The surprisingly Catholic roots of the European Union

Catholic internationalism and suspicion of the nation-state go back much further than that. For much of European history, the church’s preferred political order was closer to an imperial model, as symbolized in the ideal of Christendom that was built up across the Byzantine and Holy Roman Empires. The church fought the project of national sovereignty tooth and nail, equating it with a loss of Catholic universalism and all of its globalist implications. The 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which birthed the modern idea of sovereignty and the nation-state, was the direct result of the Protestant Reformation and the violent breakup of Catholic empire that followed. In fact, the loss of the United Kingdom to Brexit almost suggests that the E.U. is a contemporary version of the Holy Roman Empire that unites Catholic cultures and Christian Democrats across the middle of Europe.