Denver Catholic

18 AUGUST 27-SEPTEMBER 9, 2016 | DENVER CATHOLIC Perspectives Carmen Hernández: an apostle of the marginalized C armen Hernández, one of the originators of The Neocat- echumenal Way, now fi nds herself close to her great love, Jesus Christ, for whom she has given her life. She died July 19 in Madrid at 85 years old, after a year and a half of illness. She never stopped evangeliz- ing. Together with Kiko Argüello and Father Mario Pezzi, Hernández helped to found The Neocatechumenal Way, which today has given the world a return to the announcement of the kerygma, that is, the Good News of the Gospel. She was born in Ólvega, Spain, in 1930. She attended a Jesuit school where she received her missionary spirit, a mark that characterized her entire life. However, due to her father's desires, she took up studies in chemistry at the University of Madrid. After earning her bachelor's degree she worked in the family busi- ness. Soon she left this in order to fi nd her missionary vocation. Carmen spent eight years at the Missionary Institute of Jesus Christ in Barcelona. Carmen found herself studying the works of Monsignor Pedro Farnés Scherer, professor of the Liturgical Institute in Paris, who knew how to orientate her to a profound renewal of reconciliation, a rediscov- ering of the Eucharist, the centrality of Easter, the importance of cat- echesis and the necessity of Christian God and Brexit E ver since the United Kingdom decided in June to leave the European Union, contend- ing (and sometimes overlapping) explanations have been oŒ ered for a vote that stunned the world's opin- ion-makers: a perceived loss of national sovereignty to a trans- national organi- zation; concerns over cur- rent EU immigration policy and the eŒ ect of open EU borders on jobs and the rule of law; aggravations with petty bureaucratic regulation by EU mandarins in Brussels. Together, these amount to what's often called the EU's "democracy defi cit," which seems to me real enough. I'd like to suggest another, perhaps deeper, answer to the question of the EU's current distress, though: to put it bluntly, the "democracy defi cit" is a refl ection of Europe's "God-defi cit." Let me connect the dots. The founding fathers of today's European Union – which began with the European Coal and Steel Community before morphing into the European Common Market and then the EU – were, in the main, Catholics: Italy's Alcide de Gasperi, West Germany's Konrad Adenauer, France's Robert Schumann. Appalled by the self-destruction that Europe had wrought in two world wars, they sought an answer to aggressive nationalism in economic partner- ships that would bind the West Franks (the French) to the East Franks (the Germans) so that war between them would be inconceiv- able. It was a practical idea, it worked, and it was understood to be the fi rst step toward forms of political part- nership and integration. The wager underlying this project, as these men conceived it, was that there was enough of Christian or bib- lical culture left in Europe to sustain democratic pluralism in a "union" of sovereign states that would respect national and regional distinctive- ness. And that Christian or biblical "remainder" involved the Catholic social-ethical principle of "subsidiar- ity:" the idea that decision-making should be left at the lowest possible local level (as in classic American federalism, where local governments do some things, state governments do other things, and the national govern- ment does things that local and state governments can't do). "Subsidiarity" is a check against the tendency of all modern states to concentrate power at the center: which explains why the principle was fi rst articulated by Pope Pius XI in 1931, as the shadow of totalitarianism lengthened across Europe. Respect for the social-ethical principle of "subsidiarity" also implies respect for cultural diŒ erence. And that, in turn, assumes that human beings get to universal commitments—like respect for basic human rights— through particular experiences, not through generalized abstractions. Or as Polish editor Jerzy Turowicz said to me twenty-fi ve years ago, John Paul II was a "European" because he was a Cracovian, the heir of a par- ticular experience of pluralism and tolerance, not despite the fact that he came from a unique cultural milieu. When biblical religion collapsed, as it manifestly has in most of Old Europe and too much of New Europe after 1989, commitments to subsid- iarity and its respect for diŒ erence imploded as well. The vacuum was then fi lled by a monochromatic, anti-pluralist notion of "democracy." Embodied in EU law and enforced by unaccountable bureaucrats and EU courts, the results of this decayed democratic idea went far beyond idiotic regulations on the shape of tomatoes and bananas to include a concerted attempt to impose a single political culture in Europe, best described as the culture of personal autonomy—the Culture of the Self. That pseudo-culture is the hollowed-out shell of the Christian personalism that once inspired de Gasperi, Adenauer, Schumann, and the mid-20th-century Christian Democratic parties of Europe. And its political byproduct is the EU's "democracy defi cit." Forty years ago, German constitu- tional scholar Ernst-Friedrich Boeck- enfoerde argued that the modern, liberal-democratic state faced a dilemma: It rested on the foundation of moral-cultural premises—social capital—it could not itself generate. Put another way, it takes a certain kind of people, formed by a certain kind of culture to live certain vir- tues, to keep liberal democracy from decaying into new forms of authori- tarianism—more pungently described in 2005 by a distinguished European intellectual, Joseph Ratzinger, as a "dictatorship of relativism." The Boeckenfoerde Dilemma is on full display in the European Union, which is in deep trouble because of a democracy defi cit that is, at bottom, a subsidiarity-defi cit caused by a God-defi cit. Americans would be very foolish to think ourselves immune to a similar crisis of political culture. The Catholic Di erence George Weigel is a distinguished senior fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C. GEORGE WEIGEL FATHER GIUSEPPE FEDELE Guest Column Father Giuseppe Fedele oversees the Neocatechumenal Way in Colorado. He resides at St. James in Denver. Carmen Hernández, co-founder of the Neocatechumenal Way, died July 19. She was 85 years old. 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