We’re part of Europe

One of the symptoms of the crisis of Christian culture is the contemporary debate on the display of Christian symbols in public places. It’s as if a principle entailed a debate on the very idea of religious freedom. From a specific standpoint – that can be described as free – public religion represents a threat to individual freedoms and to social apparatus, differentiated according to secular criteria. According to this approach, religion, which is granted the status of religion accompanied by individual redemption, tends to be confined to the private sphere. Citizens are granted the complete freedom to opt for their religion and the related practices, provided it is confined to the private domain and that it does not threaten similar rights enjoyed by other members of society. The matter at stake isn’t only the privatization of confessional belonging. Indeed, it regards privatization of the religious phenomenon tout court. The State’s ideological stance is called to be neutral while the public arena must remain “naked”. But neutrality in this case must not be understood as impartiality, namely, being equally distanced from all confessions. In fact, it refers to the acknowledgement that the State must remain “blind” to the existence of religion as a social phenomenon. Indeed, it is a question of establishing whether the ongoing debates on the “nudity” of the public forum focus on religious freedom understood as the possibility of being free from religion and therefore having the right to silence, to preserving the secret on religion, the right not to meet on one’s path any expression of religious life, or whether the subject is the fact of being free for religion, namely, making a free religious choice and practising one’s faith also in the public sphere. Confessional neutrality, along with the preference for a negative aspect of religious freedom, implies the attempt to “neutralize” the public sphere – from which – with the imperative of the defence of religious freedom – all religious symbols are eliminated: crucifix, Decalogue, Islamic chadors; while church-bells are doomed to silence. A few days ago I visited the Roman Forum: the following phrase is engraved in the marble, “We are part of you”. This is much more likely to be a reference to Christianity than to something outside Europe. Cathedrals, parish churches, churches in cemeteries and crucifixes on the streets prove it. Crucifixes remind us: “How great must be the value of man to the eyes of the Creator if he deserved such a great Redeemer”! And since the pillar of European culture is the personalist vision of the human person, crucifixes are also a reminder that we are European. In 1990, in Prague liberated from Communism, John Paul II said: “What would have been of the admirable beauty of the ‘one hundred-tower city’ without the profile of a cathedral or without one of the thousand gems of Christian culture. What would have been of this nation if everything that drew – and continues drawing inspiration from Christian faith had been excluded or forgotten! (…) If you were made deaf and blind to these values, to Christ, to the Bible, to the Church, you would be alien to your own culture. You would lose the sensitivity and the key to understand the many values inscribed in philosophy, literature, music, architecture, plastic arts and in all the fields of the spirit of your own nation, and of the European tradition as a whole”. We are part of you – is the cry we hear from Cathedral bells…