front page" "
The Assembly of the bishops of Germany ends in Berlin today. It opened on 6 March with a keynote speech by Cardinal Karl Lehmann, President of the German Bishops’ Conference. We are pleased to publish an excerpt from the cardinal’s reflections, dedicated to religious faith in the West and in Europe in particular. “From day to day there is increasing talk of a return to religion. Of course it is something very vague; people even speak of a ‘return of the Gods’. The concept of religion often used comprises forms of religious expression that not infrequently represent aberrations from or antitheses of genuine religion, such as satanic cults. Since the Sixties and Seventies, however, there has undoubtedly been a constant shift in Europe with regard to the position of religion in society. It is enough to think of youth religions and the new religious movements. Since the Eighties, the fact that the traditional religions are recovering importance in public life has also been observed in other areas of the world: the Shiite revolution in Iran, the liberation movement strongly rooted in religion of “Solidarnosc” in Poland, the role of liberation theology in Latin America. There is also talk of a “mega-trend”, of “re-spiritualization”, of a “return of the sacred” and of a “new religious scenario”, or even of “new religious forms of culture”. Of course, in so far as science deals with this phenomenon, there are also fundamental polarizations in its evaluation. There are convinced enemies and critics who see decline, decadence, or even “opium of the people” in this scenario. The revival of religions, according to them, is a step backward: a return to the demoniac, to magic and to the archaic, and serves in the last analysis merely to circumscribe a galloping secularism: it is, in their view, a religion without God. Yet there’s no lack of those, who despite all the necessary and just criticisms, see a sign of hope in the birth of a new religiosity also in Europe. In their rambling quest for meaning, they lose themselves; they perceive the restless soul of man who cannot find peace until he rests with God (St. Augustine). Many people in fact are searching for a greater meaning to life, which is being seriously threatened by a complexity that is hard to fathom. In the Church too, we feel the effects of this changed scenario. When confronted by disasters in which science and politics demonstrate their impotence (11 September 2001, tsunami etc.), people go en masse to church, though often only briefly. Apostasies have declined especially in the last year; the number of people who have returned to the Church has increased considerably, also in Europe. Last year, with the death of Pope John Paul II, the election of a new Pope from our country and not least World Youth Day in Cologne, favourable conditions were created. But we also know how ambivalent these phenomena are, and how much they may represent fleeting moments that may be very contradictory. The journey back to the Church may turn out to be even more obstacle-strewn than before. So let us not follow certain tendencies just to be trendy, even if we observe them with attention. Let to continue, instead, to accompany people in the search of the truth, in the journey towards the Church, and in the meeting with God.
