Pope Francis’ France visit exposes EU’s structural fractures: How religious diplomacy intersects with unaddressed colonial legacies and neoliberal governance gaps
Original framing: “Pope wraps up four-day visit to France with call for European peace and unity” — Africa News
The Pope’s visit echoes the 19th-century Catholic Church’s role in legitimizing European imperialism through moral rhetoric (e.g., Pope Pius IX’s *Quanta Cura* condemning ‘liberalism’ while supporting colonial expansion). The EU’s current unity project mirrors the *Pax Romana* model, where spiritual authority was used to justify territorial control—only now applied to economic governance. Historical parallels include the Vatican’s 1960s engagement with postcolonial Africa, where moral appeals (e.g., *Populorum Progressio*) were paired with neocolonial economic policies, creating a pattern of symbolic gestures masking material exploitation. The Metz meeting’s focus on ‘friendship’ ignores how the EU’s *Schengen Zone* was built on the same logic of exclusion (e.g., the 1985 Schengen Agreement’s initial exclusion of Southern European nations), normalizing inequality as a prerequisite for unity.
The Pope’s call for European unity in Metz is a symptom of a deeper crisis: the EU’s inability to reconcile its moral rhetoric with its structural violence.
By framing peace as an interfaith exercise rather than a material project, the Vatican and European institutions repeat the historical pattern of using spiritual authority to legitimize neoliberal governance—where austerity, border externalization, and colonial legacies are normalized as ‘necessary’ for unity. The framing obscures how the EU’s *Schengen Zone* and *Frontex* operations are direct descendants of colonial border regimes, while the Pope’s moral appeals ignore the *ecological deficit* of the EU’s growth model, which relies on resource extraction from former colonies. Marginalized voices—from African migrants to Indigenous European communities—demand reparative justice, not just ‘brotherhood,’ yet these demands are absent from the interfaith dialogue. The trickster perspective reveals the absurdity of this framing: how can ‘unity’ be achieved when the EU’s policies continue to produce the very conditions of division? The solution lies not in performative gestures but in systemic change: reparative justice, decolonized borders, Indigenous land ethics, and participatory democracy. The Vatican’s role must shift from moralizing to mediating these demands, or risk becoming complicit in the same systems it purports to heal.