The force of dialogue

Follow ample excerpts of the opening address delivered by Andrea Riccardi, Founder of the Community of Sant’Egidio on the theme “Seventy Years after the Outbreak of the Second World War” in the framework of the Congress “Faiths and Cultures in Dialogue” – Krakow, September 6-8.The horror of war is the greatest lesson given to our era, a lesson worth meditating upon. War causes the death of all that had previously united peoples, turning them into each other’s enemy. However, from the abyss of war and from its utter rejection contemporary humanism was born – or reborn, creating – as Benedict XVI said – “a culture and lifestyle full of love, solidarity and esteem for the other”. After the war Europeans cherished the yearning to share a common future, and never again be at war with one another. From the ordeal of war the ideas of liberty were born again. Those very ideas led to the end of colonialism and liberated Eastern Europe after almost half a century of communist winter. No political culture, no vision of the future, no humanism will ever fail to recall the ordeal by fire of World War II. If humankind is forgetful, it produces ephemeral and insubstantial policies with no future, imprisoned in the fireworks of a media-driven world. Men and women who suffered the rage of war are often teachers and witnesses of peace, seeking those elements that peoples share. John Paul II, who was born in 1920, was a son of War. Having survived so much evil, he felt the responsibility to communicate the horror of war, to state that mankind shares the same future, which is not mutual abuse. It is peace.The power of mediocre and short-sighted persons is to ridicule and wreck great men’s visions. These persons laughed at John Paul II when, during the Cold War, he envisioned Europe’s extension from the Atlantic Ocean to the Urals. In 1989 they stood in awe. John Paul II was a firm believer. For many of us he was a saint, not an irenic relativist. With unshakeable faith he believed that dialogue was indispensable for peace, to create a civilization of coexistence.Our world has lost its loving quest for unity. We see it in the scepticism towards Europe. We perceive it in the exaltation of patriotic stances and in the resurgence of nationalistic feelings. We feel it in the mistrust of foreigners, viewed as if they were a threat. It is revealed in the scarce concern for Christian unity propounded by the righteous, such as Paul VI, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras, and Russian Metropolitan Nikodim. Without a quest for unity, the globalized world is thrown into disorder and is dangerously fragmented.By being satisfied with ourselves and with our own small world (that may also be religious), by being content with spiritual shallowness, the passion for unity is extinguished. Fundamentalism legitimates despise with aggressive self-sufficiency. The passion for dialogue is soured, and an art is lost that is dearly necessary in our contemporary world, where different peoples live together and no country is self-sufficient. Both at local and global level our everyday life requires dialogue. Our globalised world – and its infinite facets – need unity … With dialogue human divides are patiently healed, and peoples’ destinies are recovered. Dialogue reveals the mystery of unity which global world events conceal. Dialogue wipes out the demons of hatred, contempt and war.