POLITICS
(Brussels) “The EU is not mainly a huge structure of institutions. It was meant to be a community”, a “community of nations, of course, but mainly a community of human beings, called to work for the common good”. This was specified by mgr. Jean Kockerols, auxiliary bishop of Mechelen-Brussels and deputy president of the Commission of the EU Bishops Conferences (Comece). On the December issue of Europeinfos, Comece’s monthly magazine, the bishop says he is annoyed that, “in many countries and even in the local Church, there’s no sense of history and memory”, so the reasons that drove the European countries to join together 60 years ago, reasons that are perfectly shared by Christianity, “a religion of peace and reconciliation”, are forgotten. The dimension of hope that is typical of Christianity is what Europeans, often “lifeless”, need nowadays. If Europe is a “grandmother”, as Pope Francis defined it, it is somehow also a “teenager that discovers freedom”, that must learn “responsibility” and must learn to overcome its “fears and cares”. “The search for identity and a community to belong to is a key challenge for a teenager, as it is for today’s Europeans”, mgr. Kockerols writes. “Are we Catalans or Spanish or European? We have multiple identities”, and this has “consequences that can be understood in very different ways”, but the Church can “help us find it out as a chance” “to welcome a shared fate without neglecting our other identities”.
