{"id":201,"date":"2004-11-08T22:00:34","date_gmt":"2004-11-08T22:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2004\/11\/08\/rocco-and-religion\/"},"modified":"2004-11-08T22:00:34","modified_gmt":"2004-11-08T22:00:34","slug":"rocco-and-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/2004\/11\/rocco-and-religion\/","title":{"rendered":"Rocco and Religion"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ex-candidate commissioner Rocco Buttiglione, who resigned after MEPs took his comments about single mothers and homosexuals<\/a> somewhat badly, is launching a crusade<\/a> for Catholicism and Christianity, claiming the EU is being taken over by a political correctness which effectively discriminates against traditional religious beliefs.<\/p>\n

He’s a got a point, although methinks his campaign may be somewhat less selfless than he is making out. Following Bush<\/a>‘s election and the first steps towards admitting the primarily Islamic Turkey<\/a> into the primarily Christian European Union, there has been much speculation about the future role of religion in politics<\/a>. Some in Europe seem to have started wondering whether this continent – which was, after all, where Christianity got its first foothold – might benefit from some religiously-tinged politics. This approach hasn’t worked too well in Northern Ireland, but there seems to be a drive to ignore the Protestant\/Catholic division (and all the little subsects of those major Christian sects) and instead focus on an all-encompassing notion of “Christianity” – which I imagine could end up being somewhat offensive to the regular practitioners to which such a move would be designed to appeal…<\/p>\n

Could old Rocco be hoping that he could become a secular European religious figurehead, setting himself up in opposition to namby-pamby liberal political correctness in the same way Bush managed to? I doubt he’s stupid enough to think this is a possibility, but it could do him some good on a smaller, domestic scale – after all, Berlusconi has got to vacate the Italian premiership sooner or later (voluntarily, democratically or through impeachment<\/a>), and his hugely raised international profile following this latest spat between the Commission and European Parliament could put him in a good position to take over if and when – especially with the similarly-minded Bush in the White House.<\/p>\n

Either way, there’s a good interview with Buttiglione here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Oh, and sorry for the decline in posts over the last few days – I had a weekend in the country, narrowly avoiding being in a train crash<\/a> – I luckily took an earlier train – and then got delayed by the aftermath on the way back…)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ex-candidate commissioner Rocco Buttiglione, who resigned after MEPs took his comments about single mothers and homosexuals somewhat badly, is launching a crusade for Catholicism and Christianity, claiming the EU is being taken over by a political correctness which effectively … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jcm.org.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}