Debate - CONTRIBUTION - Giancarlo Cesana

Secularism
and Laicism
(An article published in La Repubblica, December 28, 2004)

Dear Sir: The publication in the pages of this newspaper of the dialogue between the President of the Senate, Marcello Pera and that of Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was very interesting. The themes tackled are central to the development of a life together in a European society. What was above all unexpected was that a “lay” person–an empiricist by formation and Professor of the Philosophy of Science–should affirm the need to oppose a relativistic conception of life and to discover in the Christian roots the decisive reference for a common civic culture. It is taken for granted that Ratzinger should support a similar hypothesis; we could say that it is part of his job. That Pera should do so, along with other “devout atheists,” as Giuliano Ferrara defines himself, is at least something new, because they are in fact “lay” and explicitly non-believers.

Since, as a believer, I am also lay, in other words not a priest, or better, not a cleric, nor an intellectual authorized to speak of religious matters, in order to understand them, I would like to try to understand and explain myself first of all. As I learned, the word “lay” comes from the Greek word laos, which means “people;” it indicates a man and even a woman (to be politically correct) of the people. So “layman” means someone who speaks not primarily because of what he has studied, but because of the experience he has and that is aroused in him by the people he belongs to. We all belong to something or, better, to a people, because we have not made ourselves, nor do we make ourselves. One who thinks he belongs only to himself and to his own ideas is the unhappiest of all, because he belongs to what his ideas belong to: to the TV, to the newspaper he reads in the morning, or to his boss–in a word, to power. Thus, we have “lay” priests who witness their relationship with God; and there are “priestly” laymen who explain (good for them) who god is–in other words, how things ought to be and how things are to be done.

Similarly, there are people like President Pera, who vindicate the inevitability of cultural reference to Christianity by use of lay reasoning. This means that they acknowledge that they belong to an event, a human and historical event, which imposes the positivity of the Christian experience as evidence for their reason. What is this evidence? In short, I think I can say that this evidence is the absolute value of the person, which must always be affirmed, even from its beginning as an embryo, in as much as it is relationship with the Mystery that constitutes it. It is not by chance that this array of laymen in favor of Christian roots emerged before Islamic fundamentalism and the proposed referendum on human fertilization, because both of these questions challenge the value of the person–the former because it nullifies it in the will of God (interpreted by the Islamic “priests”); the latter because it annuls it in the will of man (interpreted by the “priests” of science). Whereas the person has to be defended in his uniqueness and in his freedom to believe and to belong, both factors irreducible even before the claim of the State.

In his recent interview published in Corriere della Sera, Fr Giussani said, “It is inconceivable for God to act towards man, if not as a ‘generous challenge’ to his freedom.” What conception of man, of his freedom and greatness, is more lay than this?
It is worth while noting that this stress on the absolute value of the human person bears a fundamental element for an adequate idea of democracy. If it is true that the value of democracy is seen in how another person is accepted, it is just as true that it is not possible to accept the other without my own acceptance, the acceptance of all I am, of all that supports my identity. Acceptance is something reciprocal, in which the value of the other and of myself must be affirmed together (“Love your neighbor as yourself”)–in other words, a truth, decided in proposing oneself as well as being patient and open. Despite everything, this is what the Christian history of the West has always demonstrated. I want to say that it is not by chance that democracy, as we know it today, is a phenomenon that arose in the Christian West. I also want to say, following Fr Giussani, that “one is more ecumenical–that is to say, pluralist–the more one takes seriously one’s own identity.”

For it is in one’s own identity, and not in its abolition, that you put to the test laically the capacity to accept the other; an identity is open precisely because it is strong. In order to affirm itself it has no need to exclude itself or exclude others. I conclude with a final observation about faith, which is usually assumed to be opposed to lay reason. It is not opposed, because Christian faith is what reason discovers when it acknowledges that Christian tradition is not just an offering from the past, but a culture and a society.