Church
Ecclesia
in Europa Guarantee of the Future
The pontifical text that sums up the Bishops’ Synod: a clear examination
of the consciousness of today’s European. “Many men and women seem
disoriented, uncertain, without hope.” But “the Church stands at
the beginning of the third millennium with a message which is ever the same:
Jesus Christ is Lord. Christ is the source of hope for Europe and for the whole
world.”
by Stefano Maria Paci*
He has seen a lot, this Pontiff who has guided the Church across two millennia.
He has watched–and made a fundamental contribution to–the collapse
of a fiercely atheistic regime that seemed like an indestructible Moloch. He
has seen and opposed the affirmation of a New Empire that imposes its own laws,
its own rules, and its own wars. He has seen entire continents fall into the
vortex of hunger and indifference, torn apart by conflict and diseases heretofore
unknown. He has looked the evil that tried to eliminate the successor of Christ
in the face, and has seen miracles happen to himself. He has seen thousands of
martyrs who sacrificed themselves in order to testify to their faith in God.
He has seen heroism and hope. He has lived these decades as a protagonist, in
the forefront of the world stage, as the defender of human rights in the name
of Christ and His dominion over the world.
Now, after leading the Church for decades, he seems possessed by urgency. Apparently,
he wants to devote his remaining energy and time to preventing the supreme blasphemy,
which risks becoming real in our time: the possibility that Christianity may
become meaningless–that it may continue to exist, that people may talk
about it and that it be socially important, but no longer mean anything for man’s
real, concrete life.
Practical agnosticism and religious indifference
“
The Church has the urgent task of bringing the liberating message of the Gospel
to the men and women of Europe,” the Pope cries in his exhortation Ecclesia
in Europa, published at the end of June. This seems an echo, but by now much
more pressing, of that shout of joy with which he initiated his pontificate: “Do
not be afraid. Open, rather, throw wide the doors to Christ.” This is an
announcement of hope, the Pope says in his exhortation, that Europe seems to
have lost.
The Pope’s text sums up the Bishops’ Synod held right before the
Jubilee of 2000. The Jubilee was also a great media event. But the Pope, in his
exhortation, does not use triumphal tones. On the contrary, he harkens back to
the book of Revelation, like an ancient prophet who tries to warn his contemporaries
in the face of grave peril. There are, he says, “many troubling signs which
at the beginning of the third millennium are clouding the horizon of the European
continent.” First and foremost, “the loss of Europe’s Christian
memory and heritage,” accompanied “by a kind of practical agnosticism
and religious indifference whereby many Europeans give the impression of living
without spiritual roots and somewhat like heirs who have squandered a patrimony
entrusted to them by history.” It is this sort of bewilderment that today,
paradoxically, prevents the recognition that Christianity is the only ground
that over the centuries has provided a unitary idea of Europe. The Pope admits
that he is not surprised “then, that there are efforts to create a vision
of Europe which ignore its religious heritage, and in particular, its profound
Christian soul, asserting the rights of the peoples who make up Europe without
grafting those rights onto the trunk which is enlivened by the sap of Christianity.”
Thus, it is not for a battle for cultural hegemony that the Pope and Vatican
diplomats are fighting to insert into the text of the European Constitution a
reference to the common Christian roots, but for a defense of the reason that
made and makes it worthwhile to face existence, since, he writes, the “age
we are living in can seem to be a time of bewilderment.” This bewilderment
does not spare Christians. “Many men and women seem disoriented, uncertain,
without hope, and not a few Christians share these feelings.”
The Pope makes a clear, at times unpitying, examination of the consciousness
of today’s European–he is talking about us and about our contemporaries.
It is precisely this loss of Christian memory, says the Pope, “that provokes
a kind of fear of the future.” And the signs “are the inner emptiness
that grips many people and the loss of meaning in life.” This is an existential
anguish that is revealed in “the diminishing number of births, the decline
in the number of vocations to the priesthood and religious life, and the difficulty,
if not the outright refusal, to make lifelong commitments, including marriage.” And
if there is no locus, such as a lived faith, to constitute the center of existence,
the core of our heart, “existence becomes fragmentary.” We close
ourselves in upon ourselves or our own group, and the phenomena we can all see
today arise: “racism, interreligious tensions, a selfishness that closes
individuals and groups in upon themselves, a growing overall lack of concern
for ethics, and an obsessive concern for personal interests and privileges.” We
are watching a globalization that, “rather than leading towards the greater
unity of the human race, risks being dominated by an approach that would marginalize
the less powerful and increase the number of poor in the world.” And, with
the spread of individualism, there is “an increased weakening of interpersonal
solidarity: while charitable institutions continue to carry out praiseworthy
work, one notes a decline in the sense of solidarity, with the result that many
people, while not lacking material necessities, feel increasingly alone, left
to themselves without structures of affection and support.”
The most precious good for Europe
The picture drawn by Pope John Paul II is a desolate but realistic one. It is
a human condition that is born out of the “attempt to promote a vision
of man apart from God and apart from Christ.” This sort of thinking has
led to man being considered “the absolute center of reality, a view which
makes him occupy–falsely–the place of God and which forgets that
it is not man who creates God, but rather God who creates man. Forgetfulness
of God led to the abandonment of man.”
This is the supreme blasphemy: to live as though God did not exist, as though
Christianity were irrelevant to man’s happiness. Reading the Pope’s
text, we are reminded of the time when, as Chesterton recounts in The Sphere
and the Cross, there was conflict between those who believed in God and those
who refused Him. But today, all this is no longer in discussion. This is why
it is “no wonder that in this context a vast field has opened for the unrestrained
development of nihilism in philosophy, of relativism in values and morality,
and of pragmatism–and even a cynical hedonism–in daily life.” All
of this comes about with no drama, no inner conflict, but rather giving Christianity
the social respect that permits it to be harnessed into known categories–but
without asking oneself any questions. It is a sort of silent apostasy. And the
Pope uses precisely this dramatic term: “European culture gives the impression
of ‘silent apostasy’ on the part of people who have all that they
need and who live as if God does not exist.”
But above all of this emerges “clear and passionate” the “certainty
that the Church has to offer Europe the most precious of all gifts, a gift which
no one else can give: faith in Jesus Christ, a gift which is at the origin of
the spiritual and cultural unity of the European peoples and which both today
and tomorrow can make an essential contribution to their development and integration.”
Only source of hope
But the Church lives in the real world, not outside the world, and “her
invitation to hope is not based on a utopian ideology.” Thus the Pope affirms
that “in keeping with a healthy cooperation between the ecclesial community
and political society, the Catholic Church is convinced that she can make a unique
contribution to the prospect of unification.” And since the European institutions
have as their stated purpose the protection of human rights, the Pope asks all
those in positions of responsibility to “raise your voices in the face
of the violation of human rights of individuals, minorities, and peoples, beginning
with the right to religious freedom; pay utmost attention to everything that
concerns human life from the moment of its conception to natural death and to
the family based on marriage.” He asks them, “to respond with justice
and equity and with a great sense of solidarity, to the growing phenomenon of
migration, and see in it a new resource for the future of Europe; make every
effort to guarantee young people a truly humane future with work, culture, and
education in moral and spiritual values.” Because of all this, “the
presence of Christians, properly trained and competent, is needed in the various
European agencies and institutions, in order to contribute–with respect
for the correct dynamics of democracy and through an exchange of proposals–to
the shaping of a European social order which is increasingly respectful of every
man and woman, and thus in accordance with the common good.”
Thus, after twenty centuries, “the Church stands at the beginning of the
third millennium with a message which is ever the same, a message which constitutes
her sole treasure: Jesus Christ is Lord; in Him, and in no one else, do we find
salvation. Christ is the source of hope for Europe and for the whole world.”
*Vatican expert for SKY TG24, an Italian TV news channel broadcasting via
satellite