X Jubilee Conference on:

The role of the Catholic Church in the process of European integration

The Christian contribution to the European Integration Process

Cracow, 10-11 September 2010

Introductory remarks

Card. Angelo Scola Patriarch of Venices

1. European identity and integration

If we are to attempt to respond as concisely as possible to the topic proposed – the contribution of Christians to the process of European integration – while avoiding abstraction and rhetoric, we need to begin with a recognition of the sudden and often violent transformations that have manifested in all their fullness in the first decade of the twenty-first century that we have just been traversing : the process (I emphasise process and not prescriptive programme) of “hybridisation of civilisations”, the problems of terrorism, the energy and climate crises, the economic crisis. Not to speak of the change in the European religious panorama. As Jenkins[1] has observed, who could have predicted the marked decline in Christian pratice in Europe[2]? Who would have imagined such a significant Islamic presence in Rome and Madrid, let alone Paris and London? Not to speak of the urgent questions more closely connected with the present political and institutional structures of the European Union, from the financial crisis with its worrying repercussions on the single European currency, to the adjustment of equilibria between the organs of the European institutions, to the growing euroscepticism that has recently developed in many countries of the area, to the uncertainty into which the whole unification process seems to be falling. Among other things, it is struggling to keep watch “outside the house”, in particular on the so-called MENA area (Middle East and Nord Africa) which in 2030 will have 600 million inhabitants.

Alongside these questions there is the broader one of the general climate that is seeimg the rapid diminution of the conviction that for centuries has sustained western civilisation, a conviction ultimately founded in the vision of man as person, integral subject of rights and duties that are harmoniously embodied in a system of laws. Against the background of a notable in-difference with regard to the various religious creeds that inhabit our societies, typical of what Taylor identified as phase three of secularisation[3], a phenomenon stands out lastly that involves Christians more directly in their public life. I am referring to a hostility towards the Christian faith and in particular to the faith of the Catholic Church which is beginning to be translated into certain juridical ordinances and concrete normative formulations.[4]

Although the context may appear discouraging from certain points of view, we need to take great care not to read the travails of today in such a way that we let ourselves be carried away by a sense of bitterness. History is made of processes, and Christians are immersed in them like everyone else. The great resource of faith in God the Father which guides the human family and history in Jesus Christ, conqueror of sin and death, does not spare our freedom the dramatic dimension of life together with our fellow men. Christian truth, alive and personal, plays out in history and history is not deducible a priori. Like every one else, Christians reckon with this datum. Indeed they are called, in accord with the virtue of hope, to examine the signs of the times for the benefit of all.

Of course European identity has always presented paradoxical traits. On the one hand, the history of our continent has demonstrated a shared sense of belonging, on the other, it is equally evident that for many centuries the shared patrimony has always manifested in such a plurality of forms, cultures, and languages as to make it seem, to the superficial eye, as if a reference to some kind of original unity is unjustified. To reflect today on European identity after the sixty years of journeying that, as Schuman had foreseen «would not be completed overnight», requires us on the one hand to acknowledge that, given the complexity of the processes that are under way, no national state can cope with them on its own, so that Europe is not an option but a real necessity; on the other hand to refuse to abandon an ideal of identity which functions in some way as a unificatory principle. In this sense I believe that the reading put forward by Cardinal Lustiger in his day of the origins of the ECSC (European Coal and Steel Community) points us to the method by which, even in the radically transformed contemporary scenario, European unity needs to be pursued. This method involves starting from reality in all its pressing concreteness and allowing the ideal to emerge. The ideal, not a utopia. The ideal is in fact the truth inherent in the real, while utopia is, as its etymon says, the unreal. Just as in those days there seemed to be a disproportion between the instruments (common production of coal and steel) and the ideals of peace and prosperity for the entire continent (coal and steel as the raw materials of the war industry) so also today great realism and so great ideals fill the bill[5].

From this point of view it is not enough, even though it is necessary, to study the roots of Europe that we know so well. Beyond the multitude of undeniable contributions that over the centuries have helped mould its face – I am thinking of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, down to the modern concern with the significance of the subject and the Enlightenment emphasis on equality – it seems to me that crucial elements of these roots can be objectively traced in the nucleus of Christianity understood according to the criterion of secondariness which, according to Rémi Brague represents the realistic form in which to pursue European unity. The Roman attitude which received, preserved, and transmitted as its own patrimony the Hellenistic synthesis of Athens and Jerusalem was secondary. Secondary too is Christianity, for it knows it is second with respect to the First Covenant. Hence the singular critical capacity of Europe in respect of all civilisations and cultures because it avoids conceiving itself as the foundation of itself[6].

Without taking account of the anthropological, social, and cultural implications of the Trinitarian revelation – from the particular vision of the dignity of the person, to the conception of liberty and of its relationship with truth, and up to the salutary distinction between civil society and the religious dimension and to the acknowledgement of the value of subsidiarity and of solidarity – it is difficult to explain what we are saying when we utter the word Europe.

In the end, all the ethnic, national, linguistic, and religious differences consolidate rather than corroding a shared patrimony in the etymological sense of the term. And yet it is not sufficient to consider the roots if we are to meet the challenge of today’s historical reality.

To contribute to a plural Europe Christians ought to demonstrate the importance of the filial relation with God the Father, inconceivable before the Christian revelation. Benedict XVI himself stressed the quaerere Deum in his lectio magistralis at the Collège des Bernardins. Neither the Greek polis, nor the Roman civitas – with the sensational development of rights achieved by the latter – had ever understood society as family and as home. In both, the dignity of man and his liberty were subordinate to the recognition of his status as citizen. The reference to that transcendent and personal origin that constantly generates unity between the sons and constantly regenerates their freedom was absent. It is with Christianity that the notion of citizen is integrated with that of person, opening up to man his full identity. Of course in certain periods of history the idea that the unity of Europe was rooted in God was lived more naturally (we need only think of the role of the first universities in the formation of a shared European consciousness). In the course of the centuries this kind of certainty seems to have been progressively weakened. And yet the men who in the Nineteen-Fifties were in a position to reweave the broken threads of the Continent after the devastation of two tremendous wars did so in projects whose realism was laden with ideals, taking as a basis precisely their shared origin, Origin with a capital “O”. Their action demonstrated that Christianity is credible both in itself and in its public and social significance.

Taking our cue from this interpretative approach, it is evident that the process of European integration does not stand as one possibility among others, but rather possesses in a certain sense the force of a destiny that European men have the mission to fulfil. To betray it [It. tradirlo – translator’s note] would mean for our Continent a rejection of its own traditio, as well as probably representing, in the globalised world of today, a political suicide with unimaginable consequences.

2. The task for Christians

In this situation, how can Christians contribute to the process of European integration? What can the Christians of today do, not only for the sake of the affirmation of their roots, but by virtue of their presence in the here and now of history, to deepen the process begun sixty years ago while showing themselves at one and the same time faithful to the original principles and able to rise to the new challenges of our age? What has the Christian inheritance and indeed Christianity as lived today got to do with Europe?

In order to reply to these questions, a significant datum needs to be stressed, which summarises the phenomena referred to briefly just now: we live in an ever-more plural society. The presence of an ever-increasing variety of religious expressions and world visions seems to exclude the possibility of identifying a shared Weltanschauung as a way to make our shared life flourish. If this applies within each one of our western societies (for all their local variations), the situation is further complicated on the European level by the plurality of cultures and juridical and political traditions that characterises our continent.

Nonetheless Christians are surely well equipped to face up to that inevitable tension between identity and difference, between unity and plurality, which is in reality proper to each historical epoch. It is in fact in the mystery of the Trinity that resides par excellence the principle of difference in unity. And this principle, by virtue of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, becomes a criterion of comprehension and evaluation of every difference, from those constitutive of soul-body, of man-woman, of person-community and of individual-society, to all the ethnic, cultural, and religious diversities.  Historical events in Europe show this quite clearly. Obviously it does not automatically follow that Europe can painlessly reach easy accommodations between so many actors, state and non-state, personal and communal, in the field. Christians however certainly have at their disposition instruments that enable them to respond to the challenge of plurality.

Concretely, the task that they must take on will be that of rethinking the axioms on which our procedural democracies are based and the principle of secularity on which they aim to govern themselves. In a plural society, by its nature tending to be very conflictual, secularity prevails only if conditions are created that guarantee the narration and the content of all the personal and social subjects that inhabit it with a view to mutual recognition (Ricoeur[7]). Today Europe requires a new secularity valuing all the subjects that are actors in the plural society, guaranteeing the public expression of their deepest convictions.

For example if I believe in the value of the family based on publicly-recognised marriage that is faithful and open to life, but fail to back it in public debate, on the assumption that only by being quiet will I respect the ideas and values of others, I in fact take something away from the life of the community, I censor in advance the account of an experience that can enrich debates and discussions within the community.

This attempt to propose my experience to (but not to impose it on) the shared community narrative and the desire to convince others of the goodness of my proposition are the opposite of relativism.

Europe today needs a new secularism which values all subjects who act in the plural society and guarantees the public expression of their deepest convictions.

Only thus will it be possible to have a cohabitation harmonious in tendency that produces a good life. To pursue this complex harmony there needs to be a practical acknowledgement – I emphasise practical acknowledgement – of the material and spiritual goods to be shared: as Maritain argued in 1947 at UNESCO it is not a question of formulating in the abstract a theoretical accord between different worldviews. It is necessary, through agreed procedures, to confer political value on the primary social good of a practical nature: the fact of living together. This social datum must be elevated to the level of political good by all and promoted by institutions. There will not then need to be any preliminary accord about its foundation. Within this space, guaranteed to all, the dynamism of mutual dialogical recognition between the subjects about the individual contents of value can operate, in a close but always open debate between diverse worldviews. From this point of view, the practical political good of being in society could constituite that political universal which the process of secularisation has lost sight of all through modernity[8].

In this way the difference (sometimes acute) between common political action and the various cultural identities ceases, at least in principle, to be conflictual. The various identity-subjects must obviously live together under the guidance of the public establishment, while the latter, to carry out its sensitive regulatory role, must be aconfessional and impartial towards all, without however taking up neutralist positions. It can do this by guaranteeing the two constitutive levels of the political: the acknowledgement of the value of the practical-social common good of being together and the acknowledgement of those specific values that continuous negotiation will gradually recognise as such – according to the criterion formulated by Rawls of the overlapping consensus[9] – in an ongoing quest as occasion demands for a noble com-promise on specific goods of an ethical, social, cultural, economic, and political nature with all the other “inhabitants” of the plural society. 

The context that explains this further is defined by the principle of the inevitability of the cultural interpretation of faith: each faith is always subjected to a public cultural interpretation.  As John Paul II wrote, “a faith that does not become cultural would not be fully accepted, nor entirely thought out, nor faithfully lived”. In fact faith – the Judaic and the Christian – being the fruit of a God who has involved himself with history, has inevitably to do with the concreteness of life and death, of love and suffering, of work and rest and civic action.  If faith becomes culture then it is inevitable that its historical emergence generates an interpretation of faith itself.  The faith-culture relationship is circular.

In this phase of postmodernity in our plural societies, two particular cultural interpretations of Christianity are in evidence that are not far from being polar opposites.

The first is one that treats Christianity as a civil religion, a mere ethical cement, capable of functioning as social glue for our democracies.  If a position like this is plausible for the unbeliever, its structural insufficiency must be evident to the believer.

The other, more subtle, is one that tends to reduce Christianity to the proclamation of the pure and simple Cross for the salvation of ‘every other’.  To be concerned for example with bioethics or biopolitics would distract from the authentic message Christ’s mercy.  As if this message were in itself ahistorical and did not possess anthropological, social, and cosmological implications.

An attitude like this produces a dispersion of Christians in society and ends up hiding the human significance of faith as such.

Neither of these two cultural interpretations succeeds however in expressing in an adequate manner the true nature of Christianity and of its action in civil society:  the first since it reduces it to its secular dimension, separating it from the natural strength of the Christian subject, gift of the encounter with the personal advent of Jesus Christ in the Church;  the second since it deprives faith of its incarnational force.

I believe that another cultural interpretation is more respectful of the nature of man and of the fact that he exists in relation.  This is one that runs along the boundary line that separates civil religion from the crypto-diaspora and maintains the advent of Jesus Christ in all its integrity, proclaiming all the mysteries of faith and all the aspects and implications with which these mysteries are replete.

In this interpretation of the faith a central role is played by the style of testimony, which is counterposed to that of militancy or hegemony.  Testimony understood as method of knowledge and communication.  Nothing can be alien to this view of things, this curiosity and passion, nothing of that which forms part of the daily life of men and women of today, as well as politics and economics.

3. Religious freedom

With regard to the more specific contents of the action of Christians in the area of European integration, I would like to dwell only on one crucial point: religious freedom.

It is much more than mere prediction to state that religions are called to play a role in the future of Europe, for it is in fact a conclusion that anyone can draw from the simple observation of current circumstances. The presence of diverse religious realities -and I am thinking in the first place of Islam – has moreover contributed very substantially to disprove the predictions made only a few decades ago of the coming of “a secular world”. Of course, the multiplication of religious subjects and visions sometimes radically different from each other and the appearance on the scene of new actors has aroused the suspicion of many. But we cannot forget the fact that in European history religious, cultural, and socio-political events have manifested (beyond the necessary distinctions) as so interwoven as to be inseparable in reality. In this connection a far from negligible difference is observable between the two shores of the Atlantic. From the United States to various areas of Africa, to Latin America, from the Middle to the furthest East the presence of Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal Christians is growing markedly. Leaving aside any judgement that may be passed on these new realities, what matters here is to note that they combine their strong “missionary” thrust and faith with an active participation in public life. In Europe, on the contrary, there prevails an attitude tending to assert that public debate must prescind from the religious root of personal convictions. But this ultimately means obliging believers to behave as if they were atheists, which ends up depriving society of important resources. However some prominent thinkers – I have in mind for example Habermas[10], Böckenförde[11], and Rawls[12] – have begun to acknowledge in religious traditions, and in Christianity initially, the expression of a cognitive potential and a reference to a civil commitment which simply cannot be ignored.

Religions in fact possess the capacity to represent the universal in a concrete way. Contrary to what European culture has ended up postulating in the course of modernity, values are never given in the abstract (the Charter of fundamental rights itself comes close to being a pure and simple list of formal propositions), but only within lived traditions. And indeed some axioms that are fundamental to our societies – I think for exemple of the idea of freedom or of the idea of equality – can derive fresh energy from the testimony of the faithful who live them within their own communal experience. The recognition of this ought to involve an acknowledgement on the part of the political power of the public subjectivity of religions[13]. Hence the necessity that public institutions not only recognise but actively promote an effective religious freedom. In the course of some of my visits to Middle Eastern countries I have been able to encounter a reality in which Christians and Muslims, on the basis of certain shared visions – for example the dignity of the human being – combine their energies in cultural and social works with surprising results. I think of the work on behalf of great numbers of differently-abled persons (handicapped) carried on by the Association Our Lady of Peace Centre for Individuals with Special Needs (composed of Muslims and Christians) in Jordan. And all this in contexts in which religious liberty is certainly not encouraged.  I can only imagine what could happen in Europe, what potential could be released if the climate were to grow more favourable to mutual discussion. Obviously that is possible on condition that religions abandon self-interpretations of a private nature on the one hand or of a fundamentalistic variety on the other to create a space for mutual debate between themselves and with all the other cultures.

The idea of possessing a universal mission has always been dear to Europeans, but this task has been complicated and in part obscured by the phenomenon of European colonialism, which has often trasformed the mission into a project for conquest and oppression.

From the beginning of his Pontificate John Paul II gave a new slant to the conception of Europe, formulating, with a courage unheard of in those days, the vision of a continent capable of breathing with two lungs and united from the Atlantic to the Urals.

How then to rehabilitate a universal vision capable of making Europe a significant actor in globalisation and at the same time to preserve her from the tempation to engulf other realities of the planet with her culture? To reply to this question we must refer to the singular relationship with those anthropological, social, and ecological goods involved in the Christian revelation and which possess a universal value. I have recently had occasion to reread a very brief essay by Romano Guardini with the significant title Il significato del dogma del Dio trinitario per la vita etica della comunità[14], where the great German thinker points out a crucial social implication of the Trinitarian mystery. Precisely because Europe received these goods freely she cannot claim ownership of them. They are offered by the plan of a Father who guides the history of all the human family. No reality, however much it be developed and perfected, can ever claim to exhaust the totality of the real. In this connection what Etienne Gilson wrote in 1952 precisely with reference to Europe is highly apposite: «She will be learned but she will not be Science. She will be fruitful in beauty, but she will not be Art. She will be just, but she will not be Law. And we hope that she will be Christian, but she will not be Christendom»^[15]. (Elle sera savante, mais elle ne sera pas la Science. Elle saura enfanter dans la beauté, mais elle ne sera pas l’Art. Elle sera juste, mais elle ne sera pas le Droit. Et nous espérons qu’elle sera Chrétienne, mais elle ne sera pas la Chrétienté). Her task remains that of offering to the world what she has received, of showing the world (to use another expression of Cardinal Lustiger’s), «un nouvel art de vivre» (a new art of living). If we want to have recourse to a Christian category, we can say that the proper mission of the Europeans is, in dialogue and in constant debate with other cultures, to bear testimony to the pursuit, personal and communal, of that good life, made up as Aristotle said of philìa, which cannot fail to be at the foundation of the construction of the polis.

If kept within these parameters, the European contribution to the constitution of a new world order, as foretold for some time by the social Magisterium of the Church, can be as important as has already been the case at the noblest moments of her history. Europe’s offering can involve all the continents in the pratice of a free cohabitation of citizens, of intermediate bodies, and of nations that will give life to a civil society capable not of sacrificing differences but of exalting them – and without them disrupting the ever – more urgent unity between the peoples of the planet.

Studium Generale Marcianum Venezia

ASSET – Alta Scuola Società Economia Teologia  

International Summer School/ Venice, September 6th-10th 2010 

THE “NEW RIGHTS” IN THE EUROPEAN AND AMERICAN PUBLIC SPACE

 Rethinking Rights in a Plural Society 

+ Angelo Card. Scola

Patriarch of Venice 

1. The Summer School as an occasion and the role of Asset

The Summer School is a particularly important and prestigious event in the programme of research and teaching carried out at Asset, l’Alta Scuola di Società Economia e Teologia. Asset developed out of the Studium Generale Marcianum and it was conceived as a means of fostering contemporary interpretative frameworks for the study of today’s socio-cultural reality, viewed in terms of the rise of the “plural society”. This is a project that Asset plans to develop by the utilisation of methods of transdisciplinary comparison, through research on significant issues, such as discussion of the current forms of reason and “public reason” in particular and the elucidation of crucial anthropological and social issues from the diagnostic and critical-propositional point of view.

The transdisciplinary ethos that Asset aims to foster, making connections between the domains of legal science, economics, philosophy, and religion, is a necessity if we are to capture and comprehend reality as it is, namely as rooted in history. Economic globalisation, the civilisation of the internet, migration on an epochal scale, the spread of an education and schooling that are international in character – all these phenomena penetrate everywhere in the structures of contemporary societies. Therefore in pursuit of the unity of knowledge – the raison d’être of the Studium generale Marcianum, along with its concern for the unity of the subject of knowledge – we cannot fail to take up the invitation to the unity of the object of knowledge which is implied in the frequent projects of the transdisciplinary era today under way in various fields of research.

Theology too is of course not exempt from this commitment. The new cultural and social phenomena challenge it to the core; and it has the choice either of interacting with the other disciplines, or submitting to the consequences of too much self-referentiality. Theological pratice is called on for help in the guidance of study and formation by reflecting on the experience of the faith of the Christian community, the place out of which authentic and critical encounter with cultures is born.

Asset is not a study centre, but it aspires to become a School capable of articulating the Christian cultural patrimony in the context of the plural society. 

2. Why legal studies?

Now that the subject proposed has been identified, the decision to opt for a starting point in the terrain of legal studies can be seen to make sense. Law now constitutes the lingua franca of peoples and cultures[1], as can be seen on two levels. In the first place, legal issues represent a privileged level of exchange, comparison, and relationship between the various traditions and peoples.[2] This becomes evident if we turn our minds to human rights in particular, or in other words to those that are defined as “fundamental rights”. The drive for amendments to rights in a country often arises from the reception of the law or praxis prevalent in another state, or of solutions received and relaunched by international treaties.[3] What happens elsewhere, then, has importance for the legal experience of each country.

In the second place, rights have a specific role in each society: a role that is now no longer only regulative, in the normalization of relations. The idea of social change, of evolution within a given society seems almost inevitably to assume juridical connotations. When we speak of change, we almost always– and perhaps above all – draw on legal experience. It seems that when a society judges itself, or another community, it searches for parameters of judgement in juridical instruments. Law has become, as it were, one of the languages in which the universal speaks.

This imposing expansion of the horizon and the role of law points us to the rationale for, and the scope of, this Summer School. It does not intend to limit itself to being a mere survey of the phenomenon, but expects in addition to examine the critical aspects of it. 

3. The new rights and the conception of man

Today’s session opens – and not by accident – with a reflection on the new rights and on the conception of man that they suggest by implication; we shall be returning to this subject on several occasions in the course of the coming week.

The ever more insistent and widespread preoccupation with human dignity in our day does not shield us from doubts about what kind of idea of man is involved in the new rights. The debate on the subject has made it sufficiently clear that the catalogue of fundamental rights has been persistently modified in recent decades, both on the international level and within each country. Two modes of interpretation, which may perhaps be incompatible, have become established in this connection: on the one hand a gradualistic idea of human dignity, that values and protects life differently depending on the circumstances[4] in which the individual is placed; on the other hand, a vision of man as individual subject prescinding from the context in which he belongs[5]. These new conceptions of rights are grafted onto the old Lockean root of liberalism, promoting a new stage of legal individualism: they have features that are largely novel in respect of those with which traditional liberalism had made us acquainted.

To summarise with the greatest possible brevity, legal experience, especially on the American model[6], today seems to locate the individual at the centre of the order of things, breaking the social bonds by which his actual concrete life is held. This aspect of the situation is not lacking in ambiguity and indeed it has considerable importance, given the influence that for some decades Anglosaxon and American legal culture has been acquiring on the Continent and especially in Italy[7].

The ambiguity of the frame of reference within which the new rights are being developed, centred as it is on the individual, ultimately affects the relationship between society and state. If the task of law is to make possible the mere contiguity of individuals who move along parallel tracks, life in society disappears from the horizon of law. If the subject is detached conceptually from the social context of reference and deprived of bonds and relations, or if there is merely a failure to recognise the crucial role that society possesses in the affirmation of the personality of each individual, this has fundamental implications. It is in fact an approach that impoverishes the role of civil society and attributes the task of the protection and care of individuals to political authority alone. We are confronted with the paradoxical affirmation of a massive centrality of the state at the very moment when social arrangements are giving scope, formally at least, to the principle of subsidiarity. 

4. The sustainability of rights

In addition to the new physiognomy of rights, we shall be considering their sustainability. There are highly complex issues involved in the circulation of rights, the transmission from one country to another of legal solutions or decisions taken by the European Union. If the range of rights and duties grows wider while the social horizon becomes ever more complex, this cannot fail to cause disturbances to the equilibrium of each state. The widening of the duty of protection or the addition of new duties has inevitable and almost immediate repercussions on the economic, productive and social levels. It is not realistic to separate the question of rights and duties from that of social and economic requirements, except at the price of creating rights that are not concretely exercisable or even that are destructive for the future of society.[8]

A perspective that does not take account of the social and economic implications of rights is not simply myopic but narrow from the start. The opposition between the requirements of protection of the person and economic exigencies, which may sometimes certainly exist in pratice, is not always necessarily present. To posit the relationship between rights and economy in oppositional terms means to replicate that individualistic anthropology, this time Hobbesian in character, which separates the subject from the social requirements of the context in which he lives. When the hypertrophy of rights suffocates economic life, it reveals by that very fact radical and intrinsic defects. 

5. The challenge of legal modernity: the case of Islam

 An individualistic anthropological model is not even a good common ground for facing up to processes of migration either, given that it is not easily assimilable by non-western cultures. This is in fact a non-secondary aspect of the phenomenon of the globalisation of rights, which applies precisely to the field of immigration and to countries in which the religious tradition plays a legally very important role.

The dramatic emergence everywhere of a plural society, in which is clearly discernible a process of “hybridisation” – a term that I use to indicate the process of constant interaction between identities[9], cannot fail to have repercussions on legal experience both in the countries of immigration, and in those of emigration. The so-called rights of new generations cannot but reckon with this prospect: the “new rights” must inevitably come to terms with a “new society”.

There is another aspect of the problem to be considered. Legal experience can reasonably be transmitted and become established if it fits with some existing pattern in the culture to which it is relating[10]. This represents a challenge that current legal reflection cannot avoid. The export of legal culture which is developing in our countries can be interpreted in two diametrically opposed ways. It may consist in what amounts to an unacknowleged replay of colonialism, so that an alien practice is imposed on another culture; or, on the contrary, it may be the sincere advocacy of a value so that another social order acknowledges it: an advocacy solicitous in its turn to receive the good pratices that the other order suggests.

This applies above all to Islamic societies and to the important Islamic presence in western societies. The capacity of the present order of things to control social phenomena, to give them an outlet and a prospect, to integrate them into the framework of a normality of relations, is put to the test by a religious presence, variegated and yet endowed with a strong internal cohesion, that asserts itself on a collective level.

The persistent replay of the logic of the Enlightenment, which aims at cohabitation by playing on the separation between the public arena and the private space and between the religious and secular spheres, does not seem to work in favour of this normalisation of relations[11]. It cannot be a fear of the Islamic presence that leads to advocacy of a model already in crisis within the traditional European context, a model which legal doctrine has repeatedly stigmatised[12] because it excludes from social life precisely those things that religious persons hold most dear[13]. A clear separation between the secular and religious spheres does not seem to help cohabitation, rather it deprives it of justifications. 

6. The background

The question that involves philosophy and theology most directly has up to now remained in the background of our reflection. Soon after the felicitous conclusion to the drafting of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Man (1948), Maritain claimed that agreement could be reached on it only by prescinding from the question of the foundation of the rights themselves. Basically, the various subjects had agreed on the content of the Declaration, each on the basis of their own religious, philosophical, ideological and cultural presuppositions, without finding a theoretical common ground for a shared understanding.

The most discerning political philosophy of today, reflecting on the plural nature of democracy, has seen the positive aspect of this choice, developing organically what was then a simple factual given. It is necessary, through agreed procedures, to confer political value on the primary social good of a practical nature: the fact of living together. It is a social datum that needs to be elevated to the level of a political good by all and promoted by institutions, and it will not require any preliminary agreement as to its foundation. Within such a space that is guaranteed to all, the dynamism of dialogical acknowledgement of individual contents of value between the subjects can operate, in a close but always open comparison between the different world views. From this point of view, the practical political good of being in society could constitute the political universal that the secularisation process has lost sight of throughout modernity[14].

In this way the difference, which is at times acute, between shared political action and the various cultural identities ceases, at least in principle, to be conflictual. The various subjects in question ought obviously to live together under the guidance of the public institution, while this latter, if it is to accomplish its sensitive regulatory role, ought to be non-confessional and impartial towards all, without however taking up neutralist positions. It will be able to act in this way by guaranteeing the two constitutive levels of the political: an acknowledgement of the value of the practical-social common good of being together and an acknowledgement of those specific values that ongoing negotiation will recognise gradually as such, according to the criterion formulated by Rawls of the overlapping consensus[15], in the continuing quest, from time to time, for a noble compromise on specific goods of an ethical, social, cultural, economic, and political nature with all the others “inhabiting” the plural society.

On the basis of these points we can see that the theme of the foundation, which will of necessity become axiomatic in plural societies, will inevitably be an ongoing part of the debate between subjects.

The fact that often the broadening of rights makes more likely the progressive elimination of the philosophical, ideological, and theological presuppositions that would limit their expansion, does not prevent the problem of axioms being reflected in the actual content of the rights: liberty, life, and human dignity acquire new meanings and unprecedented forms precisely because the relevant philosophical context has been lost to view. The context is not discussed, it is simply forgotten. As the correlative of this, the specific content of each right fades away. Concepts wander beyond their natural or at least initial borders. Such for example is the case with human dignity. Developed as a useful tool for the protection of minorities and vulnerable individuals, it is now utilised to configure a person’s right to terminate his own life.

This is an example of the profound variations in the orientation of contemporary rights, whereby the redefinition of fundamental concepts as imposed by the plural society[16], mainly taking as its basis a concept of liberty understood in a purely subjective way, often ends up overturning their traditional meaning.

We are thus faced with a paradox: a hitherto unprecedented circulation and expansion of rights in tandem with a degree of vagueness about their content. 

7. The task

Here is the point of entry for the contribution of the Marcianum – the specific role of the theological dimension and of the social doctrine of the Church. The point at issue is not about putting “new wine into other wineskins”, but about making clearer the true face of these rights. This operation brings into question the whole horizon of the human and theological sciences. Looked at from one side, any catalogue of rights has formidable economic and social implications, but in truth it is itself the product of a certain view of man which is always I-in-relation. To recover the true face of rights it is indispensable to engage with their anthropological and social dimensions: an objective on which the various sciences and disciplines converge, each with its own specificity but in a perspective which increasingly requires a transdisciplinary dimension.

Dialoghi di San Giorgio – Inaugural Event – Venice, 13 September 2010

Protecting nature or saving creation?

Ecological conflicts and religious passions

  Card. Angelo Scola

Patriarch of Venice

1. A cue from Mahler

“O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens, Lebens trunk’ne Welt!”: “O beauty, O world drunk with eternal love and life!” These words that Mahler added to the text of the last movement of Das Lied von der Erde (1907-1909) arguably sum up the whole spirit of the work. They are fundamental concepts shaping the structure of the composition.

First, beauty. According to Prince Myshkin’s celebrated claim in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, “Beauty will save the world.”[1] But beauty, if separated from good and truth would, to use Dostoevsky’s words again, this time pronounced by Dmitri Karamazov, be “terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles… The awful thing is that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of man.”[2] And yet, as the great St Augustine asks, significantly in De musica: “Tell me, I beg you, what else can one love if not beautiful things?”[3]

The second key concept in Mahler’s phrase is the world, seen as the whole of reality. In this connection his reference to drunkenness requires close scrutiny. It is not meant as an allusion to the “third eye of the poet” pointing the way to other worlds, which the so-called poètes maudits in late 19th-century Paris (Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé…) sought by drinking absinthe. It is an opening up to fullness, overabundance and even the longing for. This brings us to love, the power which “moves the sun and the stars”[4], and often becomes solace in life. And lastly, life and eternity. Both because life is unquenchable thirst for eternity and because in every life there is something eternal. 

2. Taking in the real

Like all musical geniuses, Mahler alludes to an irreducible state of affairs. Reality speaks to man and man is able to take in reality. Indeed, there may well be an intimate correspondence between the two.

But where does the possibility of the relationship between man and the outside world come from? To come ex abrupto to the theme of this meeting: is this relationship the involvement –  albeit at qualitatively different levels – of all beings in a single nature, or the relationship that both have with a Creator? Before attempting to answer this question, we must mention an important factor. Although the question concerning the relationship between man and the world is as old as humanity itself, today it has taken on an urgent new relevance. Unlike what happened up to the age of Kant, it now seems inconceivable that anthropological and ethical questions might come from cosmology. Considerations about the Earth no longer provide a picture in which man must find a place (anthropology); nor do they constitute an example to be followed[5] or to which man must or can refer in some way. Man now appears literally to be im-mondo (“not of the world” or “unclean” and excluded from the sacred). The Earth often appears only to be a kind of inconsequential ornament. People confidently go about their affairs but their affairs owe nothing at all to the cosmos. They are extraneous to it: “We no longer know in what way it is morally good that there are humans beings in the world; and, for example, why it is good that they continue to be there. Is their existence worth the sacrifices that it costs? To the biosphere, to their parents, to themselves?”[6].

Precisely on these grounds, deciding what kind of relationship man has with the Earth is an urgent crucial issue. 

3. Man and the Earth

An initial suggestion as to what our position in the surrounding environment is comes from the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople: “It is a fact that the term ‘environment’ presupposes someone encompassed by it. The two realities involved include, on the one hand, human beings as the ones encompassed, and, on the other hand, the natural creation as the one that encompasses… we must clearly retain this distinction between nature as constituting the environment and humanity as encompassed by it”[7]. Besides providing an essential initial description of the relationship between man and the environment, Bartholomew’s remarks illustrate how this relationship belongs to the shared experience of life. Man experiences a living exchange with the created world and at the same time cannot avoid wondering about the meaning of being immersed in nature: where is that experience grounded?

In the Bible the environment in which man is created is represented by the figure of a garden (the Greek parádeisos), a place of beauty in which man’s constituent relations – with self, with God and all other living beings – are harmonious. Moreover, the “environment” itself has been created for man, who is called on to cultivated and care for it (Gen 2:15). He is also given the task of naming the living creatures (Gen 2:19).

Starting from theological thinking about creation, we realise how God’s creative action is manifested not only in making the world exist, but also in making human beings free and therefore responsible for the whole of creation. The narrative of the Fall of man and woman is meant to signify that from the first instant of creation, man’s freedom is at stake. We cannot think of man separately from his freedom. And the Earth exists for man so much that the Church identifies the root of the environmental issue in original sin. John Paul II described the issue in exquisitely anthropological terms: “In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way. At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment lies an anthropological error, which un fortunately is widespread in our day. Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and, in a certain sense, create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God’s prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the Earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though the Earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of the creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him”[8]. This is why, as the Revelation still teaches us, the man-environment relation must be seen from the point of view of Redemption.

Christ’s resurrection ushers in a new stage in which the relationship between man and creation is set under the sign of birth or “labour”, which is painful but positive because intended for the good in life. And this is above all anthropological labour, which affects however, as St Paul points out, the whole of creation: “For creation awaits with eager expectation the revelation of the children of God; for creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but because of the one who subjected it, in hope that creation itself would be set free from slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that all creation is groaning in labour pains even until now; and not only that, but we ourselves, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved” (Rom 8: 19-24). In this way anthropological labour and cosmological labour are interlocked in the ineluctable eschatological perspective. Thus in the second coming – already initiated on the path of the human family – what is already complete in Christ will be completed in us and in the world through the resurrection of our mortal body in our true body, in the new heavens and the new Earth. According to the Christian point of view, in this light we can look at the first creation and the new creation not as two separate realities which succeed each other mechanically, but as two moments which reciprocally embrace each other. The second assumes the first and gives its full meaning. The first in itself would inevitably remain incomplete and not adequately intelligible. Moreover, the historic-salvific path develops according to a plan conceived “before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4), which will be realised in “the fullness of times” (Eph 1:10).

With the new creation, Christ is revealed as the Head of creation itself:[9] the foundation of Christ’s caring for all men until his death and his resurrection for us lies in the creation of all men in Christ[10].

With thus grasp the literal meaning of creation in Christianity as the primordial relationship between God and the human person in the world: Why did God create man and the world when he has no need of them? This question can be couched in the terms of modernity as: Why is there being rather than nothingness?

Creation is the gift that God makes of Himself. Through it, he freely brings into being and maintains creatures in life, who, although radically distinct from Him, bear His indelible mark. 

4. Two reductive versions of the man-nature relationship

This vision of existence enables us to eschew two inadequate conceptions – inadequate because basically incapable of fully accounting for human experience – of the man-environment relationship.

On one hand, an extreme anthropocentrism, whereby man is the absolute master of the cosmos. We know that some ecological thinkers base this line of reasoning on the precedence that the Bible accords to man over the created world[11]. The argument comes from the first version of the Genesis narrative of creation, which takes the form of an order given to man: “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth” (Gen 1:28). Without entering into a detailed reply to this critique, we can simply refer to the “second narrative” of creation (Gen 2:41-3:24), in which the Biblical teaching is formulated as follows: “The Lord God then took the man and settled him in the garden of Eden, to cultivate and care for it” (Gen 2:15). Here there are not only two protagonists in the man-creation relationship – the human community and creation – but three, given that the relationship originates with the Creator. This leads to a further consideration. If man cannot rise to be the omnipotent master of the cosmos, nor can he delude himself that he can save it from disaster only through his own efforts, even when resorting to the remarkable discoveries and applications of science and technology.

Moreover, this prevents us from naively accepting a biocentrism or ecocentrism which sets out to “eliminate the ontological and axiological difference between man and other living beings, since the biosphere is considered a biotic unity with undifferentiated value”[12]. Accordingly, “man’s superior responsibility can be eliminated in favour of an egalitarian consideration of the ‘dignity’ of all living beings”[13]. But this view impoverishes both the value of man, who is ultimately denied the status of a free agent participating in the activities of the Creator, and the value of the earth, which is stripped of all meaning that is not its own pure conservation. In fact as Pope Benedict XVI writes: “Human salvation cannot come from nature alone, understood in a purely naturalistic sense”[14].

If the cosmos is reduced to nature in which we are absorbed, our relationship with it can at most be aesthetical, but not ethical (Kierkegaard). Nature, however, is not only “a set of ‘things’ but also of ‘meanings’”[15], through which human freedom is called on to realise its own original vocation in the search for the face of the Creator. 

5. Environmental conflicts as an anthropological issue

After this brief survey of the Christian vision of the relationship between man and creation, we can ask –  in line with the objectives of the organisers of this event – if and how this conception, and similarly those of the other great religions, can still effectively interact with a way of perceiving and tackling the current intense ecological conflicts.

It is obviously not up to me, nor am I competent in the field, even to attempt to answer the question which will be discussed by the experts during the Dialogue. It may roughly be framed in the following terms: are religions, as demonstrated by their influence in other fields in the past, able to mobilise energies to contribute to a thorough-going ecological conversion? This would require a kind of radical eschatology, as Latour argues[16], i.e. a long slow change affecting many areas of life referring to an enormous quantity of details and, most importantly, dependent on an infinite number of actions which, and this is the difficult part, demand that billions of people change their outlook. Can religious passions come to the aid of the low energy levels which seem to characterise the many ecological conflicts today?

This question contains a fairly overt invitation to frame in a radically new way the relationship between eco-logy and theo-logy in order to tackle openly the internal conflicts in these two worlds. I will only make a generic kind of suggestion.

I do not wish to go into the debate on the concept of nature. Almost everyone, in both the scientific and theological fields, now believes nature is doomed and considers this situation to be responsible for almost all the ills afflicting humanity. Personally, I believe that since something given is always given to someone, an ultimate ineffable element is ineliminable. And from Aristotle on, what has fysis been, if not this multiple, dynamic actuality?

But we must bear in mind, and especially as far as Christianity is concerned, that we cannot speak of nature other than in the terms of creation. And it is effective thinking on creation that paves the way to reconsidering the relationship between ecology and theology. Creation brings the relationship into the picture. Post-modern man is faced with a painful alternative. Having left behind the age of utopias and the pitch darkness it cast on the last century, post-modern anthropology has taken on a strongly Pascalian character. It is pursuing the meaningful wager of a radical alternative; does third-millennium man only wish to be the experiment of himself or does he wish to be a self-in-relation?[17] To face up to this challenge, anthropology must be dramatic. It must accept that the insuperable one, of which the self consists, is always present in a twofold way. I am one, that is why I can say “I”, but I am always one of two: one of body-soul; one of man-woman; one of individual-community, and one of man-cosmos. Hence otherness makes me an internal dimension of self, which on these grounds cannot exist other than in a relationship. It is the self which openly demonstrates this dramatic or polarized character. This is why the correct way of referring to the self is as the self-in-relation.

The interlocking of constituent polarities reveals the authentic relationship of creation as the permanent loving relationship of He who summons into being all reality (cf. Rom 1:20) and continues to accompany it. According to the Jewish and Christian traditions, God made the relationship of love the reason for his compromise with the human family throughout its history. For the Jewish people and for Christians, he is God with us, and the us brings into play all the constituent polarities-relationships that I mentioned earlier. The ever polar relationship of self with oneself, with others, with the cosmos and with God is the inevitable route by which we can say “I” in a humanly satisfactory way.

We inevitably see in this perspective the urgent task of inscribing the good relationship with creation in the intersecting circles of the other constituent relations.

I realise that what I am suggesting is too general not to run the risk of being obvious. But I feel it does show that there is a bridge between ecology and theology. And the more judicious scientists are also building this bridge today, having abandoned an ecologist vulgate based on a mythical return to a good and innocent nature. Baudelaire’s exclamation – Pan has come back! – is empty. And we have even less reason for crediting Assmann when he describes Moses as an Egyptian. The way for the urgent, collaborative convergence between ecology and theology is to continue the logic of creation with love. This logic is scientific, religious and political all in one. And consequently it is the logic of justice and of the complete development of humanity.

Religions can have something important to say on environmental issues when they are expressed through individual and social players willing to narrate the fullness of human experience and committed to putting forward valid arguments on its behalf.

Mahler himself bears witness to this when he says: “My heart is eternally devoured by a torment: my immense yearning for you”[18]. Or when he feels he is prey to the questions that inexorably arise from experience common to all people: “Where have we come from? Where are we going to? Is it true, as Schopenhauer says, that I really desired to live before being conceived? If I was created free, why does my personality imprison me? What is all this suffering for? How can cruelty and evil be the work of a merciful God? In the end, will death reveal the meaning of life to us?”[19]

As he was to tell his faithful disciple, Bruno Walter, on looking back on life when death already had a hand on his shoulder: “There are many – too many – things that I could say about myself; I cannot even begin. I’ve suffered so much in these last eighteen months [after his daughter’s death and his own illness] that I can barely tell you about them. How could I try and describe such a terrible crisis? I see everything in a completely new light; I have undergone such an incredible transformation that it wouldn’t surprise me to find myself in a new body (like Faust in the last scene). I’m more eager than ever to live and I find ‘the habit of living’ sweeter than ever.” He ends with a magnificent and particularly meaningful statement: “ It is strange that when I hear music, even when I myself am conducting I find very precise replies to all my questions and everything is perfectly clear and obvious to me. Or rather, what I feel that I perceive with such clarity is that they are not questions at all”[20].

In short, after so many thoughts, desires and struggles, Mahler finds true solace for his suffering in music – a real opening to the Mystery. The realm of music is very close to that of faith.

It is an opening inviting us to cross the whole of creation.

The Scientific Committee of the Oasis International Foundation

FOYER NOTRE DAME DU MONT, THE LEBANON, 21-22 JUNE 2009

EDUCATION BETWEEN FAITH AND CULTURE: CHRISTIAN AND MUSLIM EXPERIENCES IN DIALOGUE

EDUCATION AS PAIDEIA.

A PROPOSAL FOR OUR TIME

+ Card. Angelo Scola,

Patriarch of Venice

At the beginning of the deliberations of the Scientific Committee of the Oasis International Foundation I believe that it is necessary to take an overall look at the pathway that has been followed over the last seven years in order to assess the importance of the initial insight that brought some of us together in Venice in 2004 and at the same time to reflect in a critical way on the steps that await us. In this way, in addition to making the numerous Lebanese invitees who are amongst us today (whom I would like to thank in a heartfelt way for their presence and my gratitude goes in a particular way to His Most Eminent Beatitude the Patriarch Sfeir, His Excellency Minister Tareq Mitri, the Nuncio, the kind speakers, the large number of Bishops, the rectors and the professors) informed about the origins and the goals of the Oasis Foundation, we will be able to renew our shared commitment to an undertaking that is not without complexity

However, in engaging in an assessment of our work in this glorious land of the Lebanon, we cannot but start, to be realistic, from a bitter observation: rarely as much as over the last year, and I would say above all over the last month, have we feared that we were coming very close to a point of no return. The Holy Father said this forcefully in Cyprus when he feared that in the Middle East there would be ‘greater bloodshed’ if an ‘urgent and concerted international effort to resolve the ongoing tensions in the Middle East, especially in the Holy Land’, was not rapidly engaged in. Such a conflict – in the Lebanon this is well understood – would have disastrous consequences, first of all in terms of human lives but also because of its destabilising effects well beyond the boundaries of the States that might be involved. As is known, the bishops of the Middle East recently stated with painful severity in the Instrumentum laboris that was published prior to the imminent Synod: ‘For decades, the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, disregard for international law, the selfishness of great powers and the lack of respect for human rights have disrupted the stability of the region and subjected entire populations to a level of violence that tempts them to despair’. In the deliberations of this committee we cannot but take these words into account, unless, that is, we want to indulge in a deleterious abstraction which is, unfortunately, often characteristic of men of culture, to which category, indeed, many of us belong.

Faced with a challenge of such dimensions, and – to return to the overall activity of Oasis – faced with the enormous questions that the unprecedented mixing of peoples raises in every part of the world, what was the original insight from which we began? In extreme summarising form: the need to create a place of communion. The Foundation and its various tools (from its journal to the newsletter, and on to events, publications and the web site) exist for this purpose. The word ‘communion’, which was rediscovered and explored by the Second Vatican Council, has become rather widely used. And, as such, it runs the risk of being worn out. However, it is the very cloth of Christian existence and for this reason communion amongst us is an inescapable task that is still ahead of us. It is useless to add that this is not a general cause for inspiration but the principle and the method by which all the activities of the Oasis Foundation should be engaged in.

To explain the reasons for this belief of mine I can do no better than refer to a tale which in its simplicity bears within it the power of an archetype: the Tower of Babel. The event narrated by the Book of Genesis in its eleventh chapter says that the need/wish for unity (for communion) represents the constitutive element of the experience of every man and exercises upon man a permanent appeal. However it also tells us that man cannot achieve it on his own. It is precisely for this reason that each one of us, when we encounter experiences of authentic communion, albeit incipien, is easily, although not automatically, conquered by them. We also well know that the figure of Babel is matched in the New Testament by the event of Pentecost (cf. Acts 2:5-12), that is to say of the Church, and for we Christians communion is – mysterious but real – participation in the Body itself of the Lord. But because of the unstoppable internal dynamic specific to objective love, communion opens up to involve, in concentric circles according to due distinctions, all men, and, for Oasis, Muslims in particular. Again in Cyprus Benedict XVI called Muslims ‘brothers and sisters’, adding, almost to clarify that for him this was not a mere figure of speech, ‘brothers and sisters despite the differences’. Brothers and sisters, we are convinced, not only as men but also and in a specific way as believers, albeit in the variety and at times irreducibility of theological perspectives. The task of Oasis, which obviously should be declined in various fields of work, is to end everything here: to foster the dynamic of Christian communio which because of its very internal logic tends, to the extent that it finds acceptance, to expand ad extra as well. How does it do this? I can only refer briefly to this here because the analysis would lead us far away: through witness, understood in its fullest sense. Witness, therefore, not only as good example but more specifically as a method and communication of truth. This is what Jesus, the ‘faithful witness’ (Ap 3:14) taught us when in front of Pilate ‘I was born and came into this world for this purpose, to speak about the truth’ (Jn 18:37). Here I invite everyone to read the text that His Excellency Msgr. Luigi Padovese gave to us, just a few months ago, during the Second Church Assembly of the Patriarchate of Venice, which has the significant title ‘Christians in Turkey: the Value of Witness’. It is striking to re-read today his words which amongst other things demonstrate how well aware he was of the dangers to which he exposed himself: ‘If, as has happened in past decades, we accepted as Christians not to appear, remaining an insignificant presence within the fabric of the country, there would be no difficulties, but we are realising that, as is happening in Palestine, in the Lebanon and above all in Iraq, this is a road of no return which does not do justice to the Christian history of these countries in which Christianity was born and flourished, and which would not do justice to the thousands of martyrs who in these lands left to us as a heritage the witness of their blood’ (11 October 2009).

1. Tradition and Education

Please forgive me if in order to commence today’s deliberations I have moved from apparently far off, stressing again the proprium of our shared journey. This has led us over the years to speak about unity and diversity (Venice 2005); fundamental rights and democracies (Cairo 2006); the mestizaje of civilisations (Venice 2007); religious freedom (Amman 2008); and lastly the role of traditions (Venice 2009) in contemporary plural society. They emerged, amongst other things, as a concrete setting for the inevitable cultural interpretation of every religious faith. This is a central interest of Oasis. From tradition – to which we addressed ourselves last year – to education, to which this year’s meeting is dedicated, is but a short step, even though it is not one to be taken for granted. Education, as a first approximation, is specifically that process made up first and foremost of good relations and virtuous practices, of the transmission (traditio) of an overall interpretation of reality, offered to an assessment of the freedom of the person being educated. To speak about this in the Lebanon is an extraordinary opportunity for Oasis because this is a country – I believe I am not mistaken – that has chosen to link its destiny to the success or failure of the undertaking of education. Here education emerges as a serious case par excellence: where it succeeds it assures a ‘being-together’ – ‘coexistence’ seems to me to be a reductive and worn out term – which has gained the admiration of the whole of the world; but when it fails, it leaves the field open to the worst forms of violence.

And yet – and we should not conceal this fact – the undertaking of education is in difficulty in almost all latitudes. This is certainly the case in the West where by now reference is openly made to an ‘educational emergency’ and where not rarely the very idea of education seems to have been lost. But it is also the case in the rest of the globe. As the Algerian intellectual Mustapha Cherif, formerly the Minister for Higher Education and Scientific Research, wrote with critical lucidity in an article being published in Oasis: ‘In the Muslim world…Society falls between the anvil and the hammer: there are the ignorant who censor society and level it downwards and there are groups that practise a mimetic approach based on immoral modernism’. In many post-colonial societies the system of state and non-state schools has still not managed to assure mass quality education. And yet, Cherif goes on, ‘as regards the defence of its own sovereignty a country depends on its capacity to produce and assimilate knowledge’. In many cases it is the linguistic question that becomes a mirror of the difficult relationship with modernity. What does it mean for a student to receive a humanistic and religious formation in his or her own national language and a scientific education in English or French? Does one not insinuate the idea that the two areas of knowledge are incommunicable, opening thereby the road to schizophrenic attitudes that facile artificial concordances between science and faith cannot hope to heal? Let us not forget, for that matter, that it is specifically the linguistic question that led us to decide to publish the journal Oasis in its singular editorial formula.

However, our goal is not to indulge in critical aspects nor to formulate dubious classifications as regards the respective gravity of the educational emergencies of the East and of the West but, rather, to offer some lines of approach.

2. Rediscovering the Breadth of Reason

To educate we need an idea of man and above all practice of the humanum. Not an abstract idea, therefore, but an idea inevitably linked to the integral and elementary experience of every individual. Redemptor hominis states with conviction: ‘We are not dealing with the “abstract” man, but the real, “concrete”, “historical” man’. Unfortunately, however, the idea of man implicit in large part in current educational practice, certainly in the West but also at a global level, with respect, at least, to the formation of transnational elites, is increasingly that of a divided subject: on the one hand, it is said to be rational objectivism, and, on the other, in a complementary way, emotional subjectivism. Only the first sphere is said to pertain to education, which is thus said to consist in a correct transmission of information, techniques, abilities and skills. Education in this approach would thus become a synonym for training in the use of reason, for that matter reduced to its instrumental component. Outside the field of reason, and in the final analysis also of education, is said to lie, instead, the world of the affections, the exclusive dominion of a subject who constructs and invents himself or herself in an autonomy that tends to be self-referential and dangerously fragile. In addition, one should at the least refer to the fact that this dualistic conception of the human is increasingly giving way to an absolute positivism. That which, above all as a result of the amazing discoveries of the neurosciences and bio-convergences, refer back all the expressions of the emotional, affective and moral sphere to pure cerebral activities, which in the future could, according to some, even become artificial. We are thus confronted with a conception of reason limited to the empirical-instrumental sphere that does not take into account the detailed modalities by which the human logos is exercised but which must be at the base of an adequate idea of education.

I usually refer to this by using the classical term ‘paideia’ which was made famous by the studies of Werner Jaeger but which is here taken up in a broad sense suggested by Maritain. The notion of paideia, for our daily encounter of Christians and Muslims, has the great advantage of directing us back to one of the two traditions which in different ways we share: the classical heritage and more specifically the heritage of late antiquity, when, that is to say, the dialogue between Hellenic thought and the Biblical message began to take form.

In the famous ethical tract composed in Persia in the tenth century by Miskawayh, ‘The Refinement of Character’, one can read: ‘The perfection which is particular to man is twofold, for he possesses two faculties, one of which is the cognitive and the other the practical. With the one he desires knowledge and the sciences and with the other the organization of things and their arrangement in order. These two perfections are the ones which were indicated by the philosophers. They said: Philosophy is divided into the theoretical part and the practical part. When a man masters both parts, he gains complete happiness’. This quotation could be equally at home in Athens, Alexandria or Rome, not to mention medieval Latin. It well illustrates that ‘Agreement of Two Wisdoms’ – both Christian and Muslim – which in this, as in so many other fields, is not difficult to document.

However, to come to our time and taking advantage of the ineluctable acquisitions of modern and contemporary thought about original structure (foundation), we can state that always and in all cases ‘something gives itself to someone’. This formulation acts only to cut to the bare essentials the classical belief about the intelligibility of the real and the ability of man to host it.

If such is really the case, the task of the educator is that of introducing the person who is being educated to an integral experience of reality. He or she will guide him or her in deciphering its meaning because in offering itself to my freedom reality shows that it already possesses its own unity and thus a logos to be discovered.

3. An Encounter of Freedom

One could well illustrate the wealth included in this vision of paideia compared to an education reduced to mere training, that is closed because of an acritical reduction of the broad spectrum of reason to that question about ultimate things which, in line with the famous phrase of Comte, one should no longer pose.

Of great interest, instead, even though it is not possible to do this, would be to explore what it implies for Christians and Muslims to believe that not only does reality give itself to the subject that hosts it but that it itself is given (or to use a more precise terminological term, ‘created’) and therefore refers back beyond itself to a First Giver. Another line of shared research could be the process of research in which is manifested a certain unification of the multiple which in the view of some refers back to an antecedent Unity which is not of a so-to-speak merely gnoseological character. It would be advisable to discuss the possible role of knowledge about God (I do not dare to say of theology because of the known difficulties of translating that term into the technical language of Islam) as an overall interpretative hypothesis of the real. Furthermore, we could explore what is the meaning of the fact that our being in the world is located for the subject in the chain of generations: within, therefore, tradition. It is evident that one is dealing here with ineluctable questions for the work that awaits us.

But as I have just observed, the emphasis on the capacity of a subject to receive the intelligible real represents only one dimension of paideia. The other equally important dimension is its calling onto the stage the freedom, indeed the freedoms, of the educator and the educated who are always located within a fabric of social relationships. And here it is appropriate to speak about the educational risk. Introduction to a unitary existential hypothesis about the real does not take place without a dual risk. The risk first of all of the person being educated who cannot call any truth ‘his’ or ‘hers’ if he or she does not do this with his or her freedom, as indeed Goethe brilliantly observed: ‘What you have inherited from your fathers, make it your own, so as to be able to possess it’ (‘Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, erwirb es, um es zu besitzen’).

On the other hand the educator as well cannot get out of a self-exposition. The person who says ‘do that’ does not educate. He who invites the student with the words ‘do that with me’ does educate. Indeed, he or she communicates what is dearest to him or her and in doing this makes himself or herself, after a certain fashion, naked. Education – the Church has always taught – is a form of charity, an act of love where the educator offers the whole of himself or herself in witness to that truth that he or she lives as an adequate interpretative key of the real.

In the final analysis education is thus generation and constitutes in all cultures an experience of paternity and sonship.

For we Christians it has its roots in the intra-Trinitarian relationships – relationships that have the face of the singular experience of the relationship of Jesus with the Father and the Spirit.

When reflecting on this ‘encounter of freedom’ which constitutes the second dimension of paideia, we should recognise with great realism that religions, above all when they have acquired or have had imposed upon them the function of being a social glue, have not always known how to defend themselves from the temptation of seeing themselves as the bearers of a truth that is ‘so evident’ as to make completely extrinsic and thus superfluous the absent of freedom on the part of the freedom of the interlocutor. Thus today it happens that whereas, at least at the level of transnational elites, the tendency is spreading to celebrate a freedom detached from any reference to truth-good, there is manifested, as an equal and contrary reaction, the impetus to uphold a truth that is said not to require the involvement of the freedom of the subject in affirming itself as truth. Truth would not be vital gift but only a formal teaching. This is fundamentalism, a pathology of education as grave as forgoing a recognition of the objective ‘claim’ of truth. It can even come to use violence where a partisan spirit lacerates a community by destroying the political good of being together: that practical social good on which the Lebanon has wagered its own existence as a nation.

It is often repeated, and not without good grounds, that the best antidote to fundamentalism and violence is education. We should, however, add: not any kind of education but an education that knows how to keep truth and freedom together. And this last in its personal dimension and communal dimension (including therefore freedom of expression and criticism, even when this is painful, where necessary, and as regards religious freedom, conversion as well). Only an adequate anthropology, based upon I-in relation to God, with other people and with ourselves, will thus allow us to avoid a violent negative tendency, without giving way to an unsatisfactory agnosticism.

And it is at this level, in my view, very much prior to the question of the exegesis of Holy Scriptures, which is so often evoked and yet central, that the decisive future of religions will be played out.

4. The ‘Craft of Living’

In this paper of mine I have not been able to refer to fundamental issues that will be addressed at this morning’s and this afternoon’s sessions: indeed, we will hear religious education and the formation of religious discussed, we will allow ourselves to be guided by the great experience that the Catholic Church and the other Christian communities, as well as the Muslim communities, of the Lebanon have developed in this field, and we will discuss the relationship between education and the creation of national identity. All of these are central aspects for our subject which because of their importance go well beyond the horizons of the Lebanon.

Allow me, however, to end my paper by inviting you to fix your gaze on the fascination of the undertaking of education. A great Italian writer of the twentieth century, Cesare Pavese, gave his diaries the title ‘The Craft of Living’. To teach the craft of living, to teach man to be man, freely able to adhere to truth, is the unfinished task of education. It presents itself afresh to every generation because, as Benedict XVI acutely observed, ‘Unlike what takes place in the field of technology and economics, where the progress of today can build on that of the past, in the ambit of the moral formation and growth of persons such an accumulative possibility does not exist, because human freedom is always new and therefore each person and generation must make their own decisions in their own name’.

And it is once again the philosopher Miskawayh who teaches us, with the whole of the authentically humanistic tradition, the supreme dignity that is inherent in this attempt: ‘Man is the nobles of [the] existents, but, when he does not perform the actions distinctive of his substance he resembles […] the horse which, if it ceases to perform completely the actions distinctive of a horse, is uses as a donkey for carrying loads or as cattle for slaughtering and is better dead than alive. In view of this, it must follow that the art which is concerned with the betterment of man’s actions so that he may perform them completely and perfectly in accordance with his substance […] is the noblest and the most honorable of all the arts.’.

April 29, 2010. G. Fäldt, translation from the Italian for the Nordic Catholic Family Congress May 14-16, 2010, Jönköping, Sweden

Nordische Katholiche Familienkongress

Amore e Vita (Love & Life)

Jönköping, Freitag, 14 Mai 2010

+ Angelo Cardinal Scola

Patriarch of Venice

Before approaching the theme that the conference organizers have given me, which concerns God’s plan regarding the relation between man and woman in the sacrament of marriage, I would like to greet each one of you most warmly and thank His Excellence Monsignor Anders Arborelius who invited me at the end of June 2008 to take part in this meeting for families.

I would also like to thank the permanent deacon Göran Fäldt who has been in contact with me throughout the period leading up to the conference and Mrs Antonella Larsson who has done her utmost to make my trip to Sweden go as smoothly as possible.

My presence here can be traced back to two reasons on a personal level.

The first reason is related to the beauty and the necessity that an exchange of communion within the Churches be sought with ever-increasing tenacity. The communion of the baptized is a telling sign of the unity that is necessary so that “the world may believe” (Jn 17, 21).

The second reason is a conviction which was strongly underscored by Benedict XVI during the ad limina Visit of the Bishops of the Scandinavian countries, in which he referred to this Congress. The Pope spoke of the “centrality of the family for the life of a healthy society” which implies a deepening and a broadening of “the institution of marriage and the Christian understanding of human sexuality”[1]. Man today – the so-called post-modern man – is, at the same time, confused and thirsting. That is why modern man needs to meet men and women who are able to witness to their enthusiasm originated by the unique beauty of the sacrament of matrimony.

I now need to make another brief premise to the question we are about to approach. My lecture will, as I think the title shows, provide an anthropological framework that is intended as a foundation. For that reason it will not address individual ethical and legal problems in detail, which will be addressed in other talks or during the study groups. Also, it would actually not make sense to go into issues that sometimes present themselves very differently in the countries of northern Europe compared with Italy.

There is a third preliminary point to be made. There are some difficulties linked to the theme in my lecture. I sincerely hope that you will work on these difficulties in the study groups, and subsequently, perhaps in groups back home in your parishes, on the text.

1. Love, marriage and family put to the test.

To begin with we should start from the reality of the Euro-Atlantic society we find ourselves in. The current cultural climate is now often classified as post-modern. Obviously, this concept includes a variety of meanings and we cannot summarize them all here. But I believe that some of its features are quite easily observable.

First we find ourselves in a situation of advanced secularization. Clearly, secularization is not the same in all countries. You cannot establish immediate parallels between your countries and, for example, Italy. Or even between Italy and France and Germany. I think, however, that a common core of the secularization of all Euro-Atlantic societies lies in what the Canadian philosopher Taylor defines the third sense of secularization. This consists in considering faith in God as one option among others. In other words, we have gone from a society in which it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer this is one human possibility among others”[2].

The second characteristic of post-modernity, linked to the first, is that man today risks emphasizing individual freedom of choice so far as to consider it as constituting the whole of freedom. In this way, it has no link with any objective good.

The third aspect is the unique combination that has been achieved over the past two centuries between science and technology, especially in biology and increasingly in the neurosciences. This has brought about a major change in the vision of reality. Truth is no longer given by the correspondence between the intellect and the “thing” (adaequatio rei et intellectus), sometimes not even by what is empirically observable. Truth is reduced to what is technically feasible. This ends up by establishing a dangerous equation: “you can, so you must”[3] (technological imperative).

The interweaving of these factors has also radically changed the way in which man sees himself, giving rise to new situations and changes also within the ambit of love and the family. Divorce, unmarried couples, same-sex unions, the reality of living single, contraception, abortion, medically assisted reproduction, the possibility of pre-natal or pre-implantation diagnosis, cloning, as well as homosexuality, have produced a series of separations in the sphere of love, marriage and the family: between the couple and being parents, between parenting and procreation, between the couple-family and sexual difference[4]. These mutations do not stop at the private sphere, but invade civilian life in the same way. In fact, the legislature, in varying degrees in the different countries of the Euro-Atlantic area, is increasingly open to ensuring the rule of law to any “desire” of the citizen-subject, which, moreover, can be extended through the undefined possibilities of technoscience.

From this context we derive a series of questions: should sexual difference, love and fertility be considered contingent facts that can be overcome nowadays – or perhaps already have been – or do they have an absolute value? Are these three factors, taken together, really essential for the experience of marriage and the family? Does their unity deserve to be maintained and consciously pursued as something that calls for the freedom of every person to choose what is good in view of his own good? Is the family founded on a man and a woman’s marriage that is faithful, public and open to life really the appropriate way to develop the whole person? Coming to your countries and considering the plurality of worldviews in them, starting from the difference between believers and non-believers, and considering the various ecclesial and religious affiliations that give rise to a large number of mixed and interreligious marriages, one might ask: how can this plurality of visions be lived in a positive way within the family itself?

Do not all these burning questions urgently propose another question, which summarizes all the previous ones, and which each of us is now called upon to answer, at least implicitly: who or what does the man of the third millennium want to be? Until the fall of the walls between political systems and ideologies, we witnessed a dispute over being human (John Paul II). At the time, the question in dispute – man himself – was somehow identifiable. Today, on the other hand, so much has been lost in the understanding of who man really is.

There are two roads along which post-modern man seeks an answer. Travelling along the first road he wants to be “only his own experiment”, an expression used by a German philosopher of science. Enough of the talk about the person and personal dignity understood as absolute and universal principles!

The second road leads instead to reconsidering these fundamentals from the perspective of the relational nature of the person and of his faculty to be in communion with other human beings.

If man in today’s world is at this crossroads, we need to emphasize, as our meeting will confirm, that the Church is called to a new evangelization. The new proclamation of the Gospel must let Jesus Christ, the Lumen gentium, Light of the peoples, shine through its face. Evangelization must by its very nature show how the event of Jesus Christ is contemporary with man of all times in His unity of soul and body (corpore et anima unus, GS 14.) Then all the human aspects associated with the nuptial experience, such as affection, love, marriage, family, motherhood, fatherhood, brotherhood, friendship, but also consecrated virginity and celibacy, are channels through which the Church, mother and teacher devotes herself at the present historical juncture, to care for men and women, communities and peoples.

But there is also another reason, perhaps less obvious at first glance, but equally decisive, which indicates that nuptiality is rooted in the essence of the Church. The proof is in the nuptial language used in Scripture, by the Fathers, by Holy Doctors of the Church and more generally by the whole tradition of Christian thought when it describes, varying in terms of intensity and emphasis, the highest mysteries of our faith. Starting from the Sacrament of the Eucharist, in which Christ’s Body is given and his Blood poured out, we are redeemed and made fully brothers and sisters; to Baptism in which we are incorporated into Christ in the Church (the theme of the body emerges again) and made children of God in the Son (here the unbreakable bond between nuptiality and the parental relation emerges); and finally to Christ’s relationship with His Church as expressed in the letter to the Ephesians, where he uses the imagery of marriage.

If we just scroll through the list of these themes we can easily realize that what is at stake here is not only the substance of our everyday life, even in its more intimate aspects, but also, at the same time, the understanding of our faith and our belonging to the Church.

2. The nuptial mystery of sexual difference, self-giving, fecundity

The most appropriate way to deal with the problems described above is to read through the lens of the nuptial mystery in its three inextricably linked dimensions: sexual difference, self-giving, fecundity. Indeed, the expression nuptial mystery reveals the profound nature of love because by showing how the self, others and the unity of the two act together, it leads to the heart of elementary human experience[5], common to all persons, in every time and place. The fact that it is a mystery does not indicate that we are unable to know anything about it. It only suggests that since it is one of the dimensions through which every man’s personal freedom enters into a relationship with the infinite, it cannot be totally defined within one definition. In this regard, Evdokimov writes: “None of the poets and thinkers has found the answer to the question:”What is love? “[...] Do you want to trap light? It will escape through your fingers”[6].

Let us therefore briefly examine the three components constituting the nuptial mystery but never forget that they can never be separated. Each one always puts the other two into play.

a) Sexual Difference

The theme of sexual difference, the first dimension of the nuptial mystery, was developed by the Magisterium of John Paul II to deepen the prophetic strength of Humanae Vitae starting from his Catechesis on Human Love[7]. This theme was recently taken up again by Benedict XVI in Deus Caritas Est[8].

Taking as his starting point the two stories of Genesis on the creation of man (Gen 1:27 and Gen 2:18-25), Pope Wojtyla identifies the gendered nature of human beings as a constitutive dimension of anthropology. The individual exists always and only as male or female. What does this fact suggest? It suggests that no human being can constitute the whole of man by him or herself, because he or she will always be faced with the other way to be human. Man cannot exist “alone” (Gen 2:18), but is always in a relation. In this way, he is aware of his or her finite nature, and discovers at the same time the vocation to be open to another. It is important to emphasize that sexual difference is not accidental in nature. It is an integral part of man’s image and likeness of God. Indeed, Pope John Paul II says that “man has become the image and likeness of God, not only by his humanity, but also through the communion of persons that man and woman form right from the start[9].”

The relation between male and female therefore requires consideration simultaneously through the categories of identity and difference. While the former can be easily led back to the personal nature of human beings and the resulting equal dignity between man and woman (both equally human beings), the latter is not without problems, as one can clearly understand from the obvious difficulties of contemporary culture to think in terms of sexual difference.

Difference does not refer to a simple question of roles, nor can it be reduced to a complementarity in view of the recovery of a lost identity (lost because of a jealous god: through the merging of the two halves, as imagined by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium). On the other hand, it does not concern only the relationship between husband and wife, but all the relations in which the self is immersed, those between brother and sister, between mother and child, father and daughter and so on. Sexual difference, fully understood, is revealed as the primary mode by which the individual, one in body and soul, comes into contact with reality. Awareness of one’s being which is always situated in sexual difference creates a constant openness to others and shows a path to self-knowledge. From here you can see that the difference[10] (differre – to take the same or something elsewhere) can never be abolished. It is an unrivalled dimension of the personal self.

b) Being open to the other as gift of self

It is precisely in sexual difference adequately lived that opening oneself to another can take the form of self-giving. Starting from this fact we can better understand the link between the nuptial mystery and the sacrament of marriage, whose ultimate justification builds on the nuptial language of the Bible[11].

The theological tradition offers us a way of thinking within the framework of the text of Ephesians 5:21-33. In this text the human experience of love between spouses, based on sexual difference, is illuminated by the analogy with the spousal love of Jesus Christ for the Church, which by virtue of the sacrament of marriage involves the Christian spouses. Let me be clear: the sacrament is not an addition to the natural fact, but it is what explains it in depth. That is why St. Paul invites the spouses to know that love must be total, personal, redemptive and fecund. And this is a fact that also applies to spouses who are baptized members of different Christian traditions, because, ” by means of baptism, man and woman are definitively placed within the new and eternal covenant, in the spousal covenant of Christ with the Church […]and by their right intention, they have accepted God’s plan regarding marriage[12].”

To live its vocation fully, the union between man and woman, which is rooted in sexual difference, must be faithful and open to life. This is shown in the Catechism of the Catholic Church when it speaks of the goods and requirements of marriage[13]. In this matter it is of decisive importance to overcome a serious misunderstanding. These goods and requirements are not properties that are added to the love between man and woman. They are part of the essence of love. Where there is no faithfulness and fruitfulness there never has actually been love, in its proper sense[14]. They are not precepts of the Church which have been added, almost to put a certain restraint on the free expression of love. They are the goods – assets – which emerge from the profound nature of human love. Since they are essential to love, even though they are radically challenged by contemporary culture and customs, they are always able to show their relevance to the present day.

Let us see briefly how.

In one of his last books, the great Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton describes with much self-irony his death, his funeral and God’s judgement on his life. He imagines his soul, separated from the body, conversing with philosophers, poets, popes, politicians. In the dialogue about love, where Guitton speaks with his wife and the poet Dante, we find this brilliant statement: “Some get married because they love each other, others end up loving each other because they have married. It is a good thing that there should be both the one and the other in a marriage. – “Why do people end up loving each other, once married?” – “Perhaps because we needed to keep the direction we had taken?” Guitton suggested. His wife replied: “‘There must be something else, if it is love.” – “Marie-Louise, what is this other thing?” – “It must relate to time and eternity”[15]. There is no love that does not mean the desire of “forever”. The phenomenon of falling in love, when heard in all its seriousness, tells us the same thing. Part of the experience of those who love, is to want to give all of themselves without time limits. And it is precisely the experience of those who are loved that they want the love that embraces them to never end. In my task as a pastor, I always say to young people: “If you are truly in love, I challenge you to say it without adding “forever” ”. The “forever” is an essential part of love. Shakespeare’s genius expressed it as he angrily bursts out in a verse of a sonnet: “Love is not love/ which alters when it alteration finds/, or bends with the remover to remove./ O no, it is an ever fixed mark”[16].

If this is true for every experience of sincere falling in love, forever should be all the more present in the love of those who marry, and of Christian spouses. The call of the Epistle to the Ephesians, “as Christ loved the Church and sacrificed Himself for her to make her holy by washing her in cleansing water with a form of words, so that when he took the Church to himself she would be glorious with no spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and faultless” (Eph. 5: 25-27, Jerusalem Bible). This call makes love “for a time” unthinkable. Not only because the gift of Christ leads as far as the sacrifice of himself on Golgotha, but also primarily because the duty that “husbands must love their wives as they love their own bodies; for a man to love his wife is for him to love himself” (Eph 5:28, Jerusalem Bible) is based on the fact that “a man never hates his own body, but he feeds it and looks after it” (Eph 5:29, ibid). Within the sphere of love, time loses its disintegrating power and becomes an anticipation of eternity. The fidelity of spouses is a wonderful example of Jesus’ call to lose one’s own life in order to find it. Life is given to us to be given in turn. The cross-check of this is that if you don’t give your life, time steals it from you.

From the above we understand better what is meant when the Church repeats the Lord’s injunction “what therefore God has joined together, let no man put asunder” (Mt 19:6). The verse points out that the human decision to love enacts the will to continue the work of God who created us male and female. In contrast to what contemporary culture seems to suggest, the union forever is not a burden imposed on our freedom, but a condition for being able to implement it. The indissolubility represents the possibility that freedom can be fulfilled and similarly that the desire to be loved and to love actually helps to make the original plan of the Father on the marriage transparent. This is not the result of a higher ethical capacity in the spouses. This fullness is only possible if husband and wife live their daily relationship as a sacrament, as a concrete form of their being a domestic Church. At this level we understand the importance of the spouses living an intense sacramental life which will be a continuing revival of the awareness of their baptism and of belonging to Christ. And around this centre, a great opportunity of mutual commitment is freely given through the experience of forgiveness[17].

c) Fecundity (Fruitfulness)

To find out where love ultimately leads us, seen in all its aspects, we shall have to return to its origin. To understand the third factor of the nuptial mystery, fertility – which is the outcome following the gift of self – we must start from the first factor: sexual difference.

We first remember that the person “I” is structurally related to the person “you”. Openness to the other is constitutive of the identity of the person. In giving themselves to one another by virtue of sexual difference, the bride and groom become one flesh and thereby open themselves completely to the procreation of a child. Precisely because even within the marital union the two do not merge into a unity that encompasses them, but continue to be different people in pure and full communion, they make place for a third person.

Considering the conception of a third person, the great Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar quite ingeniously said that “the act of union of two persons in the one flesh and the fruit of this union should be considered together, skipping over the factor of distance in time.[18] This statement is an argument for the prophetic power of Humanae Vitae. The procreation of children, which involves the fascinating adventure of education, expresses the full meaning of marriage[19].

I would add, incidentally, that a deep experience of conjugal love can be established even in interfaith marriages, if the spouses are made aware of the difficulties and fully respect the canon.

3. The nuptial mystery is an answer to the question of man’s love in the post-modern age.

When we meditate on marriage through the category of the nuptial mystery we can fully grasp God’s plan for man and woman. It reveals the correspondence between the three dimensions of sexual difference, self-giving and fruitfulness with the desire for happiness, which properly belongs to every human being.

In this light we can clearly see how the objections of contemporary thinking to the Christian vision and to Church teaching on the theme of human love in fact seek a reduction of man’s asking for fulfilment (“if you wish to be perfect “, Matthew 19:21), which lies in every human being’s heart. The objections stem from separating the desire from the task which is inevitably implied in every desire. What suffers as a consequence is human freedom which is no longer lived as a way to realize man’s stretching out to the infinite, but as the illusion that one can respond to this by satisfying momentarily an indefinite series of finite desires. The result of this for love is what the genius of Albert Camus had already understood: “men and women either tear each other apart in what is called the act of love or force themselves into an enduring habit for both of them” (La Peste, 1947). A union between man and woman which renounces even just one of love’s constitutive dimensions is likely to end up reducing the other person to a mere instrument of pleasure. The outcome cannot but be boredom. Only where love is recognized in its entirety, that is, as participation in God’s free plan which calls human freedom, can the Christian response to the dominant objections of today show that it has good reasons to offer. It is only on the strength of full love that we can affirm the beauty of chastity, as well as the illicitness of contraception; or the fact that life from conception cannot be disposed of, even when the life was not wanted, or is affected by malformations which do not correspond to the parents’ expectations; or the dignity of human life even when struck by serious illnesses or marked by extreme old age.

But the labour that we are living through in the present historical moment also tells us something else. At first sight, and in every way, human frailty seems to contradict the possibility of a “forever”. It seems to deny sacrifices as something good, and leads one to think of a child in terms of a “product” rather than as fruit. But seen in its depth, human frailty certifies the very truth of love. As is shown in the teaching of John Paul II, if one recognizes its own disproportion to living fidelity and exclusive love, but one remains open forever, open to sacrifice to the point of forgiveness, and open to children, then one is led to discover that desire achieves its aim only through the exercise of a task. That moves one to want love to be definitive through a duty. It is the wanting of love that leads one to decide in favour of the duty of fidelity. It is the gap between the greatness of the vocation to which one is called, and one’s incapacity to fulfil it with one’s own strength which convinces spouses – through the oath they exchange to love until death separates them – to lean their mutual fidelity on God, who is faithful love (cf 1 Jn 4: 16, Jerusalem Bible).

4. The family, a privileged place of the nuptial mystery

What we have said so far on the nuptial mystery and its dimensions is brought about and becomes understandable in family life. Family life is based on the intertwining of two kinds of relationships – one between spouses and one between generations, each with a specific way of expressing love. A person’s identity is directly related to each of these, and it is through these two types of relations that the person can live the relationship between the ‘I’ and a ‘you’ which encourages balanced growth.

The strength of the family lies in its being a privileged way for every person to develop their personal identity. Benedict XVI recently said so on the occasion of the visit ad Limina of the Bishops of the Episcopal Conference of the Scandinavian countries: “Children have the right to be conceived and carried in the womb, brought into the world and brought up within marriage: it is through the secure and recognized relationship to their own parents that they can discover their identity and achieve their proper human development”.[20]

Who we are and what we think of ourselves, the trust we have in our selves, in a word the value of our individual person is rooted largely in our experience of belonging to a family body, which is inserted in the chain of generations. The basic trust of a child towards life, his awareness of being a subject worthy of love and capable of love, is born and grows within the family context. It is within the family relationships that the child can experience the promise of what is good and the happiness that his coming into the world brings. It was strongly sensed by Friedrich Hölderlin in his famous poem “The Rhine”: “It all depends on birth, on the ray of light the newborn meets”[21].

The truth of these claims becomes evident in extreme situations which give rise to a child’s question about his or her origin. Let’s think of a critical situation that involves an increasing number of children throughout Europe: the separation or divorce of parents. What is hardest to accept for their children, apart from the difficulty to adapt personally to the new situation in which their parents are also involved, is the loss of the sense of the pair bonding from which they originated. The most rigorous and thorough analyses of this phenomenon indicate that the strongest obstacle to children’s education is not so much the level of conflict to which they may have been exposed in the process of the separation of parents, as by the loss of a fundamental certainty tied to the original union of the parents. A child is aware of the fact that his existence came about through his parents and cannot adapt to the idea that this union may fail at some point without great suffering.

In the family, man discovers and sees his nature as a relational being exalted: this is why families are the place where generations care for each other. They are the first school where the person has the experience of good relationships and virtuous practices which can be extended to the Christian community and civil life. So for children, the family is the basic environment of education, and for the elderly, an irreplaceable environment of solidarity.

As the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church affirms (number 238): “The family is a community of love and solidarity that is uniquely suited to teach and transmit cultural, ethical, social, spiritual and religious values, essential for the development and well-being of its members and of society”. The family in fact transmits almost by osmosis the elementary moral experience. It is the society in which everyone, through the basic good constituted by loving relationships is “recognized” as a person, with an openness to a future “promising happiness” which also demands a task to be undertaken in relationships with other people. Before coming into contact with the other primary social institutions (community, neighbourhood, school, city) the person is raised in a family who has seen him or her being born to life. Indeed, it is through the family that man makes contact with society. From the existential point of view, and also from the purely temporal view, man is first a father, a mother, a son, a brother or a sister, and only later a citizen.

But the family, particularly by virtue of the increased longevity of people living in the northern hemisphere, is increasingly called upon to take care of older members of the family and of those who are no longer self-sufficient due to specific illnesses. Taking care of these people finds its raison d’être in the cycle of life that goes through generations, which represents another form of gratuitous love which cannot be easily replaced by other institutions, which are called to rediscover the exceptional value of the family. In the following words, Benedict XVI emphasized: “Since the family is the first and indispensable teacher of peace, the most reliable promoter of social cohesion and the best school of the virtues of good citizenship, it is in everyone’s interest, particularly that of governments, to defend and promote a stable family life”[22].

5. Bearing witness

In marriage and the family, men and women experience the nuptial mystery whose source is that splendour of love of the living God, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The nuptial mystery, however, is not comprehensible as long as it is abstract. To understand and communicate the meaning of the nuptial mystery, it is necessary to show how “advantageous” the encounter with the Risen Lord is for human existence. This event of Jesus Christ needs to be announced by individual Christians in families, and by families as a whole. To have an answer to the questions raised by the practices of post-modernity, even declarations of sound doctrine made with conviction will not be sufficient. Communicating that doctrine can be put into practice will require personal experience.

For a Christian, bearing witness consists in following Jesus with the courage to acknowledge him before the world, as he did. When called to trial by Pilate, he said: “I was born for this, I came into the world for this, to bear witness to the truth; and all who are on the side of truth listen to my voice “(Jn 18:37, Jerusalem Bible).

Only testimony that is worthy of faith can actually move the freedom of other people, inviting them strongly to make decisions. As Benedict XVI pointed out “We become witnesses when, through our actions, words and way of being, Another makes himself present.

When we bear witness, “the truth of God’s love comes to men and women in history, inviting them to accept freely this radical newness.” Through witness, God lays himself open, one might say, to the risk of human freedom.” (Sacramentum caritatis, 85).

The construction of this political universal in a plural society asks of every subject a narration directed towards a recognition that is shared as much as possible. A triple aspect must be contemplated by the subject. Every subject with identity must narrate himself/itself, narrate others, and accept being narrated.

In a plural society, the unitary ecclesial subject is inevitably seen from an internal perspective and from an external perspective which are often discordant: ‘He who sees people dance does not hear the music, does not understand the movements that he observes. Thus it is also that he who does not share the Christian faith is inclined to explain it with reference to something that is different from the truth of its object’. On the other hand, ‘a Christian who is unable to immerse himself in the external perspective…becomes a sectarian or a fanatic who closes himself before the universality of reason’ (Spaemann). The Christian proposal must therefore take into account, with coherence, both these profiles, without forgoing its truthful core which postulates – and we do well to remember this – the very ‘claim’ to universality that is specific to reason.

A valuable contribution that Christianity offers to the construction of the political universal can be read by anyone, beginning from its external profile alone as well. It is the practice of elementary moral experience that makes it reasonable for everyone to refer to a common morality.

To understand the authentic nature of this common morality one must begin from the elementary experience of good that every man has. If we look at the genesis of the moral experience of the (child) subject, we realise that it is rooted in a wish for self-completion which takes form in original inclinations and affections, beginning with the primary relationships of recognition, in which, in circular fashion, this wish acquires practical self-awareness and becomes capable of communion with others. The original form by which man learns and actuates good consists, therefore, in the relationship with the origin of good. And the decision in favour of the good things that should be done derives from the practice of good relationships. Elementary moral experience, which is common to all men, does not originate from an idea of good that is contained in the cosmos or the bios, nor is it deduced from the rational nature of man: it is formed beginning with the primary benefit of the relationship.

On this basis, the person perceives a de-ontic tie (ob-ligation) with the possibilities of good itself. He realises their character of not being optional or hypothetical.

The belief in the absoluteness of moral Good leads Christians, who are aware of the value of living together as a primary political good, to propose this common morality. It is the basis on which one can, from time to time, look for a noble com-promise on specific goods of an ethical, social, cultural, economic and political character with all the other inhabitants of a plural society. When this com-promise is technically impossible at the level of substantial principles, Christians should resort to conscientious objection.

Looking now at Christianity from the internal profile in order to clarify fully the contribution of Catholics to the growth of the good life of a country, it is important to observe that its incarnation in history postulates an insuperable circularity between faith and culture.

Faith, in offering man an interpretative hypothesis of the real, produces culture/s; and culture(s) interpreting itself/themselves, interpret(s) faith itself. In historical time such a dynamic is insuperable.

A pathway suitable to the correct interpretation of the circle of faith/culture(s) should be looked for in the proposal of all the Christian Mysteries in their structured unity, as they spring forth from the event of Jesus Christ. Incarnated in the history of the individual and community subjects that live them, they bear upon the way in which men conceive of themselves and as a society, upon the relationship with the creation, and there are exposed in their turn to the inevitable cultural interpretations that the subject practises. The commitment of a Christian to the person, to society, and to the cosmos is not a consequence of the Mysteries that he lives. And yet it is not immediately coincident with the Christian Mysteries as such: it is implied in them. Indeed, the Christian Mysteries are not given once and for ever in the form of a package of dogmas from which suitable consequences should be drawn; they are dimensions of the event of Jesus Christ who continuously proposes himself anew to the always historically situated freedom of man. They do not require mechanical applications, nor extrinsic juxtapositions, but dynamic implications.

To announce the event of Christ in all its entirety, coming, therefore, to demonstrate all its implications, is what today is required of Christians. And this is the case above all in Italy where the phenomenon of secularisation reveals, when subjected to an attentive analysis, characteristics which are completely special and at times rather different from those to be found in other Euro-Atlantic countries. It is no accident that the Italian Church is spoken of as an ‘exceptional case’.

It is by now a commonly shared idea that it is necessary to translate the concepts deriving from one’s various religious and cultural traditions into public argumentation. In other words, it is vital that the foundations, which cannot be relinquished in any substantiated view, be translated into a series of axioms. Similarly to mathematical logic, they must be understood as a formal system of properties that implicitly define their expression (which is, in this case, a vision of the world), quite apart from a priori recognition or negation of their absoluteness by everyone concerned. On this basis the subjects living in a pluralistic society are called to work at continuous dialogue, and to tell others tirelessly of their own identity within a spirit of reciprocal recognition, allowing orientations and directions in the interest of the common good to emerge. On this subject, as Benedict XVI wrote in his lecture for the university “La Sapienza” (Rome 17th January, 2008), the very experience of democracy shows that numerical majorities and their relations of strength are not enough to guarantee and maintain it; democracy needs to be characterized also by «a process of argumentation that is sensitive to the truth».

A civil society conceived in this way has no need to neutralize religions, nor need it hurl itself against universal absolutes of which the various social subjects may be convinced. Its only must is to accept dialogue between equals, leaving to the state institutions which promulgate and interpret laws the task of recognizing which opinion is the most advantageous, and which tradition the prevailing or dominant one which the sovereign people, either directly or indirectly through its representatives, indicates as the one to which their society wishes to adhere. This does not imply the dictatorship of a majority that claims to establish the truth, nor the negation of the fundamental rights of any minority or individual (including objections on grounds of conscience). It is merely a question of not making the necessarily secular nature of the State coincide with an impossible neutrality.

The Christian community also wants to contribute to building good life in society. In society, the Christian faithful, sustained and guided by the authentic Magisterium of the Church, learn to get to know Jesus Christ, the living fulfilment of moral law. By adopting Jesus’ action, Word, and precepts as their moral law, Christians find the adequate reason for the moral sense of existence. Indeed, Christ proposes himself as the essential and original principle of Christian morality. But, in so far as he is the principle of universal morality, he carries within himself and gives value to the path of human moral experience as such (common morality), which Revelation reveals, rather than denies. Within the framework of common morality, the legal and economic dimension of common praxis can be worked out.

On these bases, Christians can contribute to the building of a good life, even within areas full of pressing issues, like bioethics, on which you will be reflecting in your meeting.

I am certain that your exchange of views on multiculturalism, religions and bioethics, conducted with scientific rigour, will be able to show how the Truth – towards which mankind yearns – always promotes freedom that is adequately understood.

I wish you all that your work may be fruitful and send you heartfelt greetings.

On the occasion of his encounter with representatives of Muslim communities in Germany on 20 August 2005, Pope Benedict XVI re-emphasised that “interreligious and intercultural dialogue between Christians and Muslims cannot be reduced to an occasional option. It is in fact a vital necessity, and our future depends to a great extent upon it”.
Here the Pope was re-stating a personal conviction about interreligious dialogue which he had espoused some years before in his celebrated volume entitled Das neue Volk Gottes. Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie (The new people of God). In this work the theologian Joseph Ratzinger had maintained: “[] it has become an integral part of our faith today that Christianity should have relations with the religions of the world: this is far from being a matter of a mere curiosity that is solely interested in constructing some theory of its own about the destiny of others this destiny is decided by God alone, who does not need our theories (…) But today there is more at stake: the sense of our being able and obliged to believe. The religions of the world have become a question mark for Christianity; faced with them it must start to think afresh about its claims, [] how it can understand them as playing a necessary role in the history of salvation”1.

Having acknowledged the centrality of interreligious dialogue, we next need to determine the few basic criteria to which Benedict XVI refers. They can then be the object of discussion and study in our dialogue. It is not possible in this brief introduction to offer a systematic presentation of these criteria. I will limit myself therefore to stating two; I cannot even hope to be able to offer an organic analysis of them.

a) Religions and good life
The first of these criteria – not in order of importance but because it is the most pacific was particularly and significantly emphasised by the Holy Father in his addresses to Muslim believers. This asserts that dialogue is proper to every believer as a member of the people of God or of the Muslim communities. It derives above all from the fact that every person is de facto a member of a society, and is thereby called to contribute to the good life of the society in which he or she lives. Here the Pope strongly emphasises the need for adhérents of religions to take the same path: “Certainly, recognition of the positive role of religions at the heart of the social body can and must impel our societies to explore more and more deeply their knowledge of the human person and to respect human dignity by placing the person at the centre of political, economic, cultural, and social activity. Our world must come to realise more and more that all peoples are linked by profound solidarity with one another, and they must be encouraged to assert their historical and cultural differences not for the sake of confrontation but in order to foster mutual respect.” (Pope’s speech to the diplomatic corps in the Apostolic Nunciature at Ankara, 28 november 2006).

b) Faith, reason, and religions
The second and more demanding criterion is the one emphasised particularly in the celebrated lecture at the University of Regensburg. It deals with the nexus of faith, reason, and religion and the capacity of human reason to grasp this nexus. In this connection the Holy Father affirmed at Regensburg: “theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences (…) precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. (…) A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. (…) For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity (…) is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. (…) The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time.” [Official translation from Vatican website]
This long quotation from the Regensburg lecture can help us to determine a few essential elements which can be the object of our dialogue.
The correct relationship between faith, reason, and religions, perfectly comprehensible to human reason when not enslaved to reductionisms, involves a recognition of the two inseparable sides to dialogue, neither of which can be dispensed with.

c) The principle of integration
The first of the above criteria can be identified as the principle of integration. What does it consist in? It can best be described in the words of Hans Urs von Balthasar. The Basle theologian acknowledges the necessity of a comparison of the actual contents of religions at all levels. In this way “something like a scale of recognisable truths will be born, which can be co-ordinated according to the principle: “The one who has more truth is more right and has more rights on his side” (…) The one who turns out to be in a position to integrate the maximum of truth into his vision would have the presumption of a maximally true truth”2. From this point of view it is possible to grasp why the Holy Father proposes to understand interreligious and intercultural dialogue in a unitary fashion. A definition of culture which does not take into consideration the religious dimension constitutive of the ultimate requirements of reason is reductive (Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?)

d) Truth and freedom
The second indispensable aspect of dialogue concerns the truth-freedom nexus. While it is true that the principle of integration is essential, because required by the quest for truth proper to religions, at the same time it does not manage to encompass all of the horizon of truth on its own. By its very nature truth requires the act of a freedom which is ready to give active assent.
The principle of integration cannot but bow to the “freedom of God in His Self-revelation”3, proposing a kind of absolute knowledge of hegelian stamp. The same principle must also respect the truth of the finite freedom of man, which is called actively to welcome the statement of truth rather than merely enduring it! That is why Balthasar himself speaks of truth in terms of “love that gives itself in freedom (“only love is credible”)”4. Pope Benedict also fully took on board this crucial aspect of interreligious dialogue when, in his Message on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the Interreligious Encounter of Prayer for Peace (the second of September 2006), he opted to speak expressly of the «language of testimony».Christians and Muslims in particular must bear testimony, in reciprocal dialogue, to their faith in the one God and in the ineradicable distance constantly present in the Islamic faith between Creator and creatures. They must not however undervalue the differences – beginning with the trinitarian monotheism central to Christianity. Defending in continuous open dialogue the freedom of religion in every civil society, Christianity and Islam are then called to testify that every form of violence is by its nature alien to the authentic raison d’être of religion as such.

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1. J. RATZINGER, Il nuovo popolo di Dio, Queriniana, Brescia 1971, 391-392. [Das neue Volk Gottes. Entwürfe zur Ekklesiologie, 1972]

2. H. U. VON BALTHASAR, La mia opera ed epilogo, Jaca Book, Milano 1994, 97-98. [My Work: in Retrospect, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993]

3. Ibid., 98.

4. Ibidem.

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