Pope to Visit Germany Before Vote

Benedict’s appearance at a Catholic youth festival in August is good timing for Germany’s conservatives, who are campaigning to take the chancellorship in September.

June 16, 2005

The build-up to the annual conference of Roman Catholic youth in Cologne, Germany, this August—just one month away from a probable federal election—should be carefully watched.

Pope Benedict xvi will address this conference and is expected to draw an audience of over 2 million. This is the first time a German pope will address such a conference, and both the pope and his audience will no doubt be highly sensitized to this reality. Benedict’s message to the youth will have particular appeal to a segment of the German population that presently hungers for inspired leadership in times most unsettled and unsettling.

Should this German pope find a powerful following within the country’s current generation, he may be instrumental in igniting a political force that will clamor for a more conservative leader at the upcoming German elections in September.

Religion appears dead in Europe, or so some say. We can actually expect to see the revival of religion, namely Roman Catholicism, on the Continent—particularly an increase in its influence over politics. That is what makes the confluence of this groundbreaking youth conference in Germany, presided over by a German pontiff, and this pivotal moment in German politics, so noteworthy.

Germany, residing as it does at the heart of Europe, will not give up on its dream of a pan-European federation. Remember ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl’s warning that, should this dream not be realized by the institutions set up to achieve it peacefully, Germany may be tempted to obtain its will “by its more traditional methods.”

The apparent fracturing of the dream of obtaining a united Europe by multiple edicts and endless treaties, issued by a faceless bureaucracy in Brussels, appears, on the surface, to be doomed. The reality is, as Texas-based think tank Stratfor recently mused, “Europe, for political reasons, cannot be unified except beneath the heel of a conqueror” (June 2).

Watch for the Vatican to use its influence over Germany to provide Europe with just that.