God today

An “important initiative that tackles one of the great issues that have always fascinated and interrogated the human spirit”: that’s how Benedict XVI defines the international conference “God today: with him or without him changes everything”, which opened in Rome on Thursday 10 December, in the message sent to the President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco (complete texts on Agensir.it) which has promoted it through its own service of the “cultural project”. The Pope affirms right at the start of his message that “the question of God is central also for our own age, in which there is often a tendency to reduce man to a single dimension, the ‘horizontal’ one, considering that an opening to the Transcendent is irrelevant for his life. The relation with God, on the contrary, is essential for the life of humanity and, as I have had occasion to affirm many times, the Church and every Christian indeed have the task of making God present in this world, and of trying to open man’s access to God”. “The present international event – added Benedict XVI – is placed in this perspective. The breadth of approach to the important issue that characterises this meeting will permit a rich and wide-ranging response to the question of God to be traced, but will especially be a stimulus for a deeper reflection on the place occupied by God in the culture and life of our time”. Man is made for the truth. “The programme of this intensive conference is inspired by the typically human and profoundly Christian need to seek the Truth”, said Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco on Thursday evening in Rome, in his introductory address to the international conference on “God today”. “Seen from outside the Catholic viewpoint – said the cardinal – this enterprise will seem vain and illusory to many. We, on the contrary, remain firm in our conviction that man is made for the Truth, and that his groping journey through life does not contradict, indeed reinforces, the need for an open and wide-ranging search for the profound significance of living and acting”. According to Bagnasco, “this is, besides, one of the features that most markedly distinguishes man from the animal and from the machine. Especially in the Western world, the question of God is excluded from the usual approaches of culture”. The President of the CEI then continued: “Marginalized and psychologically removed, it is present however – insuppressible as it is in the depth of the human heart – under false colours. That’s why there is growing interest in the paranormal, in the occult, and in nebulous forms of esoteric religiosity. Yet in all these forms the dignity of human reason is mortified and defeated”. Cardinal Bagnasco ended by affirming that “the Christian truth knows only the persuasive force of the good reasons that support it and the disinterested love that proposes it”.Believers, atheists, agnostics. “The question of God inevitably involves the person who poses it, given that is has to do with the sense and direction of our life. Therefore even the response to the question ‘does it make any difference whether God exists or not?’ profoundly changes, depending on whether those answering it are believers or non-believers, whether atheists or agnostics”: that’s one of the initial passages from the opening address given at the conference “God today” by Cardinal Camillo Ruini, chairman of the CEI’s “Committee for the cultural project”. “Genuine believers – he said – reply by saying that the difference not only exists but is great and radical… for them in fact God is the origin, the be-all and end-all of man and the universe. Non-believers, on the contrary, may differ in the way they reply to the question, depending on whether they consider faith in God to be negative, positive or irrelevant for the life of man and of society, but properly speaking they refer only to our faith in God, not to the reality itself of God, given that according to them God does not exist, or at any rate we cannot know anything of him, even if he did exist”. “There does not even exist, in this regard [being believers or not], a space of neutrality that may consist in taking refuge in an agnostic position” – said Ruini: “agnosticism is indeed theoretically arguable, but far less concretely viable. In practice we are forced to choose between two alternatives, already identified by Pascal: either to live as if God did not exist, or to live as if God did exist and were the decisive reality of our existence. If we act according to the first alternative – pointed out the cardinal – we adopt in effect an atheist, and not just an agnostic, position; if, on the contrary, we opt for the second alternative, we adopt a believing position: the question of God is therefore inescapable”. According to Ruini “St. Augustine’s axiom especially holds good in this regard: ‘we truly know only what we truly love’. In our approach to God we cannot therefore enclose ourselves in any rationalistic narrow-mindedness”.