A creative minority

“Pope Benedict exhorts the Christians of Europe, now a minority, to become a creative minority by living the Gospel in practice. It would not be the first time, in its history, that Europe is saved by a creative minority. Only in this way can the “old continent have a future”, declares PAT REILLY with conviction: writing in the last number of “Flourish”, the monthly magazine of the archdiocese of Glasgow, Reilly paints a picture of Europe and of its possible future. First of all, he asks himself whether, faced by the crucial and significant question of a negative birth rate, an ever more ageing Europe really wants to have a future at all. A PYRRHIC VICTORY. “In 1900 – notes Reilly – Western Europeans formed 30% of the world population; in 2025 they will only be 10%: a finding that would seem to confirm the hypothesis of Benedict XVI according to whom Europe is suffering from a strange lack of desire for a future”. According to the author of the article, children, “once considered a source of hope and confidence in life that transcends our own, are now increasingly seen as an obstacle and a burden”, “a threat to the present as if they removed something from our lives”; “potential rivals, competitors, who can be eliminated by preventing their birth”. But that, observes Reilly, is “a Pyrrhic victory” because the result is that the average age of Europeans is progressively rising and those who “speak of the burden of children, once they have retired, will experience the even heavier burden of the lack of them”. WHAT IS EUROPE? That is the question posed by the journalist, who defines Europe “essentially as an historical and cultural concept, a spiritual entity united by common ideals”. Otherwise, he remarks, “it is nothing, and this is precisely the risk Europe runs today”; it is the risk, already prophesied by Paul Valery, of being reduced to a “small and insignificant peninsula at the edge of the Eurasian continent”. Emphasising that “the historical greatness” of Europe “is inseparably interwoven with Christianity”, Reilly says that religion “is a crucial distinctive feature, indeed the main distinctive feature of its civilization”. Today, “in a kind of cultural suicide, modern Europe, in particular its anti-religious culture, has revolted against this religion that has turned her into a great civilization. In an access of hatred towards herself, she has rejected” precisely what it is “to which she owes her very existence”. Yet, notes the author of the article, we are at the same time witnessing a general religious revival in the world; “the most striking testimony of that is the revival of Islam, whose objective is not the modernization of Islam but the islamization of modernity” as a “reaction to the moral relativism and permissiveness” that reign in the West. In Reilly’s view, “this explains why many Asians and almost all Muslims consider Europe materialistic, corrupt, and culturally and socially decadent”. AN EMPTY VASE. If we look beyond its apparently imposing façade, we will see, says Reilly, that “Europe has been undermined by the weakening of its principal component, Christianity, through a deliberate policy of sabotage and betrayal implemented from within. Posing as multiculturalists, the enemies of Christianity” have “fiercely attacked its most important contents: marriage, the family, the dignity of the human person descended from God”. According to the journalist, therefore, “it is no accident that the European decline coincides with the rejection of our religious heritage. For many years – he points out – we have lived in the perfume of an empty vase, dissipating the precious moral capital so painfully and heroically accumulated through the Christian centuries. Hence the present-day moral bankruptcy, the spiritual desert in which we live”. Reilly argues that “the Western triumph in the Cold War has led not to power, but to exhaustion”. “Anti-social forms of behaviour, crime, drugs, family breakdown, spread of abortion, sexual pathologies, permissiveness”: these are the features of the moral decline that is spreading through Europe, a consequence of “wrong choices, taken in the name of technology, nationalism and militarism, but still correctable”. “The religious heritage can be reclaimed and Europe can rise again”: “a new Europe reborn from the energy of creative minorities and extraordinary individuals” is the vision proposed by Reilly, the same that is “exhorted by Benedict XVI”, the only way of “restoring a future to the continent”.