In need of hope

“Welcoming others means welcoming a presence. It means encountering a life-nurturing word”. Jean-Charles Tenreiro, vice president of CIMADE (ecumenical mutual support service), President of the Reformed Church in France for l’Ile de France, delivered the opening address on the final day of the 85th Social Weeks of France titled “Migrants, building a future together” (Paris, November 26-28). “Welcoming others – Tenreiro added – means giving a name and a face to others, knowing that we’re journeying together towards a promised land. It’s not a utopia. It’s the very promise that God made to Abraham and Sara, which He kept”.”Others are the glance, the mirror, the face, the passage, the new resource, the knowledge, the movement, the conflict, the mystery”, Msgr. Gabriel de Comane, archbishop of Russian Orthodox Churches in Eastern Europe thus described the others, and underlined that “no ideology, no border, no State reason can justify discrimination”. “The love for others is more important than prayer and mortification”, he added.Card. André Vingt Trois, archbishop of Paris, president of the French Bishops’ Conference, asked: “How many men and women would like to be liberated from the demon of hunger, disease, humiliation…? How many men and women turn to Christ to be liberated? As Christians, as the repositories of the promise that God made to Abraham, how could we refrain from directing our glance towards the suffering humanity and indicate them the answer that is Christ?”.Multiculturalism is not a danger. “For me, the so-called ‘danger’ of multiculturalism is an illusion. Not because multiculturalism is a panacea”, but because “it is a fact”. The real danger “is not multiculturalism but what anthropologists call deculturation”. Tzvetan Todorov, historian and philosopher born in Bulgaria, resident in France since 1963, believes that multiculturalism is “the distinctive trait of modern societies” and must therefore be viewed “not as an ideological conflict” but as “cultures getting to know one another”. “When a strong, traditional religion is absent – he explained – we are led to ask ourselves what could ensure the community’s necessary cohesion. The answer often is ‘us’: the things we share and our differences”. Today, more than ever, he added, we are witnessing “developing relations between distant peoples” that also entail “closures, even more radical that those experienced in recent times”. This leads to “xenophobia, an age-old reflex that we believed no longer existed”. The philosopher described it as a “rather primitive” outlook, against which “French society has built a strong resistance”, even though “it is a widespread hostile approach”. According to Todorov, proclaiming cultural homogeneity would be “useless and desperate”. As relates to the relations with Islam and Muslim immigrants, the philosopher urged to distinguish between “the obligation of complying with the law, which makes no exception”, and “cultural identity”. Commenting on the burqua he added: “In the debate regarding the ban on the veil at school my impression was that the legislative provisions were too extreme. But I was proved wrong: the law was well-received, without problems. For me, the story of the burqa is different. Raising a national debate on this theme appeared to me as a way to deal with secondary problems in order not to face the main ones”.Opposite thoughts and shared commitments. A rare, although not unique episode in the history of the Social Weeks of France, occurred with the lively protests against a speaker in the round table of November 28 on the government’s migration policies Henri Guaino, who had been invited to convey the position of the government. “An opinion – remarked Jérôme Vignon, the president of the Social Week of France – which inevitably clashed against those who address the problems of immigrants on a daily basis, causing inevitable tensions”. Other speakers in the round table were Jacques Barrot, Hélène Flautre, Yannick Blanc, Assane Bà. Speakers conveyed two distant stands: those advocating openness to migration flows, and those demanding the enforcement of strict regulations. “The political realm – said the director of Etudes François Ernenwein – has the task of identifying the just compromise. But social policies are developed and renewed with time, also owing to immigrants’ contribution”. He added: “In-between this future which has yet to unfold, and the imperious present time there is the need for hope and of the commitment of everyone, of national and civil society, which includes Christians”.