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What is, what ought to be the specific role of Catholic intellectuals in the process of the unification of Europe? What guidelines have come, or may come, from “Catholic culture”? What prospects for “Christian roots”? What needs to be done to ensure that Catholic intellectuals speak with a common voice? These are some of the questions posed by a commemoration of Jacques Maritian thirty years after his death. Paul VI said of Jacques Maritain that he was “a master in the art of thinking, living and praying”. The French philosopher remains one of the great masters of the last century, one of the Catholic intellectuals who, though his writings and through his public stances, was always present in the debates of his time and had a significant influence in many European countries. He was “a philosopher in the city”, as was emphasized at the recent conference organized in Rome by the Saint-Louis de France Cultural Centre in Rome, founded by Maritain himself in 1945 when he was French ambassador to the Holy See, and by the Jacques Maritain International Institute, founded in 1974, a year after his death. In our time, so poor in real thinkers, a recovery of Maritain’s thought would be useful, because it would illuminate the road we need to take. Giorgio La Pira saw in Maritain his “polar star” and wrote in 1976: “our whole life, spiritual and cultural, during these last thirty years, is linked to, rooted in Maritain’s whole work: in his prayer, spirituality, and cultural life”. The French philosopher Etienne Borne said that Maritain’s political philosophy is a philosophy in the full sense of the word and this philosophy is a form of humanism: a personalist humanism”. For, when the world fails to rid itself of barbarities, Maritain affirmed that every political project must be rooted in humanism. In particular he taught that democracy must not be limited to some rules of how it should function, nor be reduced to election times. It must, he insisted, be built around the person and be inspired by a social and ethical renewal of “living together” on a national and planetary scale. He always emphasized the centrality of culture in the construction of modern society: in his last book, Approches sans entraves,(1973), he pledged his support to political, cultural and religious meetings, without obstacles, in a universalistic perspective. In his inaugural address to the second general Conference of UNESCO held in Mexico, in November 1947, in which he represented France, before the representatives of 48 nations, Maritain defended the idea of universal cooperation, the search for the common good between nations, and international social justice. To the fatality of war he opposed the brotherly love transmitted by the Gospel that awakens the human conscience. For Europe he defended a federal solution, the only one capable, in his view, of guaranteeing genuine unity between peoples separated by a tragic history. Maritain was a Catholic philosopher of democracy and the State, a philosopher of the arts, education, theology and metaphysics. He rightly asserted that his work was “the greatest modern synthesis of the Catholic understanding” of the world. But he did not remain confined to intellectual speculation. He was never afraid of getting involved in the city of man, of tackling the difficulties of his time, in response to totalitarianism, anti-Semitism, war, and the threats to democracy and peace. That’s why his thought is so much alive today, and so actual for Europe.
