Translation by ZENIT

VENICE, Italy, APRIL 1, 2010 – Here is a translation of the statement on sexual abuse in the Church made today Cardinal Angelo Scola, patriarch of Venice, at the end of the Chrism Mass held in St. Mark’s Basilica in Venice. 

The solemn occasion of the Holy Chrism Mass which sees all the presbyterate gathered here, with the deacons, women and men religious and not a few lay faithful, impels me to say a rightful word in regard to the question of the sin and crime of pedophilia committed by priests and consecrated persons. This topic, also in our country, has been for some days on the front page. 

With a calm and objective judgment I intend to manifest to you all, to all the Christian people and to all the inhabitants of the patriarchate, what in this regard I have had in my heart for days.

 1. As Benedict XVI affirmed, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco and the recent final communiqué of the permanent council of the Italian episcopal conference confirmed, pedophilia “is an odious crime, but also a scandalously grave sin which betrays the pact of trust inscribed in the educational relationship. If committed by a consecrated person, it acquires an even greater gravity.”

Hence our dismay, sense of betrayal and remorse for violated childhood and even greater our closeness to the victims and their families. Hence also, without hesitation and minimizing, the renewed commitment to render an account of every one of these crimes, determined not to hide anything. Mercy and forgiveness toward those who have erred implies on their part submitting themselves to the exigencies of full justice and hence to answer “before God Almighty as well as before the courts duly constituted.” The Italian bishops are determined to follow the directives confirmed by the Holy Father whether through the canonical procedures or through a loyal collaboration with the state authorities. Moreover, they will multiply their efforts to prevent similar situations. Even one sole case “is always too much, above all if the one who carries it out is a priest.”

Part of an objective attitude is to highlight the fact, stressed even by many non-Catholic sides, that the phenomenon of pedophilia concerns different environments and various categories of persons. This notation does not intend to diminish the gravity of the facts pointed out in the ecclesiastical ambit, but invites “not to engage — in case this should happen — in strategies of generalized discredit.”

2. In this context I am pressed to thank you all, very dear priests of the Patriarchate, for your indefatigable and long-standing action in the educational field. The very grave episodes pointed out in some dioceses must not darken your luminous commitment and throw discredit on the precious action that from immemorial time you carry out in our parishes, our schools, as well as in groups of faithful. Educational action that in the churches of the Northeast and in the Diocese of Venice today is more attentive than ever to all the pedagogical implications.

I  invite you all to continue serenely and even more energetically in the precious task of transmitting to the new generations the Christian meaning of life that, if adequately proposed, is able to make the balanced and mature personality grow at all levels, including the affective and sexual. Because of this I am certain that very many parents who normally entrust their children to parishes, to Catholic schools, to charitable institutions, to GREST, to Catholic associations, will intensify their trust and will be even more aware of the decisive importance of the family to introduce and accompany children, boys and girls and pre-adolescents to the encounter with Christ in the Christian community.

3. It is misleading and unacceptable to question, from cases of pedophilia in the ecclesiastical environment, the holy celibacy that the Latin Church asks for, in full liberty, of the candidates to the priesthood in the light of a very long tradition. We are rediscovering its beauty in this Year for Priests. Celibacy, when it is lived with one’s gaze fixed on Jesus priest and with an undivided heart for the good of the people of God that is entrusted to us, is a beautiful experience of love which makes our humanity flower. To accept freely the gift of celibacy and to follow that way does not imply some psychic and spiritual mutilation. For those who are called, the grace of celibacy is the path for a singular but fulfilled expression of one’s affectivity and sexuality. Of course we are earthenware vessels and we carry in them a great treasure but, with the help of God and the support of the Christian community, we carry it with responsibility and joy.

4. Finally in this extraordinary day of Holy Thursday, expression of the peculiar “Catholic genius” because in it shines the power of the Eucharist and the full meaning of the ordained priesthood, we intend to express again and forcefully our affection and our impassioned following of the Holy Father Benedict XVI. To him who has done so much and does so much to remove “every filth” from the whole structure of the men of the Church are addressed false accusations. But the “humble laborer of the vine” — that is how he described himself when introducing himself to the world now five years ago on the occasion of his election to the Papacy — will receive from the Spirit the grace to offer this iniquitous humiliation transforming it into renewed energy for his indispensable ministry of Successor of Peter.

We, Venetian priests and people, entrust him today, in an all together special way, to the Most Holy Virgin Nicopeja.

Beloved, receive with an open heart these words of your Patriarch. And be certain of his full confidence and his esteem. They are founded on the knowledge now of many years of your love for Christ and for the Church which is transformed in daily gift, often silent and not understood, of your life in favor of every man brother of ours.

May the progress of the pastoral visit continue to strengthen our unity so that, as Jesus has asked us, the world will believe and discover in this way the fullness of living.

I invite you to find the appropriate ways to make this statement known as widely as possible to all the faithful and to all men and women who live in our patriarchate.

With heartfelt affection of communion in the Lord I bless you and all the faithful wishing you a Holy Easter.

This is the source where Christians draw their passion to meet all men in every part of the earth and to share their life.

Here  you can read the Cardinal Scola’s declaration.

“Mr President of the Venetian Institute of Sciences, Arts and Letters, Directors of the Department of Astronomy of the University of Padua; of INAF, the Astronomy Observatory of Padua; of INSAP, the International Executive Committee; of the Vatican Observatory, honoured Conference participants, it is an honour for me to address you on the occasion of the Sixth International Conference on the Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena, at which you intend to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the first astronomical use of Galileo’s telescope.

Your important gathering has prompted the Holy Father to send you a message through the Patriarch of Venice, which I now have the pleasure of reading to you.

I take the liberty to add my personal best wishes to those of the Holy Father.

The presence of so many scientists at this Conference, many of whom explicitly refer to the Catholic faith, represents an unmistakable sign that the dialogue between faith and reason and science and religion – to which the Holy Father’s Message refers – is in existence.

To me this seems a decisive step towards turning the current anthropological torment created by rapid transition on our planet in the direction of that good life to which the whole human family aspires.

An interesting confirmation of the fruitfulness of your efforts is your intent within this Conference to seek dialogue with other important disciplines such as art, music and literature. Tending towards the unity of knowledge, which is too fragmented in our modern age, is a necessity which requires going beyond pure inter-disciplinarity.

Your choice of Venice as the seat of your Conference is more than an act of homage to Galileo, who presented his telescope to the Doge, because Venice, the city of humanity, is a place where the multiple manifestations of the human spirit in artistic, literary, musical and scientific works are called to exchange and thus enrich their views. Venice’s heritage and traditions bear witness to this, as does her present vocation as the crossroads of cultures.

I thank you all and apologize for the fact that other commitments oblige me to leave this assembly. I am certain that your time here will be spent in good work.

Here some excerpts of the card. Angelo Scola’s contribution.

Scientific Committee of the Oasis International Foundation
Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, 22-23 June 2009

INTERPRETING TRADITION AT A TIME OF MESTIZAJE OF CIVILISATIONS
ON THE INEVITABLE CULTURAL INTERPRETATION OF FAITH

“A year after the stimulating meeting in Amman, which was concerned with religious freedom considered even to the extreme foundation of freedom to convert, we are reunited again today in the magnificent seat of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in order to analyse the subject of traditions and their interpretation.
The growth, at a numerical level as well, of those taking part in this scientific committee and their variety of religious backgrounds and loyalties bears witnesses to how deeply is felt the need for a place of shared encounter. It was precisely the perception of this need that inspired, by now six years ago, the idea of a reality of communion that would unite Christians of the East and of the West in a work involving the reading of the historical circumstances in which to actuate the increasingly urgent relationship with Muslim believers.
Whilst I believe that by now the goodness of that initial insight has been ascertained in the light of the fruits that it has produced in recent years, there remains in front of us, always open because inexhaustible, the task of refining our comprehension of a historical process that calls on us in an increasingly imposing way.

An Ineluctable Horizon: the Mestizaje of Civilisations
This year’s title, ‘Interpreting Traditions at a Time of Mestizaje of Civilisations’, contains in its second part an important clarification. Our analysis, indeed, seeks to develop by taking into account a context evoked by the category of ‘mestizaje of civilisations’.
To the benefit of those of our guests who are joining the deliberations of Oasis for the first time, I would like to observe that through this term, which has a explicative and not a prescriptive meaning, we seek to read the process of the unprecedented mixing of peoples that is in front of everyone’s eyes. The qualification ‘of civilisations’ by which we connote the term ‘mestizaje’ is often not seen in all its delimiting range perhaps because the term ‘mestizaje’ produces at the outset a certain counter reaction.
For us, the mestizaje of civilisations – and I would like to stress this clarification – is not a political programme: its circumstantial character, indeed, excludes the possibility of erecting it into a goal to be pursued down the historical future. At the same time, it is something more than a simple description of a process (as an enunciation of a physical law or a detached observation of a biological phenomenon could be) because it is offered as a horizon that is able to provide space for all the categories that are necessary to creating the conditions by which such a process could become an opportunity for a broader mutual acknowledgement on the part of all the actors in the field. I am referring to the subjects of identity, otherness, difference, relationship, interculturality, integration, etc. Decisive weight amongst these categories should certainly be given to the factor of ‘tradition’.
(…)
As we have always done, we will take advantage of the specific expertise of each participant, but for the sake of a shared work which, taking them as given, goes beyond them. In this sense, our coming together constitutes a practical illustration of that unity of forms of knowledge which today is increasingly seen as necessary. It constitutes the great challenge and the reason for existence of the Studium Generale Marcianum, in whose cultural project Oasis participates to the full.
First of all – by now this is something that we know – we are dealing with unity of the subject of knowledge in its capacity to host the whole of the real, but because of the special configuration of the disciplines that involve us in Oasis this reflection can attempt to express itself also as unity of the various forms of expertise, albeit in obvious respect for the methodologies that are specific to each form of expertise. In this field, in fact, the building of humanistic knowledge does not appear to be as yet imploded.

Although one of the finest fruits of Oasis for me and for many other people has been the possibility of getting to know better the fascinating Islamic civilisations and the rich Easter Christian traditions, it is evident that we cannot think that we will all dedicate ourselves full time to Islamic studies or to the study of Eastern Christianities or to the theology of religions. Is this a limit destined to condition the future developments of Oasis? Decidedly not, because the specific object of our work is not directly the study of Islam or of Eastern Christianities, nor even inter-religious dialogue stricto sensu, but a reading of the process of the mestizaje of civilisations, in which both Islam and Eastern Christianities come into play, as indeed do the various traditions of the West. This is a process that concerns all of us in the first person, beyond specialisations, so important has it become. I, for example, can touch it with my hands as a bishop every time that I make a pastoral visit in any Venetian parish.

The Implications of Faith
If faith is inevitably destined to become culture because it always offers an interpretation of the real, and culture in its turn interprets faith, the dialogue between the subjects involved in the mestizaje of civilisations will take place first of all, even though not solely, at this level, in an adventure of reciprocal edification. The subject is of capital importance for a plural society which seeks to promote the fundamental practical good of being together.
The dual risk is that of falling into deductivism, on the one hand, or into extrinsicism, on the other. Giving way to deductivism, from the principles of faith would flow in an automatic way certain applications, certain consequences. In opposite fashion, in giving way to extrinsicism, culture would be the field of the ‘human’ on which faith would then be grafted from the outside as a superadditum. Both these paradigms have experienced at different times broad success within the Christian world but by now they display with clarity their limits.
On the ridge between the two fronts is, in my opinion, located a more suitable pathway. Not mechanical applications, nor extrinsic juxtapositions, but dynamic implications. An implication, as is known, is an aspect contained – implied – in a reality that precedes it. If we talk about the implications of the Christian Mysteries, the primary reality is the Christian Mysteries, but these mysteries according to the sacramental logic of Revelation (FR, n. 13) are dynamically embodied in the present of the subject who lives them. They this bear upon how men conceive themselves, on the way in which society is conceived, and on the way in which the relationship with creation is conceived, and they are subject in their turn to the inevitable cultural interpretations that this subject practices. The commitment of a Christian as regards people, society and the cosmos is not a consequence of these Mysteries. And yet it does not immediately coincide with the Christian Mysteries as such: it is implied in them. Indeed, the Christian Mysteries are not given once and for all in the form of a package of dogmas from which to draw opportune consequences; they are dimensions of the event of Jesus Christ which constantly proposes itself anew to the freedom of man, which is always historically located.

Tradition and Truth
Here, therefore, is outlined the pathway that I have tried to follow through brief points: Oasis is called to an exploration of the role of traditions in the time of the mestizaje of civilisations as a place of the inevitable interpretation of every faith. These interpretations are the subject of a continual narrative and dialogue between the subjects that live in our plural societies. Without, however, ever forgetting the ultimate assent required by Truth, because, as Pascal observes, ‘however much such antiquity may have force, truth must always have the better of it, however much it is of recent discovery, since it is always older than all the opinions that have been held of it’.

The witness to martyrdom that Christians in this troubled country are offering constitutes a powerful reminder to all of our Churches. It is the ultimate invitation to all Christians to follow resolutely Jesus Christ, our Pascha.
On the occasion of the upcoming Holy Week, I shall not fail to remind all of our faithful, in particular our priests, to say a special prayer in memory of Monsignor Rahho and in solidarity to you all.
With the deepest sense of collegial affection

Angelo Scola
Patriarch of Venice

Nobody is able to weigh up the ‘balance’, even though many propose conclusions; nobody is able to provide comprehensive interpretations, even though many exhibit deductions and explanations, including ones that are about plots and behind the scenes activity.

Our contribution to the debate begins with a different assumption: the entry onto the scene of a subject who asks questions and reacts to the consequences of an extraordinary event. Christians and 11 September, this is the title, the subject, of this fourth edition of Oasis. That is to say: faced with a circumstance, even a circumstance with a terrible and disturbing face, we ask ourselves what God is asking of us through this circumstance, what he asks of we Christians. I believe that first and foremost the event of 11 September brings to the fore the question of evil in the world. This is a question which has always in an acute way besieged the mind of man. With Leibniz and the Teodicea, the West even transformed it into an objection: ‘If God exists why does evil exist in the world?’ And like a game of hide and seek, in looking for the responsibilities for evil different answers are attempted. Perhaps it is thought that God is not responsible for evil, but does not impede it and thus at the least He is quiet up there, in the heights of heaven. Or He is not responsible because simply He is not there and thus the curse of man is not to be redeemed in any way: nothing has meaning.

But in order to address the question of evil in an authentic way it is necessary first of all to go to the original experience of man. From there perhaps we will find some outline of an answer. ‘In the face of evil what am I? Am I able to eliminate evil?’ If a man is sincere, in front of his own evil and that of others, his first act is to recognise that he needs salvation, a salvation that he cannot alone give to himself. It is here that the message of Christ becomes dramatically evident: the possibility of the redemption of evil and thus of the salvation whose indispensability man perceives lies in One who did not engage in discourses about evil but proposed himself as liberation from evil; even though he had not sinned he allowed himself to be treated as a sinner; and as an innocent he allowed himself to be crucified for our sake. Salvation is not only the explanation of the constitutive enigma of man (‘what a strange being is a being that does not have in himself the foundation of his being? Who before did not exist and now does exist, and then will not be?’), but is even the concrete offer of Jesus himself as the Eucharistic way to life and truth. Thus the answer to the question of the Teodicea is not a theory about evil it is the person of Jesus who was crucified and rose again.

Now, this salvific key is offered to the freedom of every man. Balthasar says: ‘God in Jesus Christ ends the enigma of man but does not pre-decide his drama’. The meaning of this is that each one of us is always in action and must ratify with his ‘yes’ to Christ the path of his conversion, of his change, and of his victory over evil in faith. To those who listen to him Christ says: ‘you need to change, you must change, and you must always change’. This is the ‘convert!’ that gathers within it the whole of the great appeal of the Torah, of the Prophets, and of Wisdom, concentrated after a certain fashion in the appeal of the Baptist. ‘I beseech you, be reconciled with God’, says St. Paul. Thus 11 September pushes us deeply towards a great reflection on the enigma of man, on the enigma of evil, on the possibility of salvation from this enigma, on the possibility and responsibility that each individual man has in the construction of a personal and social ‘good life’.
Today, in Christians, all of this should bring about two approaches. First of all the depth of the question. ‘Are we in a position of confession? In our daily and communal lifestyle is the approach of confession, that is to say that of those who recognise that they are sinners and invoke the mercy of the cross, normal?’ Can we, instead, observe that we rarely enter the fray, rarely feel the urgent need for a question about our faithfulness to the Christian message. I believe, for example, that it is necessary to reflect on why in the East such a total confusion between Christianity and Western civilisation has been made possible. This confusion allows very many of our Islamic brethren to condemn both Christianity and the West as though they were the same thing, linked in the same decadence; we cannot confine ourselves to dismissing this as a simplistic criticism. I do not believe that Christians must throw a veil of negativity over the whole of the modern experience which so strongly marks the West, but it is certainly important to take on board ‘Eastern’ criticism so as to engage in courageous questions about the claim to reduce religion to a private fact, the intellectualistic and abstract claim of ‘democracies for export’, and the claim to an irrepressible freedom of conscience which, however, coincides with ‘it is forbidden to forbid’. To sum up, the formula of the Second Vatican Council is of great contemporary relevance: Christianity by its nature generates cultures but it is bound to no culture in particular.

Secondly, the energy of knowledge. To know Islam; to know the forms of Islam. And here the question of the subject involved returns. I would like to observe here the path followed by Oasis. We have made a proposal to the Christians of the West: to know Islam, to speak with Islam, through our Christian brethren of the East, through their millenarian experience, through their reality and their concerns as minorities. Through a created, concrete and present subject. This is a choice that is generating two very good consequences: it forces we Westerners to ‘de-intellectualise ourselves’ and leads our Eastern brethren to adopt this task within the universal Church. In this context we want to address the questions of a most general nature, that is to say of a social, economic and political nature, that this historical moment is bringing to the fore. Can we not today ask ourselves whether the great appeal launched by John Paul II against the war in Iraq was not a prophetic voice that should have been listened to? Can we reduce the problem of security in the West to mere technical and containing factors? How can Europe speak to the United States of America? Is it right to think that one must respond to human bombs with retaliation? In what sense can one prevent a threat? To what point should the use of force be taken?

Westerners believe that they have an explanation for everything, a reflex of the great European mind that has synthesised Alexandria, Jerusalem and Rome. But after losing the subjectivity that was behind it, this great culture has become one big building game: pieces to out together and take apart in a game that is increasingly abstract and rarefied. We produce theories that are always new and which lose sight of reality. And if one departs from real subjects, the purely scientific approach, the approach of study, is destined to be partial. From our wealth springs presumption, which easily becomes a superiority complex because within our mental system we can articulate very complete theories in relation to which, measured solely on the terrain of language, the developments that come from the East can appear overly primitive. However it is on the other side, specifically in the East, that we see a force, a belief in religio, in an explicit relationship with God, in relation to which, essentially, we are nostalgic, because by now we run the risk of being without fathers, the children of no one.

In this historical moment that began with 11 September, which is so dramatic and so dark, there is the possibility of a positive way. In the East and the West this passes by way of the community of Christians, the courage with which they themselves enter the fray, how they demonstrate that they are ‘confessing communities’, knowing how to adopt and make their own the request for salvation that beats in the heart of every man.

]]> http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/11/september-11-five-years-after-cardinal-scolas-message/feed/ 0 http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/01/todays-and-tomorrows-scenarios-for-competitive-strategies-religions-and-politics/ http://english.angeloscola.it/2006/09/01/todays-and-tomorrows-scenarios-for-competitive-strategies-religions-and-politics/#comments Fri, 01 Sep 2006 14:15:50 +0000 ufficiostampa http://english.angeloscola.it/?p=190 1. The “Gods Are Back”
With the end of the age of utopias, the end to what Lyotard refers to as the age of the “Grand Narratives” , the growing influence of religions and sects around the world, especially of Islam, is at odds with the view that prevailed after 1945, namely that religion’s social and political relevance in the modern world would wither away. Then there were expectations that the process of secularisation would usher in the so-called mundane world. Instead, we are witnessing the Sacred making an almost furious comeback . All the tragic conflicts that have inflamed every corner of the globe after the fall of the Berlin Wall are proof enough of the naiveté behind the idea that in the 21st century the Western Way of Life would spread globally under the sign of “an awkwardly-labelled Humanity with a capital H” .
In order that this overly brief remark about the socio-political importance of religion not be seen as uncritically biased, it is necessary to take into account the objectively dialectical nature of the relationship between religion and modernity. If we want to respect the history of Europe, whose mind has tended to think globally, we must explicitly look at the dialectical between Christianity and Modernity?
What is it?
Let us begin at one extreme of this dialectical relationship. Today we can dispassionately say that modernity led Christianity to rigorously explain the consequences caused by the necessary and sound process of differentiation of religion from politics, a distinction that was already announced in the Gospels when Jesus said: “Then repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God” (Mt: 22, 21). Modernity, especially with the advent of the Enlightenment, held in check a certain ideological drift in the Christian experience itself, a drift due to a doctrinaire point of view that reduced revealed truth to just a “system of conceptual propositions from which one could deduce individual aspects of reality”. This reductionism denied reality’s historical, unpredictable and perplexing nature and underestimated the importance of the relationship of truth to freedom. Quite a few occurrences connected to the inculturation of Christianity in Europe-and there are no reasons to disagree with this-are proof of this ideological failure.
From early modernity, the one-way vision that governed the relationship between truth and freedom found itself progressively in crisis. This vision correctly claimed that freedom had to provide space for all the truth, but it did not clearly show how to integrate the truth of freedom into the meaning of freedom for the truth, which implies the objective recognition of freedom of conscience, when the latter is correctly understood.
Nonetheless, and this is the other extreme of the dialectical relationship between Christianity and modernity, we must stress that if European modernity was, in a certain sense, able to force Christians to accept this greater authenticity, it was able to do so thanks to the essential and permanently vital core of the Christian faith itself. This core was passed on, from Jerusalem to Rome, by way of the unbroken Christian traditio, and continues to this day to be a key resource for contemporary Europe but also other parts of the world.
I am referring here to the principle of difference in unity which lives in the mystery of the Trinity and passed into History because of the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ and became, by analogy, the principle of understanding and positively valuing all differences. At both individual and collective levels, this difference is not only tolerated but it is actually extolled because it is held in unity by that Truth-which is an event before it is ever a doctrine and ethics (cf. Deus caritas est n. 1)-that reaches into the farthest point (sort of a Ultima Thule) of the human experience, so that even the most radical difference is not allowed to degenerate into something that would more or less violently dissolve society.
In this context, the practice and theories of democracy evolved in the West in such a fashion that democracy came to be understood as an ensemble of citizens, intermediary organisations and peoples living together, freely and in an orderly fashion. In so doing, the latter gave rise to a civil society adequately served by the state.

2. Religion removed from the public sphere
And yet we cannot forget one important fact that, historically, came out of this dialectical relationship between modernity and Christianity in Europe. The precious outcome of this relationship, i.e. the truth of freedom of conscience and thus a satisfactory distinction between religious faith and political action, came with a hefty price, namely the removal of religion from the public sphere of civil society. A perceptive historian wrote that with modernity “religion starts to be viewed from the outside. It is categorised as a custom or something that is historically contingent. As such it is seen as opposed to reason or nature. ” Starting in the 16th century, various alternatives to the former relationship between religion and politics appear. There are attempts to reduce all confessions to one (integralism/fundamentalism); to find a supposedly universal natural religion that predates historically-contingent religions (naturalism of the Enlightenment); to attribute to “politics” the same function as a catalyst for citizens, intermediary organisations, civil society and nations once performed by religion (totalitarianism); and finally to subscribe to the notion of “provisional morality”, i.e. to scepticism (agnostic liberalism).
This fundamental process had a two-edged historical outcome. On the hand, religion came to be politically used in either an authoritarian way (as state religion) or liberal way (as a socially valuable tool) . On the other, religion was restricted to the private sphere, irrelevant and inappropriate for the public sphere. What modernity failed to do was to consider religion’s public relevance in and of itself.

3. Etsi Deus non daretur?
Quickly moving to the present, we can see that the rapid development of today’s civilisation of networks has transformed the nature of political participation and humbled intermediary organisations. In Europe, for more and more people a proper relationship between an individual’s fundamental rights and the state can only exist if other points of reference and mediation are excluded-only this way is a society deemed democratic and pluralistic. In this context, religion is seen as an “unwelcome third party” to be tolerated in so far is it is confined to a person’s private life. This view corresponds to the current phase of globalisation which focuses on cultural neutrality whereby in modern Western democracies all religions are “equal” (in-difference). The public sphere is said to be neutral as far as religions are concerned (…). All religions are asked to see their own universalism as a private affair, [at best] limited to their own sphere of influence. ”
This outlook is best exemplified by Kelsen’s well-known assertion that the “appreciation of rational science and the tendency to keep it free from any metaphysical or religious intrusion are traits of modern democracy “.
In very different ways countries like France, Italy and Spain have been the scene of heated discussions with regard to secularism. In each the prevailing view has been that the modern state ought to be secular and neutral. But we must really understand what this formula means. In the more passionate interpretations, the term “secular” does not only mean “a-religious” but sometimes even rhymes with “antireligious”.
Scholars do point out that in the United States, expressing one’s religiosity in public life is an accepted practice, albeit not a predominant one. The Founding Fathers somewhat tried to build “a secular state without a secular civil religion” . In this country, the political sphere is clearly separate from that of religion, but it is open to the latter because it is aware that government alone cannot fashion ethical citizens. On the contrary, ethical citizens are often inspired by religion to favour democracy. American Evangelicals, whether Methodists, Baptists, Pentecostals, whose appeal is currently reaching into places like Latin America (Brazil), Asia, Africa, and even in predominantly Muslim regions, are able to go quite far in integrating their faith and the American culture. Whatever we may think of these faith-based movements, and we should not underestimate their appeal, they do seem to confirm that “an important lesson in the American experience of religious diversity within a democratic political and social structure is that its religious foundation of culture is broad enough to accommodate those attempting to live according to one of the three great Abrahamic faith traditions while preserving individual freedom of belief and practice [as well as the freedom not to believe or practice].”
Kelsen’s thesis is thus coming under closer critical scrutiny today not only by people like David Novak, an American Jew who argues that “religious people are capable of building a secular order based on their own revelation-based traditions” , but also by those in Europe who are calling for a fresh approach to pluralistic democracy. Thinkers like Böckenförde and Habermas for instance, who, each in his own way, argue that whilst the modern state can only be based on a consensus over procedures, this does do not exclude that “the liberal secular state can also be sustained by normative premises that it alone cannot generate” .
Isn’t forcing believers to act etsi Deus non daretur, by not mentioning the relationship between rationality and the ultimate divine origin of a given rule (norm), ultimately a price to high to pay in order to live in society ? Are we actually sure that this omission isn’t depriving society of something good?
Ultimately, it is not possible to exclude, at least in principle, the notion that religion, too, can play a role in the public sphere.

4. Religions, social capital and “cultural métissage”
In particular we must ask ourselves: Can the principle of difference in unity, whose roots are Christian, ensure that democracy is real, now and in the future, in Europe as well as elsewhere? A democracy that not only can face rapid intercultural and inter-religious transformations, but can even turn the world’s new traits into cultural resources ? I think so. And I am certain that there is nothing nostalgic about it; it does not in any way, shape or form imply returning to bygone models of Christianity.
With regard to this I would like to say a few things.
First, I believe that recognising the religious dimension in civil society can fill the gaps left, among other things, by the liberal view of religion as a private matter.
Above all democracy needs trust and shared ideals without which it turns into a set of purely procedural conflict-resolution mechanisms between opposing interests. Von Kutschera realised this when he said that even ethics, whose main task is to “mediate between interests and moral needs, cannot motivate men’s desires and interests. Ethics need to be more grounded in anthropology, the more so since markets and economies are increasingly globalised. The fact that today there is no other form of democracy than the procedural model not only does not rule out Böckenförde’ thesis but rather proves it. In other words, democracy needs a certain societal background.
Secondly, it is by now obvious that marginalising religion from the social sphere is unacceptable to those non European cultures for which religion is essentially a public matter . In this sense, modern solutions to the relationship between religion and politics become obsolete as a result of the sometimes violent historical evolution of the process-I stress process-of civilisational and cultural métissage. This expression, which tentatively appeared some 20 years ago in anthropology departments and is by many still perceived apprehensively and with suspicion, has a broader application, in my opinion, than terms like identity and integration .

5. A public sphere religiously qualified
What new role can religions play at this point in history, at least in the West? First of all, I think we ought to recognise the need for a religiously qualified public sphere that is well separate from that of the state and quite distinctive within civil society itself .
This means that in its attitude towards religion, the state must shift from one of passive tolerance to one of “active openness”, in which religion’s public relevance is not reduced to whatever public space religions have negotiated with the state. For their part, religions must abandon their self-centred or fundamentalist attitude and engage in direct exchange with other religions and cultures so as to create an arena of dialogue in which religions can express their views and be heard in public debates over cultural values.
In other words, “a religiously qualified public sphere exists within a civil society defined as the meeting place where people engage in social exchanges (market-oriented or socially integrative), not deprived of their religious self but defined by it, and who, through their mutual interaction, give value to their respective selves as part of a democratic political system that regulates the presence of different religions in the aforementioned spheres of exchange. [A religiously qualified public sphere] is the place in which religions themselves elaborate social relations by acting outside of their own immediate realm through the influence they exert on social actors.”
Such a proposal recognises the fact that, “increasingly, freedom is viewed as a relational phenomenon” in tune with a one-to-one relationship between truth and freedom that is still being explored, since early modernity, in various modern cultures.

6. Religions and the Good Life
We must therefore imagine in more rigorous terms the type of state that can create an adequate space for a civil society that is truly plural, a state that is not afraid of the inevitable conflicts that will occur in such a society, but one that is able to positively regulate them. The type of state that I have in mind is not “detached” (i.e., falsely neutral); it is a state that is openly in the service of its citizens and their needs (like freedom, happiness, fulfillment) but without a specific worldview (Weltanschauung). And whilst fully respecting democratic procedures, it assimilates the values that underlie democratic life itself (civil and political liberties) to which intermediary groups give rise. I am neither ignoring nor am I worried by the fact that history teaches us that values are rooted in specific traditions which institutions certainly shape but which are in turn shaped by them. What I mean is the notion of “dominant traditions” similar to what Habermas had in mind when he spoke of “better opinion” . In the same way that someone arguing for an authentically formal and procedural democracy is not necessarily taking a “relativist” position, so anyone who thinks that the same procedural focus endowed with its own validity must be understood in axiological terms is not automatically a “fundamentalist”. I speak on purpose about the “axiology” and not the “foundations” of a procedural democracy, because this way we can refer to a “pre-political” level, one that is also religious in nature, and something that is quite useful for implementing human rights legislation and make democracies work. On another occasion I dealt with the same issues, when I spoke of “new secularism” in relation to the Italian situation .
Fundamental rights-if viewed in terms of the needs that constitute everyone’s basic experience and in terms of the values of living together in a democracy which are rooted in the particular history of a given people-represent the positive features of a truly secular society. In such a society, the state organises (and supports) the ways different identities and religions live side by side. The state I have in mind is not a state conceived as an empty and unremarkable container that one fills as one pleases (this is a weak and for all intents and purposes an unworkable proposition), certainly not one that is confessional, but rather one where everyone can make his or her own contribution to the common good. And this can only occur as part of an inevitable and respectful mutual process of give and take and recognition that preserves the real nature of power, which is and ought to be service to the people, even when the state must resort, as Kant put it, “to the use of force to uphold the law”.
It is no accident if it is the only proposition that, by avoiding the opposite dangers of unrestrained individualism and oppressive collectivism, can adequately take into account the “relational” nature of power . None of us can conceive ourselves outside of a relationship. The “individual” does not exist as a separate atom, self-sufficient and thus unrelated to others. We always exist in relation to a “different other” . Each one of us is both “oneself” (identity) and the “other” for “someone else” (difference). In actual terms, as Ricoeur pointed out, this relationship expresses itself in a process of dialogic confrontation and recognition (whose flip side is non recognition) which are the bases for sensible co-existence and legitimate rule .
As mutual confrontation and recognition evolve, the tie between identity and difference, in addition to being important for democracy, appears as something indissoluble. From this perspective the relationship between religion and politics only requires respect for religions’ nature as concrete universals. This nature is no less important than the universality of fundamental rights, which are often too abstract when they are reduced to a simple list of poorly understood and historically contextualised rules.
A civil religion alone is not enough for a sound democracy, nor can democracy rely on religions that are simply privatised. What democracy needs to do is to fully recognise that personal faith is inseparable from group ties (religions), which operate as independent actors in the public sphere and offer everyone without distinctions their own proposals for the good life to individuals and society in a process of exchange of ideas that is open, democratic, secular, public and plural.

Specifically as a result of a careful consideration of this ambivalent reality, various personalities of the Christian world (members of the laity, priests and bishops) met in Venice about a year ago to implement a project which we decided, in significant fashion taking the words pronounced by the Holy Father John Paul II at the Omayyad mosque of Damascus as a starting point to call ‘Oasis’. Oasis refers first and foremost to the Archbishop of Budapest, the Archbishop of Lyons, the Archbishop of Vienna, and the Archbishop of Zagreb, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Archbishop of Changanacherry, the Archbishop of Tunis, the Bishop of Islamabad, and the Auxiliary Bishop of Arabia, all of whom, together with the Patriarch of Venice, make up the organising committee. At the same time, Oasis refers to a group of friends who created the International Centre for Study and Research and a journal. This project was born within the Studium Generale Marcianum, which came into being in Venice as a form of renewal of the pastoral action of the Patriarchate.
Whereas for Europeans such as ourselves the name ‘Oasis’ has the ring of a somewhat exotic transposition of the locus amoenus of Platonic connotations, a kind of garden where tarrying to converse is pleasant, an oasis is held much more dear by the man of the desert. And it is not in the least surprising that the garden became both in Genesis and in the Koran the paradigm itself of heaven.

The Hybridity of Civilisations
In order to illustrate the character of a project that has run the risk of having a demanding but at the same time auspicious name, I will begin with a general observation.
In connection with so-termed globalisation and ‘network civilisation’, we have been witnessing over recent decades an unprecedented process of the mixing of peoples, which, employing a metaphor that is somewhat bold, I have defined with the phrase ‘hybridity of civilisations’ (métissage de civilisations), where there should, obviously, be a strong emphasis on the genitive ‘of civilisations’. It is not the case that the meeting of peoples is a new development. Indeed, migrations and mixtures mark out the history of mankind. We may think of what the migrations of the Germanic peoples meant for the Roman Empire or what the invasion of the Mongols meant for the Abbasid caliphate. The new fact is that today this phenomenon affects the whole of the planet. This process, which is often tumultuous and loaded with contradictions, is unstoppable, and as a process it necessarily involves us and urgently requires the freedoms that are involved to find their direction.
An important aspect of this mixing of peoples is its unprecedented ‘bi-directional’ character. Although, in fact, many inhabitants of developing countries come to seek their fortune in Europe, North America or Australia, it is also true that every year millions of people, for the purposes of work or recreation, visit the remotest localities of the globe. Despite its evident limitations, tourism has helped to break down the barriers of isolation.

Oasis wants to study this process and its implications for civilisations. This is borne out, among other things, by the composition of its scientific committee which brings together both Western and Eastern personalities in a shared endeavour that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The choice of multilingualism (the journal is printed in four bilingual versions) is also dictated by the same wish. We could have published a journal exclusively in French, or in English, or in Arabic. Instead, we chose to have languages co-existing with each other even though the difficulty of the undertaking does not allow us for the moment to have an equal relationship in quantitative terms between Arabic and Urdu and the Western languages.
It is evident that a phenomenon as new as that of the hybridity of civilisations brings with it immense problems and to find adequate solutions requires great creative capacities. In the Western world the debate tends to focus on questions that are primarily of a juridical character out of the belief that it is urgently necessary to provide a solid legislative framework within which the individuals who are progressively becoming members of our societies can be received. Indeed, this position brings out an important aspect of the problem but it cannot conceal indeed it often conceals, above all if the sirens of gay nihilism are followed the temptation stigmatised by the poet T. S. Eliot as that of dreaming of ‘systems so perfect that no one will need to be good’.
In our opinion, the path that is possible is the path of testimony I use this category in the practical and theoretical sense which no man can evade because of the risk that is of necessity implied in freedom. It is useless to deceive oneself that man can be spared the adventure of encounter with others. This is because each one of us is born and grows through relationships. And it is specifically at this level that the journal Oasis intends to offer its own contribution, a journal that is not to be located at an academic or scholarly level but rather at a cultural one, in the broadest and noblest sense of that term.

Testimony: the Path to Encounter
The term ‘testimony’ runs the risk of immediately raising a problem. Given, it is said, that testimony implies an identity, and because the affirmation of one’s own identity is generally seen as being opposed to encounter with others, one should, it is argued, conclude that these positions exclude each other: either one engages in encounter or one bears testimony.
In our specific case, given that this is a journal produced by Christians, one would, it is proposed, be tempted to conclude that it should be directed solely to Christian communities that live in the West or in Muslim countries. To speak with ‘others’ as well, one would need, it might be suggested, another style, another point of departure, in essentials: another journal.

I think that this is an insidious cultural aut aut to which we should briefly turn our attention. If we turn our minds to history, to the standard bearers of the unbridgeable opposition between identity and encounter, we find many refutations of this. We may think, for example, of the great epic work of the transmission of classical knowledge. Who fails to recognise the cardinal importance of the re-reading of the Greek texts in the advance of Abbasid civilisation? And who, in turn, does not concede the important role, in a Europe that was already not unaware of the classical inheritance thanks to the patient work of monks, played by the input of Arab philosophical and scientific thought? Of this dialectic of encounter and identity it seems to me the Arab poet al-Buhturi was also aware when, towards the middle of the ninth century, after admiring the ruins of Persian rule in Ctesiphon, he ended his famous sniyya with the words ‘And thus I will always admire all noble people, from all lineages and descent’. An Arab and a Muslim, he found that he was celebrating a Persian and Zoroastrian king.

Naturally, history also records ferocious oppositions that have arisen when identity has been understood in an exclusivistic sense, but rather than discouraging us this should provide us with warnings about the present.
In reality, the very possibility of encounter lies in the inexhaustible search for truth understood in a dynamic, living and personal way by the human heart, which in all latitudes beats with the same desires, living every day on affection and work. If such was not the case, one would not know how to justify the fact that human cultures, albeit in their evident diversity, are mutually comprehensible: perhaps at the end of a long journey towards languages and categories that at the outset were distant, but always mutually comprehensible.

It is starting from this belief that Oasis intends to offer itself. With a dynamic identity and thus an identity open to others. Recognising the ecumenism and theology of religions as an inescapable dimension of the Christian experience, Oasis calls on all men of good will, whether Christians, Muslims, members of other religions, atheists or agnostics, and invites them to stand forward in the first person in a shared work about the meaning of the person, community, and the family of peoples. And without being afraid to propose to the freedom of others what they have found to be answers, without omitting to ask that a free dialogue of this kind be made possible everywhere in the world, as a generator of a new civilisation.

Indeed, freedom is for truth. Ever since Greek philosophy this has been an unquestioned cornerstone of the European mind. It has been more difficult for European thought to understand the equally irrepressible principle of the truth of freedom. Practical atheism as the ‘destiny of European modernity’ arose from the defence of the freedom of man carried to the point of postulating, as a minimum, the impossibility of re-cognising the truth. Beginning with the modern age, finite freedom in its constituent desire, its untameable technical-scientific effort to ‘possess’ man and the cosmos, and in the attempt to construct new forms of civil, economic and political life supported by good government has believed that it must require, at the least, a foregoing of the question of absolute truth: hence the censorship of the question about God.

Instead, Biblical revelation contains a theoretical core that post-modern man is rediscovering. Truth is the encounter that takes place between the absolute and transcendent foundation and man. This foundation testifies itself to man in the individual act of freedom that calls him to involvement. Freedom is based upon a God who manifests himself in history in order to come to encounter with man.
In Christian tradition truth, although conserving the whole of its character of absoluteness, is living and personal truth. It thus is not afraid of giving itself over to the finite freedom of man. The very event of Jesus Christ is overwhelming proof of this. Freedom for truth is not given that is not at the same time truth of freedom.
With these assumptions we thus sincerely invite whomsoever so wishes to engage in co-operation, in the certainty of the need to contribute to the accompanying of this complex but unstoppable process of the hybridity of civilisations with an authentic critical spirit. Indeed, only thus will there be realised that wish also contained in the Arabic word that expresses the concept of integration: to become mutually complete, perfect.