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Shocked by the violence of current events and disturbed by the insidious anxiety that is invading society also in many cities of Europe, it is really important for us to meet someone who responds to all this by praising the human being. The human being, in fact, among all the animal species, is the one with the best future before it. “All of us are the missing link between ape and man”, the ethnologist Konrad Lorenz might have said. Will this man ever come? As a Christian, I dare to answer in the affirmative, because already on other occasions I have been able to perceive the first glimmers of hope in it. Alongside gestures of indescribable horror, there are all those gestures of pure goodness and selflessness of which human beings are capable, irrespective of their religion or their ideology, their race or class. Each time, I grasp, with wonder and astonishment, the fact that there is in each one of us a capital of goodness that permits me to continue to have faith in our humanity. And – this is the heart of my faith – I acknowledge that there is this Jesus of Nazareth in whom I recognise the climax of human history, the advent of a new being, the most profound mutation – thanks to love – that our society has ever known. It may be that He is behind us, according to the calendar of the historians, but He is also before us, beckoning to us like an enormous task to be completed, a horizon to be reached. Jesus, the Christ, has permitted me, once and for all, to believe in man, in spite of the denials of history and current affairs. His message begins with the Beatitudes that proclaim as a certainty the happiness that sometimes seems to us so uncertain. Throughout his life, He never ceased to draw close to those whom he met on his way and whom the social, religious, moral, political or ethnic rules of the time branded as foreigners, people to be avoided, if not even suppressed. If you draw close to any man – he seems to be saying to us – you will have the joy, one day, of discovering that others are close to you. Our land will have become a place of brotherhood. It will be a harvest time beyond all expectations.And could not this land be Europe? Could not this harvest time be the present? In the heart of every “hominid” is inscribed this vibrant and urgent appeal: humanise yourself by humanising others. Each person you meet has the same dignity as you, and you will find your own dignity by recognising his/hers. Humanity is not a condition, but a vocation, a project to be fulfilled in each one of us. Might this not be the greatest task of Europe, her mission to ensure that humanity may vanquish within herself and in the world?
