The way to the future

European culture risks disintegration if, “preoccupied by its secularism”, “it grows deaf to the great message that comes to it from the Christian faith and from its wisdom”. So says the text of the speech that Benedict XVI was supposed to have pronounced during his visit to the University of Rome “La Sapienza, planned for 17 January for the inauguration of the academic year but later cancelled due to the protests “of a decidedly minority group of professors and students”: a demonstration that the Italian Bishops’ Conference had defined, in a statement, as one of “anti-democratic intolerance and cultural narrow-mindedness”. We publish (in our own translation) the final part of the Pope’s speech.”In modern times new dimensions of knowledge have been opened up. In the universities these are especially being promoted in two major fields: first, in the natural sciences, which have been developed on the basis of the connection between experimentation and the presumed rationality of matter; second, in the historical and humanistic sciences, in which man seeks to better understand himself by scrutinizing the mirror of his history and clarifying the dimensions of his nature. In this development not only has a vast dimension of knowledge and power been opened to humanity, but the knowledge and recognition of the rights and dignity of man have grown, and for this we can only be grateful. But man’s journey can never be said to be finished and the danger of a relapse into inhumanity can never be simply averted: as we see in the panorama of our history today! Today, the danger of the Western world – to speak just of this – is that man, precisely in consideration of the greatness of his knowledge and power, may surrender before the question of truth. And this means at the same time that reason, in the end, may yield to the pressure of interests and to the appeal of utilitarianism, and be forced to recognize utility as the ultimate criterion. Or to put it from the point of view of the structure of the university: the danger exists that philosophy, no longer feeling itself able to fulfil its real task, may degenerate into positivism: and that theology with its message aimed at reason, be relegated to the private sphere of a group, large or small. But if reason – urged by its presumed purity – grows deaf to the great message that comes to it from the Christian faith and from its wisdom, it dries up like a tree whose roots no longer reach down to the waters that give it life. It loses the courage to seek truth, and thus becomes not greater but smaller. Applied to our European culture this means: if it wants merely to construct itself on the basis of the circle of its own reasoning and of what at the moment convinces it, and if – preoccupied by its secularism – it cuts itself off from the roots from which it lives, it does not then become more reasonable and pure, but disintegrates and breaks into pieces.What has the Pope to do or to say in the university? Undoubtedly he must not try to impose the faith on others in an authoritarian way: faith can only be donated in freedom. Beyond his ministry as Pastor in the Church, and on the basis of the intrinsic nature of this pastoral ministry, it is his task to quicken and keep alive the sensibility for truth; to constantly invite reason to dedicate itself to the search for what is true, for what is good, for God and, in this journey, to urge it to glimpse the useful lights that have sprung up along the history of the Christian faith and thus to perceive Jesus Christ as the Light that illuminates history and helps us to find the way to the future”.