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Welcome home your home just as much as ours! Here we are finally together at home, in re-found unity. Truly, it’s a great opportunity to sing the European anthem: “Oh joy!”, in this month of May 2004, which marks the end of Yalta and the second fall of the iron curtain. For months now the media have been trying to help us discover the new members not of Europe (for these countries have been European for over a thousand years!), but of the European Union, which finds an increased legitimacy in this. They have not disguised the doubts or the perplexities. For this enlargement is a considerable challenge: what was difficult for a 15-member EU will be even more so with 25 members. What kind of Europe do we want? Is it really the same for everyone? Our conceptions are very different: they range from the Europe of the Baltic to that of the Mediterranean, from that of the Anglo-Saxon world to that of the Latin countries. For example, various new member countries of the EU are hoping to find in it, first and foremost, a guarantee for their sovereignty and, beyond that, for their identity, which they have had to defend and conquer step by step. In the West, the draft constitutional treaty is threatened by the idea that the power of the Union ought to interfere as little as possible with the market: in this way, the planned referendum in the United Kingdom risks signing the death warrant of the political Europe. These differences of conception between the various countries about the European project will be difficult to overcome. Differences between citizens, like difference between political families, are legitimate: as Christians, we are not called to defend a given political project rather than another. On the other hand, we are called to promote the fundamental values of the European spirit: the dignity of the human person, solidarity, the clear distinction between politics and religion. It is in this that our specific contribution to the unity of our continent today consists, just as it did in the past. If possible, let us try to do so better, recalling that there have been many positive but also many dark sides in the past! To make this contribution we have a point of strength in our favour: the brotherhood without frontiers that we profess in the name of our faith, a brotherhood that we have maintained through the dark years with our brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe and developed further over the last fifteen years. In this historic moment, our brothers of the new countries of the EU are holding out to us the gift of three essential attitudes: the courage of the faith, capable of a painful rupture in the face of a society that does not share our convictions; a deeper spirituality, that roots the faith in the inwardness of each individual; and an unquenchable hope. As far as we are concerned, the contribution we can offer is the experience of a European society that, no matter how secularised, is not hostile to us: there are so many men and women “of good will”, who do not share our faith, but share our values. The Spirit blows where it wills, even outside the confines of the visible Gospel, sowing the seeds of the Kingdom in every direction. Europe is seeking for meaning. Europe, however, will only listen to us if our words and our actions bear witness with competence and modesty, with significance and imagination, to the hopes and fears of our time. The challenge that we all have in common, from one side of the continent to the other, is that of making the Gospel living and credible in Europe today.
