Cardinal Danneels lists the social ills with which his city is afflicted: loneliness, anonymity, insecurity, alienation… An “acute need for liberation”, “ever deeper and more numerous questions about the meaning of life”, and the “search for a viable balance between person and community”: these are some of the more insistent and characteristic requests that the inhabitants of contemporary cities pose to the Church today. So said Cardinal Godfried Danneels , archbishop of Mechelen-Bruxelles, in an address given in the Austrian capital on the presentation in Vienna on Saturday 4 May of the city mission in four European capitals: Brussels, Paris, Lisbon and Vienna. Below we give a few excerpts from his address. Faith returns to the cities. Today emphasized the Belgian archbishop more than half of the population lives in the cities and the “rural areas are no longer the place for the incubation of the Christian faith” as they were in the past. The faith is returning to the urban areas “just as in the early days of Christianity”; it’s here, in the big cities, maintains Danneels, “that the future of Christianity will be played out. So we need to focus on the cities, where “cultures have been developed”, where a “new concept of community life and a new image of man”, together with a new language, have been formed: it’s here that the inculturation of the Gospel must take place. The city has become the centre of life”. The temptations of the urban apostle. “Fear and loss of faith said Danneels are the great temptations of the urban apostle today”. That’s why it’s important to know how to “identify the pitfalls clearly” and foster “yet greater faith in the irresistible force of the seed that is the Word of God”. The archbishop of Brussels also urged that the importance of the “group” and the support of the community be not underestimated, and recommended that the mission be prepared in such a way that it be “able to master the vocabulary, grammar and mentality of the urban population”. The ills of the city. The inhabitant of the city, in Cardinal Danneels’ view, “does not seek answers in religion”. His ills remain visible: “loneliness and anonymity, the need for security and community, mobility and alienation, and, not least, his difficulty of finding a place in society”. So “the search for a cure” is strongly felt in him. A whole market has been created to cater to it: a “market in the search for meaning, an open market, where numerous candidates, each with his own remedy, are present”. Search for meaning. The search for “a viable balance between person and community, between the condition of being alone and living in a group, is strongly felt in cities in particular”: what is sought said Danneels is a model of living in society that strikes a balance between life as a single person and life as a member of a community. But “being free” of every bond and of every moral obligation does not make man happy. Testifying to this are the “numbers of suicides which should not be underestimated” because they are the ‘consequence of being free’, when a person no longer knows why, or for what reason, he should bother to go on living”. Lack of cohesion in the social fabric. “The city added the Belgian cardinal is also the place of a lingua franca incapable of giving a name to problems or understanding how they should be solved: a linguistic confusion that, as in the city of Babel, involves us all”. This is a fact, says Danneels, that is “well understood by the sects that often shamelessly exploit the numerous needs of man” and, by their great tendency “to personalize and individualize”, offer metropolitan man “an antidote to the pain of anonymity”. Also for this reason, “evangelization is more than ever necessary”. Patrizia Collesi
