FRONT PAGE
On 11 September 2001 the world crashed. Just over ten years previously, in November 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen. Our planet then seemed reunified. And in some sense it was. The terror attack to the very heart of America showed that clearly. People can no longer live far from the global capitalist market and escape from our “hyperconsumer society”. Nor can they protect themselves from the revolutions of our history. War no longer has any frontiers, especially when it is unleashed in the form of terrorism. The attacks of 11 September brought home to us the truth that globalization touches even the world of religion. Islam – the best and the worst of it – was pushed into the foreground. Ever since then, Europe and all the Western countries became ever more clearly aware that they are no longer “Christian”. Under the shock of atheism, it had once been possible to believe that there was no longer any obligation to take an interest in religion. The phenomenon of the sects and the nebulous wave of New Age – which interested our countries so much in the Nineties – had already made us understand that things were not quite so simple as that. With the “coming out” of Islam, the religious question becomes inescapable. In France, recent figures show that some three thousand people convert to Islam each year, a figure almost identical to that of the baptism of adults in France. In Belgium, the ‘Catholic’ University of Louvain has opened a department of Islamic formation for imans and teachers of this religion. That is also a reminder to Christians. How far are they familiar with their own religion? Is their religion in step with the cultural evolution of our society? Can they be satisfied with the proposition that “one religion is as good as another”, or are they urged to rediscover what it is that is specific about the God of Jesus Christ? It must be sought hand in hand with Christianity’s unique alliance between the human and the divine and God’s radical respect for our freedom, conceived not in an individualistic way but as responsibility. The future of Europe, and of our planet, is entrusted to us. Shall we construct it by playing the cards of dialogue, brotherhood and equality, or those of power and hence of war?
