On the side of hope

“The role of religion in the life of man and the aim of education”: that’s the title of the address given by Cardinal Péter Erdo, Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest and President of the CCEE, at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on 4 May. The cardinal was speaking at a round table devoted to the recent CCEE survey on religious education in Europe (see the feature in this number: New “citizenship” – A resource for Europe). We publish one or two excerpts from Cardinal Erdo’s speech below.Religious freedom responds both to parents’ right to educate their children in their own religion and to the right of the young to receive religious education. So, when the Catholic Church or other Christian or religious communities offer religious education, they do no more than respond to this fundamental human right. The Church does not demand any special privileges or any favourable treatment. The Church is conscious of the fact that respect for religious freedom is essential and that no proposal of faith can be imposed with force.The secular idea, which wishes to impose its own conception of religion, declaring that this should remain a private affair, does not even respect the community aspect of freedom; it therefore repudiates something that forms the very essence of religion itself. In substance, to affirm that religion represents exclusively a private affair, is tantamount to saying that God, if He exists, has nothing to do with social life and consequently that faith is something that has little impact on real life. That’s why those who deny the pertinence of God to life assert that God is not really God. For they contest the possibility of His being in rapport with the reality that He himself created. This is undoubtedly one of the possible responses to the religious question posed by man. From a democratic point of view, it can be maintained that a person’s agnostic conviction must be respected just as much as religious convictions, by virtue of the inalienable freedom and dignity of the human person. When the Church insists, through Vatican Council II, on the importance of the defence of religious freedom, she gives precedence to the fact that States are duty-bound to guarantee freedom and cannot therefore impose a view, whatever it be, by granting exclusivity to one religion or any other view of the world. It is clear that a society cannot survive without observing a minimum of values, and without accepting a common denominator.In an age in which so many people are perceiving the signs of a crisis, not only economic and financial, but especially a crisis of values and of the meaning of life, religious education can play a decisive role thanks to the renovating impetus it communicates to people and to culture. How often the Holy Father Benedict XVI and the Servant of God John Paul II have declared that we have a need for a human ecology, in other words an attention to the human that takes into account all the aspects of individual and social life, interior and exterior, emotional and political! It is just for this reason that the Church attracts by her conviction that it is her duty to continue to educate the young, and to do everything possible to offer them a high standard of education. If religion is connate with the life of man, it follows that the teaching of religion must be present wherever the education of the person takes place, namely in schools and in all the public places of the contemporary world. We are convinced that the contribution of religions in general, and that of the Catholic Church in particular, give the life of man a new perspective and a wider horizon, making it truly more human and able to generate a society more rich in solidarity and in hope.