Never as today

“World peace could not be safeguarded without creative efforts equal to the danger that threaten it….”: so opened the Schuman Declaration on 9 May 1950. The European Coal and Steel Community (Ecsc) was founded in April 1951 and then the Treaties of Rome were signed on 25 March 1957. Fifty years have gone by since then and the face and the destiny of the continent have changed. Peace as a goal, freedom as the founding principle, and active solidarity as a method, have achieved reconciliation after centuries of war and devastation, allowed reconstruction, guaranteed independence and democracy, permitted an unprecedented expansion of progress and prosperity, and provided the conditions for the consolidation of democracy. And then Europe set itself a new challenge, that of reunification, after the fall of the Wall: a dramatic breach was recomposed in its essential features.Never before in history had a political project on this scale been realized. It was based on the inclusive and pacifying force of right, which finally replaced the right of force. Today countries are queuing up to join the European Union, agreeing to give up a part of their own national sovereignty (as in the case of many policies and not least that of the single currency) to share resources and future prospects together. Despite that, no wind of enthusiasm is blowing in Europe, and the blame for that is not just the failure to complete the institutional process, which remains an objective of primary importance. For many, this anniversary risks being a kind of celebration of the past. It needs to become, instead, a new departure. We have the cause of Europe at heart not just because of the spiritual and cultural values that it represents for our children and for the whole world, but also because it is the sensible response to the challenges of globalization underway. We are called to resume the meaning of the project. A Eurobarometer survey of 19 December 2006 ascertained the three values in which Europeans most believe: peace (52%), respect for human life (43%) and human rights (41%), followed in turn by democracy and individual liberties. The European project today, it seems to me, means especially embracing three great challenges that also existed at the origins of the Community: energy, which involves both the poor and the rich, both the worker and the industrialist, without evident conflicts of interest between the various groups; demographic ageing which urges the need both for policies to support the birth rate and the family (as the European Union has just begun to do, for the first time in its history, since 2006), and policies for an active third age and social services of general interest; and the development of a new partnership with Africa, not by chance an objective of great neo-colonialist attention by China and new geo-political attention by the Usa. These are challenges for the future: they concern what we will bequeath to our children, rather than what we defend for ourselves. Christians, never as today, are called to make a specific contribution to them, by reviving a necessary sense of the sacred in the culture of our time: the value of life; the dignity of the human person at every stage of life, from conception to natural death; the radical and original difference between man and woman on which the fundamental unit of the human relationship, the family, is based; the sanctity of work; service to the common good; respect for law and education; and guardianship of the creation. Christians need to foster a new awareness of the sacred and a new mission at the service of the world, to be cultivated and taught with holy patience.In acting in this way, we hope that this great heritage will be preserved and invested in our common future.