Courage and wisdom

“Europe has a need of courageous men and women”, said Luca Volontè, parliamentarian at the Council of Europe, intervening on 22 November at the seminar in Rome on “Europe and the New Evangelization” promoted by the Council of the Bishops’ Conferences of Europe (CCEE). The political representative of the Council of Europe intervened in the second half of the meeting together with the French philosopher Philippe Capelle-Dumont, thus opening the way to a moment of dialogue and debate among the participants.Appeal to wise mobilization. Europe has a need of politicians “capable of fighting the good fight – said Volontè – in the clear-sighted consciousness that it is possible to win or to lose. So in politics too there is a need for the courage of being and living what one is, and what one wants to be in the electoral programmes, or in the government intentions”. “In tackling the challenges of Europe today – he added -, we must first of all pose ourselves a question of method: what right have we to impose Christian values on a Europe that is, in many respects, no longer Christian?”. And to this question he replied: “Our Christian values are in reality universal, in as much as they are natural and attainable with the use of reason”. And if on the one hand “signs of great apprehension due to the abandonment of the faith and of the consciousness of God in our life exist and persist”, on the other hand, pointed out Volontè, “it seems to me that a great liveliness and an interesting revival [of faith] can be glimpsed in many countries”. In his view, what is needed is “a better organization, coordination and effectiveness of common actions among the hundreds of Catholic local, national and European organizations”: “I think that this ‘waste land’, the bitter fruit and logical consequence of unchecked consumerism and moral relativism, is an extraordinary and providential provocation of the Church of Europe”. “To a Europe suffering from an identity crisis and to our fellow-citizens we must say that we ourselves feel ourselves to be protagonists of the present and the future of our European homeland, because it concerns us and appeals to us”. What’s needed is “a great appeal to the wise mobilization for the growth of the ‘neo-humanism’ of which Europe has so urgent a need”, concluded Volontè: “we need to educate a new generation of Catholics in public life and the democratic responsibility of politics, a new generation of persons ready to dedicate themselves with boldness, without any fear”.A forgotten role. The European cultural context and the “destiny of Catholicism in contemporary Europe” was discussed instead by the Professor of Philosophy at the Institut Catholique of Paris, Philippe Capelle-Dumont, who emphasized that a kind of “amnesia”, often “arrogant” about the role played by Christianity in our continent, is gaining ground in Europe today. “For roughly three decades we have found ourselves in a situation whose paradox has been dramatically accentuated: on the one hand we know that the history of Europe was forged according to the original inspirations of Christianity; on the other, we observe that the scope given to Catholicism after two millennia of history is purely residual”. According to Capelle-Dumont, “it is forgotten that Christianity, in spite of all its historical vicissitudes, not only invented but also promoted, in Europe and for Europe, the theoretical distinction of the temporal from the spiritual, inspiring the practical separation of the political and religious orders”. What’s more, there’s a refusal to recognize Christianity’s “merit of having formed the main paradigm of the continent’s future constitutional settlements, and of the main scientific and philosophic concepts of European history”.Faith, reason, communication. Referring more specifically to faith, the philosopher explained that for the Christian the search for the truth “is never realized outside the tension between faith and reason”, and that “the recognition of the rapport between the human and the divine” can only “take place in the exercise of communication”, undoubtedly “the main question of this century, to which we Catholics as a matter of urgency must make our own contribution”. “Because – he explains – what’s at stake in communication is not only, nor primarily, the control of the media, but, more profoundly, the work of specifying the modes of communication induced by our twofold relation with the world and with our tradition”. Today “communication occurs by virtue of the power exerted by economic influences and deliberate psycho-social manipulations”. “So we need to learn to communicate by overcoming – beyond blind tolerance and hence by adopting effective but tranquil strategies – the resistances that Christian positivity encounters”. This leads the philosopher to pose the questions: “Is the Catholic world able to satisfy ‘creative’ communication without forming authentic ‘communicators’, authentic ‘correspondents'” in contemporary society? Is it able to do so without stimulating “a real correspondence’?” And “can this task of ‘correspondence’ be realized without having recourse to what happens in correspondence: recognition?”.