27th European Prayer Breakfast at the EP: Focus on Freedom

The 27th annual European Prayer Breakfast took place at the European Parliament in Brussels, on 4 December 2024. CROCEU General Secretary, Rev. Fr. George VALCU, also took part into the event, delivering a closing blessing-prayer to the attendees.

This years topic for reflection was freedom, with reference to St. Paul's words to the Corinthians: "Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2Cor. 3: 17). The keynote address was delivered by Dr. Christiaan Alting VON GEUSAU, a Dutch legal scholar, former rector of the Catholic University ITI in Austria and chairman of the International Catholic Legislators Network (ICLN). Reflecting on the meaning of freedom and how to live it today, Dr. VON GEUSAU first underscored that freedom is not to be confused with one's ability to do what one wants, how one wants and when one wants, nor with the absence of suffering, pain, uncertainty or risks. Instead, freedom is rather "the uninhibited and real ability to choose to do what is right and to choose not to do what is wrong. Or: to be able to act justly and reject what is unjust". He further distinguished between the inner and the outer dimensions of freedom, both of which could fall under attack from totalitarian, full-fledged surveillance regimes, but also from a dominant culture promoting intelectual and behavioural uniformity, by way of restricting notions like religious faith or personal conscience to merely private sphere of our lives. Faced with these risks, Europeans should grow better aware of the danger of lukewarmness and indifference, and rediscover a fighting spirit that would "revive our love for freedom as Europeans and citizens of its individual member States and beyond" concluded Dr. VON GEUSAU.

Established in 1998 by a group of like-minded Christian MEPs, the European Prayer Breakfast has grown into a much larger event, bringing together a few hundreds members and staff of EU institutions, religious leaders and friends of the European project, aiming at building upon the Christian foundations that were laid by the founding fathers of the European Union, back in the 1940s and 1950s.