Profound unity

When John Paul II first said that “the Church must learn to breathe again with its two lungs, its Eastern one and its Western one”, at the Angelus for the Feast day of Saints Cyril and Methodius in 1985, I was “on the other side” of the Iron curtain, in Warsaw, darkened by the martial law of general Jaruzelski. But I was in Rome on December 22 1989, when, after the fall of the Wall of Berlin, in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia, His Holiness said that “walls are clearly artificial and unnatural”.In 1989 John Paul II spoke of “a common European house” erected on the “humus” of “osmosis and the sharing of values, different yet complementary”. Now that the European Union includes 27 member states, pope Wojtyla will be proclaimed Blessed. Everything appears to be in its place. But what kind of Europe is preparing to homage a pope that spoke of values, while this same Europe appears to fear even the word “Christianity?” It could seem a bitter twist. Only a few years of technological development and related wellbeing were enough to overlook the importance of values that weren’t those pertaining to money-coined profit. John Paul II described a “peaceful Europe, irradiating civilization”. But it appears that our continent is on the verge of relinquishing Christianity – despite the Pontiff’s warnings – “as if it were a traveling companion now tuned into a stranger”. Our continent appears to have discarded “the intellectual and spiritual heritage that shaped European identity across the centuries”. When Poland was yet to become an EU member country, and when there was the courage to demand freedom, drawing from that very European “intellectual and spiritual” heritage, freedom still possessed inestimable value. Today, “political correctness” includes turning a blind eye to the persecution of Christians in the world. The same blindness that affected men and women that were cut off from the free world by an Iron curtain and were sent to die in Stalin’s gulags. Indeed, this very same “blindness” prevented to see millions of Jews who perished in the gas chambers. Europeans resemble their own avatars. In a virtual world they fight against a non-existing enemy, increasingly distancing themselves from reality. In Santiago de Compostela, on November 9 1982, John Paul II said: “I, Bishop of Rome and Pastor of the Universal Church, send you from Santiago a cry full of love: Find yourself. Be yourself. Discover your origins. Rekindle your roots. Revive the authentic values which made glorious and profitable your presence in other continents. Rebuild your spiritual unity, in an atmosphere of total respect to other religions and to the genuine freedom. Give Caesar to what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God. Do not be proud of your achievements to the point of forgetting its potential negative consequences. Do not get depressed by the quantitative loss of your greatness in the world or by the social and cultural crisis that are affecting you now. You can still be the light of civilization and encourage the progress of the world. The rest of the continents look at you and also expect the same response Santiago gave to Christ: “I Can”. Do we have reasons to believe that just as in 1978 the newly-elected Polish Pope had spoken righteous words, the upcoming proclamation of his sanctity will restore bygone wisdom? An answer was already provided by cardinal Camillo Ruini, in his speech at the LUMSA University in Rome on May 18 2010. For this Pope, “in love with his Polish homeland – the cardinal said – nation wasn’t an exclusive and contrapositive concept. Rather, it was an open an living unit that is self-fulfilled only within the large family of nations”. Cardinal Ruini added that in those days, when the fragile European unity was being put to the test “I bore witness to the belief, engrained in John Paul II’s experience of faith and culture, that Europe possesses a profound, historical and spiritual unity. A unity that is stronger than the manifold conflicts that characterized its historical development and that is part and parcel of Europe’s mission”. There still is hope.