In 2004 Cardinal Ratzinger, the future pope, spoke out against letting a Muslim state join the EU. The cable released by WikiLeaks shows that Ratzinger was the leading voice behind the Holy See’s unsuccessful drive to secure a reference to Europe’s ‘Christian roots’ in the EU constitution. The US diplomat noted that Ratzinger ‘clearly understands that allowing a Muslim country into the EU would further weaken his case for Europe’s Christian foundations’.
The Vatican’s acting foreign minister, Monsignor Pietro Parolin, responded by telling US diplomats that Ratzinger’s comments were his own rather than the official Vatican position. But by 2006 Parolin was working for Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, and his tone had distinctly chilled. “Neither the pope nor the Vatican have endorsed Turkey’s EU membership per se,” he told the American charge d’affaires, ‘rather, the Holy See has been consistently open to accession, emphasising only that Turkey needs to fulfil the EU’s Copenhagen criteria to take its place in Europe’.
But he did not expect the demands on religious freedom to be fulfilled: “One great fear is that Turkey could enter the EU without having made the necessary advances in religious freedom. [Parolin] insisted that EU members – and the US – continue to press the [Turkish government] on these issues... He said that short of ‘open persecution’, it couldn’t get much worse for the Christian community in Turkey.”
In 2009, the American ambassador was briefing in advance of President Barack Obama’s visit, that ‘the Holy See’s position now is that as a non-EU member the Vatican has no role in promoting or vetoing Turkey’s membership. The Vatican might prefer to see Turkey develop a special relationship short of membership with the EU’. Roman Catholicism is the only religion in the world with the status of a sovereign state, allowing the pope’s most senior clerics to sit at the top table with world leaders. The Vatican has diplomatic relations with 177 countries and has used its diplomatic status to lobby the US, UN and EU in a concerted bid to impose its moral agenda through national and international parliaments.
The cables also reveal that the Vatican planned to use Poland as a trojan horse to spread Catholic family values through the structures of the EU. The then US ambassador to the Holy See, Francis Rooney, briefed Washington in 2006, shortly after the election of Pope Benedict XVI, that “the Holy See hopes that Poland will hold the line at the EU on ‘life and family’ issues that arise” and would serve as a counterweight to western European secularism once the country had integrated into the EU. The cable notes that Pope Benedict is preoccupied with Europe’s increasing psychological distance from its Christian roots. daily times monitor
