A new humanism

In his greeting to Benedict XVI during the audience which concluded the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council of Culture on “The challenges of secularization for the Church and in the Church” (March 6-8), the President of the Vatican Department Msgr. Gianfranco Ravasi, described the “temptation”, present since the very first centuries of Christianity, to “discolor” one’s “spiritual and cultural identity”, “extinguishing the glow of faith and enervating the zeal of charity”. “In the secularized cities where we live today, God isn’t necessarily evicted. He is made irrelevant or imprisoned in merely sacral or magic shapes”, he said. “Nonetheless, we continue confiding in the truth that -“man infinitely surpasses man”-, to use the famous expression by Pascal, and that the Church has before her open spaces to cultivate a new Christian humanism and let faith shine”. The challenge is “to allow the Word of God to resound in a new and incisive way.” Hence, in our secularized society, we must “vigorously reintroduce the major moral values and eschatological issues”, also weaving “with energy and rigor the respectful dialogue between science and faith”. During the last day of the meeting many proposals were put forward regarding the choice of the topic of the next Plenary Session, in 2010.The proposals of the Council. Msgr. Lluis Clavell, professor of metaphysics at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, asked to “open to the laity” as consultors, which “Msgr. Ravasi had proposed”. Msgr. Joseph Doré, archbishop of Strasbourg (France), recalled the need “to reflect on the formation of seminarians and priests”. Msgr. William Benedict Friend, bishop in Luisiana (Canada), described the emergency of economy as “one of the challenges of Christian humanism”. Msgr. Bruno Forte, archbishop of Chieti-Vasto (Italia), pointed out that “in our global society, where the strong identities of modernity have been replaced by the weak, mixed identities of post-modernity”, the Church is called to recover the value of “symbolic language”. In his report, cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, archbishop of Westminster (England), had spoken of “the five languages that transmit the Good News to men and women today: testimony, love and solidarity, the language of loving parents, the symbols of the sacrament, the silence of contemplation”. Msgr. Donald Brendan Murray, bishop of Limerik (Ireland), declared that “anthropology is the major question which needs to be addressed”. While cardinal Claudio Hummes, prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, proposed to dedicate the next plenary session “to investigating the positive aspects of contemporary culture”. A topic needing to be explored – he continued – “is the longing for the passion for truth. Renouncing truth is a mutilation of humanity”. “But humanity is necessary, and in a culture focused on the present, which lost its memory and the faith in the future, the sense of history ought to be recovered”.In the gateways of secularization. Msgr. Joseph Zycinski, bishop of Lublin, addressed the topic of dialogue between the Church and Science. “In order to overcome” nihilism, relativism and rationalism, “Christianity must collaborate with natural sciences”, he affirmed. In fact “the development of science entails questions which imply an ethical judgement. When technology prevails over ethics, the result is a situation of so-called ‘high cannibalism’: technological cannibalism”. Such are the cases of cloning or genetic engineering”. “The suicide of Socratic ethical reasoning, generates monsters” and “leads to the euthanasia of reason”. This is “the area of Christian intervention for a new evangelization of culture”. “The rejection of truth leads to a flight in the world of illusion, it leads to the death of meaning, to the suicide of reason, to the fragmentation of the human person into the many particles studied by science”. This is why “it’s important to invest in interdisciplinary dialogue”.Strengthening the immune system. For card. Lubomyr Husar, major archbishop of Kyiv-Halic (Ukraine), “secularism is the disease of a culture which has an immune deficiency of ideas”. To evangelize culture it’s necessary to evangelize firstly “cultural institutions”, since “often, intellectuals, have an approximate knowledge of the things of God, which they pretend to criticize”. At the same time, “in the Eastern Church faith is perceived as sentimental and cultural belonging, not pertaining to authentic faith and spirit”, the consequence is that “the Orthodox Church isn’t held in high esteem by intellectuals”. After 70 years of “Bolshevik Communism persecutions” – the prelate concluded – the “priorities” are: “the education of the clergy, the formation of a Christian intellighenzia and the support to Eastern Catholic University”.