01-03-2007 - Traces, n. 3 Within Reality Dialogue It is by respecting the human person that peace can be promoted, and it is by building peace that the foundations of an authentic integral humanism are laid. This is where I find the answer to the concern for the future voiced by so many of our contemporaries. Yes, the future can be serene if we work together for humanity. Man, created in the image of God, has an incomparable dignity; man, who is so worthy of love in the eyes of his Creator that God did not hesitate to give His own Son for him. That is the great mystery of Christmas, which we have just celebrated, and which continues to spread its joyful atmosphere over our meeting today. In her commitment to serve humanity and to build peace, the Church stands alongside all people of good will and she offers impartial cooperation. (Address to the Diplomatic Corps Accredited to the Holy See, January 8, 2007) Magdi Allam (Ad Personam Assistant Publisher of the Corriere della Sera, Italy’s largest newspaper) Every man of good will is grateful to Benedict XVI for the religious inspiration, the intellectual clarity, and the human courage with which, in the historical address to Regensburg University on September 12, 2006, he defined the basis of the correct and constructive relationship between dialogue and peace, in the name of the indissoluble link between faith and reason. From the preeminent position of his spiritual magisterium and of his academic authoritativeness, the Pope clarified that the scientific premise of dialogue is the consideration of reality for what it actually is, in taking an objective snap-shot of it and in describing it in a way that is not susceptible to either its specificity or its diversity. He added that building bridges between people who belong to different religions or creeds will be possible only by basing ourselves on an awareness of our own and others’ reality that is untouched by any mystification dictated by ignorance or prejudice, and immune from any hesitation imposed by fear and cowardice. This will happen provided that these bridges, which express the concrete experience that leads people of good will to encounter and interact, find the solid bank of a common landing place, incarnated by the sharing of the absolute and universal values at the base of our humanity, those values that have within them the essence of religious and divine transcendence. In primis, the value of the sacredness of life and of the dignity of the person. Well, the Pope has clearly identified in the nihilism of Islamic extremism–which led to the raising of the ideology of death to supreme level of spirituality–and in the moral and cultural relativism of the secular West–which ended up putting on the same level truth and falsehood, good and evil–the two major ethical and human challenges that humanity is called to face in order to forge a common civilization of truth, life, freedom, and peace. Gianni Riotta (Editor of TG1-RAI News) An expert of Vatican media communication observes: “John Paul II was a Pope of gestures–he would appear to the crowd of believers, he would open his arms and all you needed to spread the news was a video camera. Benedict XVI communicates through concepts–he is a theologian and a scholar, and the global media is having trouble interpreting him.” The key to the Pope’s communication lies with the difficult breaking free from post-Enlightenment dialectic. Adorno said that Enlightenment reason, after Auschwitz, shed light on a desert where not even poetry happened anymore. His colleague Horkheimer talked about the critique of tolerance, far too mechanical a concept to rule today’s world, where identities multiply and clash with each other, and cannot be smoothed over by tolerance alone, according to the old school of Frankfurt. The action of the Pope, compared to Wojtyla, is marked by the new times. John Paul II acted in the context of the Cold War, at first endured and then resolved. Benedict XVI acts in the confused transition from the promises that followed the end of the twentieth century, to the hard reality of the onset of Islamic fundamentalism and of the war of identities. Within this context, the clash of civilizations hypothesized by Professor Huntington risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it is evident that this conflict is not between two “civilizations,” but between those who use dialogue as an instrument to resolve disagreements and those who have dialogue as a goal. The Pope’s absolute call to peace–even where diplomacy, forced by the logic of weapons, can’t respond to it, as in Waziristan–works therefore as a moral levee: there is no war, even a necessary one, that doesn’t also bleed dry those who embark on it in view of international good and legitimacy. Going back to square one, meaning to the role of the media, if Benedict XVI invites the media not only to give the news, but also its context, he recalls the critique to the media of the neo-Enlightenment and contemporary German Habermas, who, in a very recent essay, agrees with the Pope. Dialogue is the path of peace, but the global media is its itinerary.