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John Paul II often evoked, especially in his messages for peace on 1st January, an historic change in Europe: the emergence of a multicultural and multifaith society linked to mass migration. In this sense we can speak of a form of cultural revolution that upsets the traditional confrontation in Europe between different religions and between faith and atheism. Europe must therefore tackle the challenge of the plurality of religious traditions. We have entered a new historical experience of religious and cultural pluralism. Our world is challenged by the great movements of population, by the diffusion of international migrations and by the novelty of the meetings between different cultures that have no precedents in history and are here to stay. It is not a question of meetings between travellers, as in the case of Marco Polo and the Chinese world: the presence of the foreigner, of the Other, is no longer a transient phenomenon. The question is not to find provisional solutions, but to accept what is alien, and to co-exist peacefully with the foreigner in our midst who brings with him another culture. At the same time this globalization induces an alienation of the individual, according to the suggestive expression of Tzvetan Todorov, which may lead to the frenetic search for one’s own roots, in other words to fundamentalism. Commenting on this contradiction, the Italian theologian and bishop Bruno Forte has written: “The relation between identity and difference, revealed in the mystery of the covenant, is also dialectical: that means that the two poles do not elide with each other, as happens in the anthropology of the triumph of identity or that of the dominion of nothingness, but mutually support each other according to a movement of negation, affirmation and the overcoming of time in eternity”. The great challenge of the present time is to live in plurality and with otherness, in a new and wider horizon and with the unprecedented need for everyone to make the necessary adaptation. For Christians, that means accepting other religions; but for Muslims it means re-thinking Islam, it means saying what it means to practice Islam outside Moslem lands, dar-al-islam, in a democratic and secular context. The reality is that, especially in Western Europe, we are immersed in a pluralist world from the religious and ethnic point of view. The century that has opened is already a time of cohabitation between people of different ethnic and religious identities. The effects of this pluralism, which has emerged in European society almost in an improvised way, have been multiplied by the urbanization that has caused and perpetuated a crisis of civil society. It is the problem of the city that we need to tackle to prevent the formation of ghettoes on the outskirts of our big cities. In the nineteenth century, a conservative middleclass paper, commenting on the working-class proletariat then emerging, denounced that “the barbarians are at the gates of our industrial cities”. Federico Ozanam replied to this provocation with the cry “Let’s pass over to the barbarians!”. Instead of passing over to the barbarians today, we need to build a city in the measure of man, develop an urban civilization founded on the culture of solidarity, and conceive the city as a shared space where all can live peacefully together, because the risks of conflict linked to the rapid and often traumatic emergence of multiculturalism are great.
