” “The return of God” “

Nietzsche, Marx and Freud thought the twentieth century would mark the death of God. Malraux, on the other hand, predicted the re-emergence of the religious question in the twenty first century. At the beginning of this, third millennium, God is returning: what will be the form of this “reprise”? That of the kamikaze bombers of 11 September or, rather, that of the young people who peacefully participate in the great events of the faith? What will be the future of religions in the world? These are the themes discussed in the September edition of “Dossiers & Documents”, the monthly in-depth supplement of the French daily “Le Monde”. A “new spirituality”. “Rather than by the two extremes of the ‘death’ or ‘return’ of God, this century seems to be characterised by the great variety of religious faiths, both in poor and weak societies as well as in rich and developed ones”. So reads this edition of the supplement, edited by Alain Binet and comprising a number of essays by the Vatican correspondent of “Le Monde”, Henri Tincq. A century that is witnessing the decline “of religion conceived as a system of dogmatic and normative affirmations; the persistence of fundamentalism and sects; and the spread of the need for a ‘transcendence without God’, in other words the search for spirituality in oriental and esoteric traditions”. In this panorama Judaism, Christianity and Islam “stand as storehouses of symbols and meaning; religious practices continue, but their regularity declines and moral norms are ever less accepted”. The Christian Churches. More than two billion faithful in the world, most of them in the countries of the South. As for Catholics (a little over a billion), 35% are from the industrialised world, while 65% live in Africa (117 million), Latin America (454 million) and Asia (108 million). What are the greatest challenges? “The advance of secularisation in the West; the drop in vocations in Europe and North America; the voracious competition of Evangelical Churches and sects in the great metropolises of the Third World”; the threat “of extremist Islam which is expanding in Asia and Africa; the obstructions to ecumenical dialogue with Orthodox and Protestants”. In particular, the question of “sacramental life” remains open with the Protestant Church (416 million faithful divided among the various expressions). “For Protestants” says Tincq, this question “does not have the central position that it holds in the Catholic Church”. As for the Orthodox, 214 million, there remains “the divergence on the very nature of the mission of the Pope of Rome”. The faces of Islam. With its more than one billion one hundred million followers, Islam is in continuous expansion, despite the fact that its contradictory countenance is marked at one and the same time by moderate and fundamentalist tendencies behind which “there also lurks the desire to bring together and mobilise an entire ‘third world’ of the frustrated, victims of a relationship of ‘mimetic rivalry’ with the West”, observed the philosopher René Girard following the attacks of 11 September. What dialogue is possible? “One that knows how to treasure the lesson of events, that examines reciprocal knowledge, that is aware that neither Christianity nor Islam are monolithic blocks, that encourages criticism: in a word, a dialogue that makes every effort to save what is best in both traditions”, observes Tincq. The attraction of the East. Hinduism with its 800 million adherents, together with Buddhism and the traditional religions of China (another 800 million faithful), attract an ever greater number of Westerners. There are, says Tincq, three million Buddhists in Europe, of whom 550,000 in France. They represent an “average public” of teachers, professional people and office workers who have nothing extravagant or eccentric about them. What attraction does it have? Tincq reflects that – having overcome the simplistic definition of past decades that reduced it to “a religion without God, linked to a kind of search for the exotic” – Buddhism presents “a rigorous discipline based on non-violence and respect for the environment, a richness of speculative thought and an internal coherence that fascinates people today”. The risk, warns Tincq, is that of syncretism, “in France today it is not strange to meet neo-Buddhists who still define themselves as Christians”. Giovanna Pasqualin Traversa