Hungary: the country's constitution and guiding principles are everything the EU has labored to abolish.

Amid EU Criticism, 

Hungary Remains Resolute

Alessandra Nucci

In 1992 the Treaty of Maastricht turned the European Common Market on its head, and replaced the free association of sovereign nations cooperating to achieve their mutual interest—as envisioned in the Treaty of Rome of 1957, signed by France’s Schumann, Italy’s De Gasperi, and Germany’s Konrad Adenauer, Catholics all—with a European Union whose unlimited norms take precedence over national laws.

Today, after a gradual and meticulous 20-year-long build-up, the nations of Europe find themselves chained to a convoluted document that goes by the name of the Lisbon Treaty. Premised less on its loosely defined common heritage than on its rigidly regulated common currency, this treaty and its accompanying Charter of Rights provide the basis for authoritarian forays into ethics and conscience rights that were never supposed to be the business of legislators.

It is abundantly clear now—too late—that the faithful would have done well to heed Pope John Paul II’s reiterated call to insist, indeed to fight, for a mention of Europe’s Christian heritage in the European Constitution (see his 2003 apostolic exhortationEcclesia in Europa). Had Europe’s historical Christian roots been acknowledged in the EU’s founding documents, as John Paul pleaded they be, we would now have a solid foundation on which to base our resistance to media and political pressure to adopt laws that fly in the face of Europe’s identity and tradition.

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Hungary’s stand

Given the determination with which the secularists in power have refused to let any mention of Christianity slip into the European Union’s founding document, one can understand what an intolerable slap in the face it was when, in 2011, Hungary replaced its Communist-dictated Constitution of 1947 with a new one that not only honors its historical Christian roots but also includes an explicit defense of natural law ethics.

The new Fundamental Law is everything a central bureaucracy devoted to secularizing the culture abhors. It recognizes:

- Christianity as the basic religion of the Hungarian people (while ensuring complete freedom of religion);

- the protection of life from the moment of conception (although the law still allows for abortion);

- the family based on marriage between a man and a woman (although the law allows for same- sex civil unions);

- parental duties toward children but also children’s duties toward elderly parents;

- the responsibility before God of the Members of Parliament who approve the Constitution;

- the ethnic basis of the nation, with safeguards for the rights of resident minorities, implicitly refuting the utopian concept that defines a nation on the basis of its prevailing political ideology;

- the prohibition of eugenics.

Hungary’s new constitution begins, “God bless the Hungarians,” which is followed by an acknowledgement of St. Stephen as the founder of the Hungarian, or Magyar, state as “a part of Christian Europe.” The preamble further celebrates “the role of Christianity in preserving nationhood,” with a nod to “the various religious traditions” of the country.

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