With open eyes

Spe salvi, the new encyclical of Benedict XVI, which enlighted the period of the Advent for many people, is a hymn to Christian hope which continues in the year which has just begun. It is a message that is also addressed to European culture, this culture which has separated – some would say liberated – itself from God. For this reson the Pope recalled the great illusions of modernity which have led to the unprecedented human tragedies of the past century, and he clearly traces its European itinerary from Seventeenth-century Illuminism to Marxism. The Pope closely examines Marxism which was aimed at bringing to the fore a new world also in Europe “but which left desolating destruction behind it”. The reason for this is that Marx “forgot that man still remains a man. He forgot man and forgot his freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains freedom. He thought that with a sound economy everything would have been for the best. His real mistake is materialism: man in fact isn’t only the product of economic conditions, he can be healed only externally with favourable economic conditions”. We are perfectly aware, as stated in the social doctrine of the Church, that collective property of production means has no guarantee of economic and social effectiveness. On the contrary, it leads to coercion, to the culture of suspicion, and lastly to dictatorship which despises the human person. A large part of Europe still bears its marks. “Science does not redeem man”, said Benedict XVI, “man is redeemed through love”, the love for God which leads to fraternal love for men, that is trust, cooperation, solidarity, which paves the way to the accomplishment of the individual. The pope underlines the ambiguity or the ambivalence, according to Jacques Maritain, of the notion of progress: “it undoubtedly offers new possibilities for goodness, but also leads to abysses of evil”: the progress from the sling to the meta-bomb” in a certain sense. Because also for Europe this is a progress with no purpose, which goes around in circles, because it is aimed at ignoring Jesus and the Cross, that is salvation and hope, Christ who gives the key to the meaning of our existence. Technical progress has never been an ethical progress. With this new encyclical, the pope tells the post-modern world that Marx is dead, but Christian hope is not. Through the examples of lives dedicated to Christ, as the Sudanese slave Bakhita or the Vietnamese Cardinal Van Thuan who spent 13 years in the terrible Communist prisons a strong message is put through which is at the same time spiritual, social and political. Since, as the Jesuit father and theologian – quoted in the encyclical – Henri de Lubac said, Christian dogmas lead have their impact on society. It isn’t a question of denying or refusing progress and the goods deriving from progress, but to refuse of turning them into a new religion, to keep our eyes wide open in order never to forget God and man, so that progress may remain human progress. To reintroduce God to the men of our times and to our Europe: this is the intent of the new and intense message of the Pope. This is the urgent need of a world which, by forgetting it, is paving the way to dehumanization.