“The European Union is seeking ways to give new impetus to its own development and in particular to its own presence on the international scene, for which a great need is felt”, said Cardinal Camillo Ruini, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), on opening the meeting of the permanent Council of the CEI on 23 January. “The compromise reached in December on the EU budget at the summit of heads of state and of government continued the cardinal was thrown into doubt by the European Parliament in recent days, but the probability is that a final agreement will soon be reached”. As regards issues of family and life, Ruini stigmatised the “tendency” of the European Parliament, “profoundly wrong and full of negative consequences, not to respect the criterion of subsidiarity and to approve resolutions which, although they are not binding for the individual countries, represent a kind of moral pressure to abandon the very foundations of our civilization”. As an example of this “tendency”, the President of the Italian episcopate cited the Resolution approved by the EP on 18 January, which “rightly rejects the attitudes of discrimination, denigration and violence against homosexual persons, but also urges parity of rights between homosexual couples and legitimate families”.
