Below is an excerpt from Derek Scally’s ‘Christianity at a crossroads in Europe’ in The Irish Times yesterday.
Over the last decade, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has presented itself as defending the country’s “Judeo-Christian cultural roots”. I have yet to meet an AfD politician who could explain to me what these roots actually are.
In 2015, as the AfD began to grow, Angela Merkel was asked if she saw Islamisation as a threat to European identity. The former chancellor said she was less worried by that than Germany’s cultural Christians – and defenders of its heritage – who couldn’t even explain Pentecost.
As the refugee crisis began to build, she added: “I would like to see more people who have the courage to say ‘I am a Christian believer’ and more people who have the courage to enter into a dialogue.”
A decade on, however, it seems that those most likely to come out as believers are those least interested in dialogue.
The late Pope Francis’s final state guest, hours before he died on Monday, was US vice-president JD Vance. Six years after becoming a Catholic, Vance has embraced his new faith with a convert’s zeal.
Last February he presented what looked like the first outline of an America First Christianity, telling Fox News: “You love your family and then you love your neighbour and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritise the rest of the world.”
Vance said this thinking informed Trump administration migration policy and was in line with the teaching of ordo amoris – the order of love – of St Thomas Aquinas.
Pope Francis delivered a swift reply days later, telling US bishops in a letter there was no Catholic impediment to policy that regulates orderly and legal migration.
“However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others,” he wrote. “What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.”
It’s unlikely the two reached an accord in their brief conversation on Easter Sunday. The photograph of their meeting – a grinning, poised Vance opposite an exhausted, sagging Francis – may well become historic: a collision of two very different understandings of Catholic Christianity’s power and potential.
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