A great breath of air

If we don’t want a brazier to go out, we need to kindle its flames with a great breath of air. The same goes for Europe. There are the treaties, the legislative norms, but if we limit ourselves to these, the enthusiasm of the fire lit up in the hearts of the “Fathers of Europe” will be extinguished. Europe was made by living human beings, in its origins, as at the time of the Treaty of Rome. Europe will never exist if it does not already exist now. It is up to journalists, especially, to revive our current everyday reality by imbuing it with the centuries-old vitality of Europe. It is up to the Christian communities to re-animate the wonderful spirituality that has given life and spiritual energy to Europe, from the Rhenish mystics to the mystics of Spain, from the Irish monks to the monks of the Meteora on Mount Athos, and so many others. Europe will not have a body if it does not have a spirit. It has progressively expanded in space and in time. It has gone through many stages, advances and recessions, in the course of the centuries, but at the same time a certain unity has been created over the centuries which is still being translated today in the arts, in literature, in ways of living, thinking and conceiving the divine creation. It is not by making rhetorical speeches that this richness can be considered alive. It is not simply by describing all the monuments, sites, humanistic and spiritual currents of our past that we will revive it. In the course of twenty centuries, Europe was a living being, endowed with a wonderful personality that was developed in various fields, and enriched with the many-sided contribution of those who were probably invaders or barbarians, but who are now Europeans by full entitlement. This richness we must restore to our contemporaries, through sites, monuments and artistic creations. We must give it new life, not in the way in which we visit a museum; men and women still need to bear in themselves this wonderful living heritage and to translate it into their daily life. And apart from all the sites and the architectural monuments of Europe, the media and men of faith must offer a return to the origins. Europe was at the confluence of so many living waters. Many peoples wish to affirm their own national identity as part of this, and it is up to us to help revive it, not in memory, but as a living reality.The Europeans of this twenty-first century are beings who live in hope. Flowers rapidly wilt when they are cut and placed in a vase, however beautiful they are in their harmonious arrangement. Flowers are renewed, they bud afresh, when the lymph rises from their roots. The same goes for Europe. It’s this we hope to hear from all the protagonists of the anniversary of the Treaty of Rome: the administrators, the journalists, the Churches. May they all speak of the utopia of the founding Fathers and of Europe, so that we may rediscover the enthusiasm, the convictions and the faith of those who were more than just signatories of a treaty.