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“A space to be inhabited with humility and pride and in a climate of genuine dialogue” without “forgetting that to remain faithful to its own vocation, Europe must go beyond its own frontiers and become a real protagonist in the world, with particular attention to the ‘forgotten’ countries”: that’s the Europe aspired to by the people of Croatia in the words of Cardinal Josip Bozanic, archbishop of Zagreb and vice-president of the Council of the European Episcopal Conferences (CCEE), intervening in the debate on “Cultural roots and European identity” held in Rome in recent days. The vision of Europe conjured up by Cardinal Bozanic is a Europe in which Christians are committed to the “great questions of European civilization and its new citizenship, the life of man in relation to the various biotechnologies, the models of economic development, the forms of political action, the principles of social community, unity, identity and pluralism in an ever more multicultural society”. Cardinal Bozanic is a direct witness of the “experience of Eastern Europe where, over the last century, the loss of identity and cultural depth, the unravelling of lifestyles, and ethical uncertainty have created a situation that is an easy prey for the extremism of oppressive totalitarianism”. He declared that “what has happened in these countries risks occurring all over again if the values of the dignity of the human person and the rights of conscience fail to take root and if Europe be built on the shifting sands of mere economic and mercantile convenience”. “A Europe without roots he explained is an anonymous and desolate house; a bare dormitory and not a living dwelling inhabited by free and responsible people; a ‘Europe of markets and merchants’, guided by pure criteria of anonymous liberalism, that prepares the way for an authoritarian retrogression of the ethical state”. A Europe, in short, which “Christians cannot accept”. Christians, concluded the archbishop of Zagreb, “wish to continue to have a positive view of Europe, consistent with the history that has made her great through the centuries”.
