"In the prevailing civil cult of European politics today, the final public good, which is the measure of all the others, is the self-determination of the subject (individual or collective), who, acting in an arena of increasingly open-ended choice, regards human and non-human nature as the mere stuff of technological manipulation."Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, "Subsidiarity and political authority in theological perspective," in Oliver O'Donovan and Joan Lockwood O'Donovan, Bonds of imperfection: Christian politics, past and present (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004), 244 (225-245). The context in which this sits, and from the application of the historical analysis to the "evaluation in view of European integration" beginning on p. 239 especially, is rich.
