Treaty of Lisbon avoided mention of God and Christianity, adopted a diluted reference to religion, and put it on a par with humanism. It says that the E.U. ‘draw[s] inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, from which have developed the universal values of the inviolable and inalienable rights of the human person.’”

“Those ‘universal, inviolable and inalienable values’ now include legal killing of people who don’t pass the arbitrary, intellectually-gymnastic tests of ‘personhood’, and the EU breaks its own law by financing abominations such as human embryo-destruction and abortion. Some of the £162m (net) per week which the UK gives to the EU helps to pay for that.”

“In paragraph 90 of “Evangelium Vitae,” Pope St. John Paul wrote that although laws are not the only means of achieving an objective, they do play a very important and sometimes decisive role in influencing patterns of thought and behaviour. The EU referendum will influence the extent to which distinctively-Catholic principles are contradicted and suppressed by the weight of the law.”

”The solution does not depend entirely on whether we remain part of the EU, because UK law is as deeply rooted in relativism as law made by EU institutions, but if something important to you is buried, and you want to rescue it and put it in its rightful place, the less the weight on top of it the better; deciding to retain the maximum weight would be mad.”