Overcoming emptiness” “

“Our society, strongly characterised by all the means of communication, is, paradoxically, a society in which genuine human relations are becoming ever more difficult”. This observation, contained in the message sent by Benedict XVI, was taken on board by the 3800 participants at the 80th Semaine Sociale in France, held in Paris from 25 to 27 November, on the theme “Trasmitting: sharing values, arousing freedom”. The Pope’s diagnosis was also recalled by Michel Camdessus , president of the Semaines sociales, on opening the debate, in which philosophers, psychologists, educators, theologians and politicians intervened. PASSAGE OF THE WITNESS. The sociologist ROBERT ROCHEFORT, commissioned to present the theme of this year’s Semaine Sociale, summed up the opinions gathered through a wide-ranging survey by affirming that “our society no longer has control of transmission”. He described this transmission no longer as education or formation, but as “passage of the witness, who respects the freedom of the person who receives it, a passage that takes place in the interpersonal relation”, causing a change in both parties. Transmission – added Rochefort – means combining the four elements that compose the scheme of transmission: the two parties involved, the message and the way in which the recipient sees the application of the message by the person who transmits it”, in other words “his coherence, his credibility and his exemplariness”. CRISIS OF TRANSMISSION. According to the philosopher and sociologist EDGARD MORIN, the problem of transmission depends on the fact that “the knowledge dispensed by the channels of information, or the education imparted by a school system that fails to achieve an inter-disciplinary approach, do not provide us with the proper tools to recognise and understand the complexity of the modern world or to confront the unexpected”. In this complex world in which we live, said the journalist and writer JEAN-CLAUDE GILLEBAUD, we must “overcome stupor and lamentation, overcome hypocrisy and believing what we are told, overcome the emptiness inside us and rediscover the force of conviction, because it is when we have a weak and immature credo that we become intolerant”. If the countries of Western Europe are already familiar with this “crisis of transmission”, in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe this crisis was caused by the Communist regime which, by a radical breach with the past, replaced the ancient values with those of ideology. This operation of traumatic substitution, the collapse of the regime and the successive phases down to the present day were described, in turn, by the Croatian sociologist NEVEN SIMAC who declared that “the abuse of the political system in the Communist period caused its death” and stressed “the pressing need for the rehabilitation of politics”. The Polish intellectual, engineer and philosopher STEFAN WOLKANOWICZ, for his part, urged that “dialogue between the Europeans be a dialogue between cultures, without which even economic collaboration will be difficult”. BUT WHAT SHOULD WE TRANSMIT? The crisis of transmission and how to overcome it was widely debated during the three-day Semaine Sociale. Nor was the fundamental question of what we should transmit ignored. According to the psychoanalyst and philosopher MAURICE BELLET, “what we must transmit is life itself. It is neither a thing, nor a form of knowledge, we must transmit, but a relation that passes from generation to generation, because what man hungers for most is the hunger for love”. “This hunger can only be sated by the Gospel – Bellet continued – which is not a word of love, but love itself, benevolence, the critical watershed between what is human and what is not: the Gospel is not judgement but compassion”. Such a vision of the faith was confirmed by the German Jesuit and theologian CHRI STOPH THEOBALD, who enriched it by analysing what we have been taught about the transmission of Jesus Christ himself, he who taught and transmitted as he passed, the “passeur” of Galilee. “Christ – observed Theobald – teaches us that there is no human life without faith” and that “we cannot transmit life without faith in life”. Michel Camdessus referred to this image of the “passeur” in his conclusions. “The role of ‘passeurs’ awaits us – he said – in which we must maintain our faith, revive our hope, contribute together to create freedom of citizenship, and foster future generations that regard political life, and get involved in it, as service. In all this the Church has a particularly significant role to play, with the opening to dialogue with the other religions and the formation of witnesses engaged in the communion of hearts. Only in this way can Christianity become a religion of the future of religions”.