The religious sense, religions, idols, and violence. The announcement that God takes our destiny to heart, making Himself man. This is the Christian Christmas, the best antidote to the fundamentalist virus (whether religious or secular) and nihilism. In this dramatic moment, the Pope’s testimony

BY LUCIO BRUNELLI

“If the solution of the conflict in the Holy Land were entrusted to religious heads rather than to political leaders, it would be much more difficult to find a solution.” This statement, made a few years ago by an Israeli cabinet minister, Yosif Beilin, one of the negotiators of the Oslo agreement, scandalized the ecumenical audience brought together by the Community of Sant’Egidio for the usual Meeting of Religions. And yet the Israeli politician was stating a truth that is evident to anyone who has traveled in the Middle East. A practical agreement between Peres and Arafat is more likely than a handshake between the Rabbi of Jerusalem and the Great Mufti of the Holy City. And the observation could also be extended to the relations between the Christian churches. The atheist Putin would already have invited the Pope to Moscow, if he had not been conditioned by the nyet of the highest Russian religious authority, Patriarch Alexis II.

Religions, understood as man’s attempt to build a bridge toward God, are one of the most noble experiences present in the history of civilization from its beginnings. But they are also historically exposed–perhaps more than any other human experience–to the temptation of violence. As a mental, more than physical, attitude. The nobility of religions lies in the consciousness of human finiteness and nostalgia for something beyond. In the painful wait for a Savior. But history documents for us that this wait is rarely maintained in its original purity. It cannot be sustained over time, and so it needs to give a face to this absolute. Whoever has read Chaim Potok’s novel The Promise will remember the extraordinary pages which tell of the dilemma of American Jews after the Holocaust with regard to the plan to rebuild the state of Israel. This was opposed by Orthodox Jews, the religious Hassidim, according to whom the Zionists were betraying the expectation of the Messiah. The Messiah alone, according to the Scriptures, would have been able to re-establish the Kingdom of Israel. If God does not come–stated Reuven’s father, a morally exemplary figure in Potok’s novel–we have to get busy ourselves, because they are killing us all.

A merciful presence
Humanly, it is difficult to endure in the helplessness of the wait.
The temptation to idols is an integral part of the Biblical narration. And idols create concepts, concepts ideologies (religious and political), and ideologies claims–claims to possess and to impose on others one’s own “content of truth.” Islam, but also the Christian “religion,” in certain periods have historically known the sin of intolerance toward “infidels.” Christians are not afraid to admit it. The Day of Forgiveness, proclaimed by John Paul II during Lent of the Jubilee Year, was born of this profound awareness, which only the tendency of the media to turn everything into a spectacle on one hand, and integralist obtuseness on the other, have in part obscured or misrepresented. But Christianity has in its very nature the most effective antidote against the fundamentalist virus. It has no need to look for external correctives.

Cardinal Daniélou wrote that the real difference between religions and the Christian event is this: in the former, it is man who looks for God, while in the latter, God comes to seek man. The difference, we might add, lies also in the way the Infinite takes man’s destiny to heart. The whimpering of a baby feeling the cold in a cave, God taking on our own frail flesh. A 30-year-old man conquering a scanty group of fishermen through the ineffable mysterious humanity of His gaze, His gestures, His few words. Never forcing, never demanding an adherence greater than one’s moral or intellectual strength, but rather understanding–even offered beforehand to the one who would deny Him three times. A sequela completely and solely entrusted to the attraction of a merciful presence, to a wonder that moves the heart. And a heart at peace is the greatest human guarantee of a healthy and positive approach to reality.

For peace in the world
The integralist of every religion is psychologically a perennial malcontent. He needs to see enemies everywhere, also to find a reassuring alibi for his own inner rage. “They think they love God because they don’t love anybody,” was Péguy’s comment. These words come back to mind while watching Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, which unfortunately met with criticism from both Jews and Catholics. The protagonist’s very human desire to protect his son from the horrors of the Holocaust was branded as misguided education, because true education should never hide anything of reality.

Another example is the attitude toward the unprecedented world crisis initiated by the terrorist attacks of September 11th on New York and Washington. Anti-Americanism or pro-Americanism, bellicosity or pacifism, anti-Islamic crusade or blind irenicism. Catholics were immediately squeezed between ideological schemes produced elsewhere. They prepare one track along which you can move and call freedom of choice the only options they leave you: to travel along that same track in one direction or the other. And all the stationmasters, or more modest and faceless conductors, whether on the right or on the left, are there to scrutinize you and ready to blow the whistle on even the slightest question–seen as an unacceptable stepping out of line–about the journey’s final destination.

Even the Pope is from one side to the other, by those, simple-mindedly enthusiastic about the American bombs, who expect from him only solemn blessings on the B-52s as they take off; and by those who want him to be outside reality, deny a priori the right to self-defense, curse the Great Satan dressed in the Stars and Stripes. But the Pope has instead gone off the tracks. With his words, with his gestures, he has reminded everyone that the Church is not an agency of international morality ready to offer ethical imprimaturs. Blessed derailment. The Pope, in the final analysis, has simply prayed and asked others to pray for the victims of the Twin Towers and for the victims of the bombing; to pray that the Lord may touch the hearts of the terrorists and that the world be spared other iniquitous massacres; that the wicked violence that has profaned even the holy places of Bethlehem may be halted; that the war in Afghanistan may not be transformed into a conflict between religions; and for peace in the world. He asked people to pray for these sacrosanct intentions, rediscovering the Holy Rosary, the devotional practice that more than any other has nourished the faith of our grandparents and also solidified their family unity (may we be allowed to say it), more than so many dissatisfied preachings of today. The witness that emerged from the Apostolic See of Rome is one of great truth and independence, as the Bishop of Rome did not yield to the blackmail of politics and humbly chose the Lord as his only interlocutor in the simplicity of the tradition, with his gaze trained on the concrete humanity involved in the tragic events of recent months. This too is a gift from God to the Church, and absolutely not one to be taken for granted. And thus it is easier for everyone, even for those who feel to be and really are greater sinners than the others, to be glad to belong to the very human and mystical Body of Christ.