"Fifty years ago, the Church began to voice the hope of the peoples who had come out of the tragedy of the bloodiest war ever. It was the hope that the sacrifice of millions of creatures could be the seed of a new Europe of peoples, a united Europe", added Dionigi Tettamanzi. "The Christian Churches too played their part" in the building of a continental union. "In Basel in 1989, a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, for the first time ever the delegations of all the European Churches met in an ecumenical assembly to present the necessary realisation that the goals of the action for peace, for justice, for the protection of the Creation depend on each other and are to be pursued as a symphony". This was followed by the assemblies of Graz (1997) and Sibiu (2007). "Cardinal Martini, who chaired the assembly along with the current patriarch of Moscow, Alexius II, had already dreamt, back then, that the Alp of Motta might host a European ecumenical centre for peace". (continued)
