World Youth Days were begun by Pope John Paul II in 1984 order to evangelise the young people who were leaving the Church in increasing numbers.
Twenty years later the European Parliament was called upon to subsidise this.
On 15 December 2004 it rejected in its first reading the earmarking of 1,5 million Euros for the funding of “World Youth Day 2005” in Cologne — but the next year the grant got through.
At the beginning of 2005, to publicise Pope Benedict XVI’s first World Youth Day, 60 young members of the Catholic Kolping Society toted an icon of the Virgin and a four-metre-high wooden cross into the German Bundestag (parliament).
Then they were off with it once more to find another photo-op in Auschwitz.
The Kolping Society hailed the peregrinations of this large piece of wood as a “spiritual preparation” for their World Youth Day and they were indignant that the EU declined to fund it.
Their executive found it “incomprehensible” that most EU politicians voted against the million-pound subsidy.
They charged them with “acting from ulterior motives against the Catholic Church”.
The Pope has repeatedly warned of the dangers of “Christianophobia”. A refusal to give public money to the Church would seem to be symptomatic of this disorder and the Kolping executive was indignant at “the purposeful rejection” of this mass gathering of Catholics.
They announced that, having failed to win the subsidy by democratic means, they would lobby the European Commission, headed by the Vatican-friendly Barroso to get the European Parliament to change its mind.
Sure enough, on 2 February 2005 the European Parliament put in a “request” to the Barroso Commission to grant € 1,5 million to the organisation of the World Youth Day, after all.
It was suddenly discovered that this gathering under Church auspices of some young Catholics (gay ones are not welcome) was “an important intercultural and non-formal learning experience”.
This prompted a protest by the EU's “All-party working group on the separation of religion and politics” which attempted to find out from the EU’s Budget Central Control Committee what on earth the criteria had been for making this grant.
(And, of course, the World Youth Day also received grants from the German Federal Government, the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and the city of Cologne.)
The event itself was even attended in his official capacity by the European Commissioner in charge of Youth, Ján Figel’, who has been criticised for “not distancing himself from the Conservative Christian position as the only cultural tradition.”
There he appealed to the young Catholics “to engage themselves actively in society”.
There he appealed to the young Catholics “to engage themselves actively in society”.
Some rulings of the Barroso Commission have raised the question: Can the EU as guardian of Human Rights stand up to religious discrimination?
This one raises another question: Can the EU as guardian of church-state separation stand up to religious pressure?