A way for Europe

“It’s up to you, in your own country and in Europe as a whole, to help believers and non-believers alike to rediscover the path of dialogue”. That the message that Benedict XVI entrusted by videomessage to the youth present in the square in front of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris on the evening of 25 March, at the end of the two-day event that marked the launch of the “Cours des Gentils” (Courts of the Gentiles), a project for dialogue between believers and non-believers strongly supported by the Pope himself and promoted by the Pontifical Council of Culture in Paris on 24 and 25 March. (See the previous feature in SIR Europe no.21/2011). “Religions – said the Pope – have nothing to fear from a just secularity, one that is open and allows individuals to live in accordance with what they believe in their own consciences”. The Pope urged the young to build bridges between each other: “Take advantage of this opportunity to discover, deep within your hearts and with serious arguments, the ways which lead to profound dialogue. You have so much to say to one another. Do not turn away from the challenges and issues before you!”.With freedom and rigour. The sessions of the “Cour des Gentils” were hosted in three symbolic places of secular culture in the French capital: the headquarters of UNESCO, the Université Sorbonne and the Institut de France. The final round table was held by contrast in the Collège des Bernardins – former Cistercian student house at the University of Paris – and was followed by a celebration in front of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, during which the Pope addressed his videomessage, transmitted on maxi-screen, to the youth gathered there. Recalling the title of the two-day event, “Lumières, religions, raison commune” (Enlightenment, religions, common reason), Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, emphasized that this dialogue between believers and non-believers “must be conducted with freedom and rigour, without either radical exclusions or easy syncretism, accepting the challenge of penetrating into terra incognita and also landing in distant harbours. None of the interlocutors, however, will emerge from such a serious and fruitful dialogue unscathed”. He ended his address by expressing the following hope: “With simplicity and without great expectations” these dialogues “could offer the luminous silence of reflection and the warmth of hope”. During the round table at the Collège des Bernardins, Cardinal Ravasi entrusted to this “prestigious place of high culture, which has hosted an important address by Benedict XVI, the future of the ‘Cours des Gentils’ in France” and announced that other cities will host similar meetings in the months ahead: including Tirana, Stockholm, Prague, Berlin and Québec.Above all meeting each other. According to Monsignor Francesco Follo, Permanent Observer of the Holy See at UNESCO, dialogue must start out from the recognition of the “possibility and usefulness of speaking of God in public” to “show that religion is rooted in history and in culture” and therefore “should also be heard”. Among the “representative spaces of civil society to be privileged” in this dialogue, Mgr. Follo mentioned “the universities, where ideas are forged, and the seats of intergovernmental organizations”. It is a dialogue, however, that sometimes assumes the character of conflict. Pavel Fischer, former ambassador of the Czech Republic in France, testified to this: he had experienced all the difficulties caused by such conflict at the “time of the Iron Curtain” when, he recalled, his “life as a believer” had “clashed with militant atheism”. In Fischer’s view, “if religion is banned, culture is the area in which it is possible to express the hope that life has a meaning”. The importance of “meeting together”, which “is far more than dialoguing”, was emphasized in turn by Jean Vanier, founder of the Community de L’Arche. “The being who is fully human is not someone who is ruled by fear of others and those who are different, but someone who opens himself to what is different”; that’s why “our culture should not be a closed fortress, but rather a fountain”. The problem between believers and non-believers, he added “is not dialogue but meeting. We need to meet each other not to discuss, but to discover that the other person is a human being searching for the meaning of life, perhaps wounded by the history of the Church or by his/her personal history”. According to Vanier, what matters “is not so much reaching a consensus, as freely sharing our experience of life, our reality, and our discoveries in order to walk together in mutual respect and in a deep desire for truth”.“The transcendence of man”. According to the writer and philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, the essential point of this dialogue is “the transcendence of man”; hence the question: “How to achieve this transcendence? Through culture, science or religion?”. Francois Terre, member of the Académie des sciences morales et politiques, stressed the relation between law and cultural references, such as that “between the Christian jurist and the at times subversive character of the New Testament”. In particular, according to Terre, the Sermon on the Mount “confers on our view of the law a tonality that jurists find disturbing”. Perhaps the point of balance “may be identified in the mediation between the need for justice and the virtue of charity”.