Pray for the New European President...

...for he is not what he appears. There was, in the kitchen after the Traditional Latin Mass last Friday, some excitement over what appeared to be the appointment of a sound and orthodox Catholic to the position of EU President, a Mr Herman Van Rompuy. Everybody cheered when he got in primarily because he wasn't Tony Blair...or so we thought.

Some lamented over the fact that the President's role will be titular and therefore a loyal son fo the Church would find it impossible to block the next wave of anti-Life, anti-Christian legislation which will surely emanate from the heart of Brussels, while others suggested that the new head of Europe could be effective in 'fighting the good fight' in Europe and be 'the Pope's man', i.e someone who was for example, pro-Life and pro-religious freedom and liberty.

Unfortunately, it appears that Herman Van Rompuy is not all that he seems. Who, one would rightly ask, in politics, especially at the highest level of politics, could be? For only the worldly wise and those willing to sell the Faith down the Loire could possibly rise to the top?

Well, the stridently Protestant blogger, Cranmer, who is included in my blog list for the sole fact that he does write some interesting articles even though he's a Protestant, alerted his readers to the new President's Bilderberg connections.

On the 22nd November The Telegraph reported the following:

Mr Van Rompuy, 62, who was appointed to the newly-created £320,000-a-year post at last week's special EU summit, set out his stall on direct Euro-taxes during a private speech at a recent meeting of the Bilderberg group of top politicians, bankers and businessmen. The group officially meets in secret, but when selected details of his remarks leaked out, his office was forced to issue a public statement on his behalf.

"The financing of the welfare state, irrespective of the social reform we implement, will require new resources," he said. "The possibility of financial levies at European level needs to be seriously reviewed."

To anyone who has not heard of Bilderberg, the loose association of the very powerful, Bilderberg is a collection of highly influential, hugely wealthy men and women who meet, secretly, every year to discuss how to make the World work in the way in which they deem fit. Cue conspiracy theories concerning using global warming, flu and terror to subject the populations of the World to a New World Order, global currency and global government which has fundamentalist Christians and even sensible Catholics scrambling for the Revelations of St John the Divine. They comprise of men and women from finance, politics, the media, technology, science and the rest. The very idea that the new President should emerge from a Bilderberg meeting stating his case for Europe as President and that this information should have slipped into the public domain should set alarm bells ringing for those with concerns about the democratic deficit/chasm which exists in Europe. There is nothing democratic about Bilderberg - nothing of the shadowy meetings is officially published. There is nothing democratic about the position of EU President either, since his office is unelected. He is, if you like, Europe's 'chosen one', except no European citizen chose him and it is clear, having emerged from a Bilderberg meeting that he belongs not to the Church but to a cabal of very wealthy and frankly rather insidious people and it is this group who are 'pulling the strings'.

The same men and women who are associated with the shadowy organisation are associated with eugenics, abortion, population-control, the 'gay' political movement and all those things of which Holy Mother Church says, "Down with this sort of thing!" Therefore, the loyal Catholic's hope that Van Rompuy will be 'the Church's man' in Brussels should be tempered by the news that he's a man of very divided loyalties.

Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal: The Voice of Conservatism in Europe penned a recent post claiming that he knows the 'man of the moment' well from his time as a political journalist who wrote for the Belgian press and wrote freelance for The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, and you know I hate to gossip, but Paul Belien writes...

'Our paths crossed at intervals until 1990, when the Belgian Parliament voted a very liberal abortion bill. The Belgian King Baudouin (1930-1993), a devout Catholic who suffered from the fact that he and his wife could not have any children, had told friends that he would “rather abdicate than sign the bill.” The Belgian politicians, convinced that the King was bluffing, did not want the Belgian people to know about the King’s objections to the bill. I wrote about this on the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal and was subsequently reprimanded by the Belgian newspaper I worked for, following an angry telephone call from the then Belgian Prime Minister, a Christian-Democrat, to my editor, who was this Prime Minister’s former spokesman. I was no longer allowed to write about Belgian affairs for foreign newspapers.

In April 1990, the King did in fact abdicate over the abortion issue, and the Christian-Democrat Party, led by Herman Van Rompuy, who had always prided himself on being a good Catholic, had one of Europe’s most liberal abortion bills signed by the college of ministers, a procedure provided by the Belgian Constitution for situations when there is no King. Then they had the King voted back on the throne the following day. I wrote about the whole affair in a critical follow-up article [Read it! It is fascinating if rather shocking and saddening!] for The Wall Street Journal and was subsequently fired by my newspaper “for grievous misconduct”. A few weeks later, I met Herman at the wedding of a mutual friend. I approached him for a chat. I could see he felt very uncomfortable. He avoided eye contact and broke off the conversation as soon as he could. We have not spoken since.

The same writer, who doesn't appear to have a personal agenda, says of Mr Van Rompuy:

"Herman is like Saruman, the wise wizard in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, who went over to the other side. He used to care about the things we cared about. But no longer. He has built himself a high tower from where he rules over all of us."

So, in conclusion, while it is too early to call on whether the new head of the European-Dream-Cum-Horrendous Secular Nightmare will defend human life and take a stand for all the values the Church holds dear, such as the protection of religious, national and cultural identity, the defense of the unborn and their inviolable right to Life and the defense of the institutions of Marriage and the Family, early investigation of the monastery-hopping, 'I'm so Catholic, me!' Van Rompoy does not appear to look good, with even a tiny bit of preliminary 'googling'. Pray for him because having read just one or two articles on his rise to presidential power it looks very much like after all the fuss...Tony Blair got the job after all!