Europe According to the pope:
If Reason Opens Itself to God

From Regensburg to Berlin, the Pontiff has been insisting on the roots of our civilization in order to counter the great risk of positivism.
It is not just a doctrinal reminder, or a philosophical position. Only today do we understand how much the insistence of Benedict XVI, and before him John Paul II, on the centrality of the Christian roots of Europe, was decisive for the success of coexistence on the Old Continent. In today’s bewilderment, the words of the Pope seem the only ones that manage to chart a route. In these years of his pontificate, Benedict XVI has never separated his call for a use of reason that is not reduced from the necessary rediscovery of the Christian foundation of our society. His is a kind of “magisterium on Europe” spread throughout all his important speeches in these years.
As early as his famous talk at the University of Regensburg, the trajectory was delineated. The encounter between biblical faith and Greek philosophical thought, explained the Pope, was fundamental for the development of our society. “It is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.”
Ratzinger returned to this theme during his speech to the German Parliament last September. “The culture of Europe arose from the encounter between Jerusalem, Athens and Rome–from the encounter between Israel’s monotheism, the philosophical reason of the Greeks, and Roman law. This three-way encounter has shaped the inner identity of Europe. In the awareness of man’s responsibility before God and in the acknowledgment of the inviolable dignity of every single human person, it has established criteria of law: it is these criteria that we are called to defend at this moment in our history.” Of the indivisible relationship between religiosity and respect for the human person, the Pope had already spoken in Santiago de Compostela in 2010: “One cannot worship God without taking care of His sons and daughters; and man cannot be served without asking who his Father is and answering the question about Him. The Europe of science and technology, the Europe of civilization and culture, must be at the same time a Europe open to transcendence and fraternity with other continents, and open to the living and true God, starting with the living and true man. This is what the Church wishes to contribute to Europe: to be watchful for God and for man, based on the understanding of both which is offered to us in Jesus Christ.” But this new culture moves from a use of reason that does not stop at the quantifiable datum of reality. As Benedict XVI stressed at the Collège des Bernardins of Paris in 2008, “A purely positivistic culture which tried to drive the question concerning God into the subjective realm, as being unscientific, would be the capitulation of reason, the renunciation of its highest possibilities, and hence a disaster for humanity, with very grave consequences. What gave Europe’s culture its foundation–the search for God and the readiness to listen to Him–remains today the basis of any genuine culture.”
(L.F.)