Yesterday twenty-one red roses, twenty-one ‘rosebuds’, were offered to the altar of the Nicopeia Madonna in St. Mark’s  Basilica at the end of the mass held by the Patriarch, Cardinal Angelo Scola. A special gesture to remember the martyrdom of the Christians in the world and the massacre of 21 people which has hit the Coptic community of Alexandria in Egypt, a church that is particularly close to that of Venice, since both were born from the preaching of Mark the Evangelist.

Cardinal Scola, in an interview with the Corriere  the imam El Tayeb, head of the al-Azhar mosque, asked the Pope for a sign in order to re-establish trust. You have been involved in the presence of the Christians in the Middle East for decades now through the Oasis Foundation. What do you think of El Tayeb’s words?

“First of all we must bear in mind that we still know little about each other. This is shown by the fact that no practising Christian would recognise himself in the image of his faith which is current among Muslims and vice versa. There is also an urgent need to face the big problem of the relationship between truth and freedom. It is a question of a balance that must always  be regained, since without truth man loses his way, but without freedom man is a slave. Violence is  born from this too”.

But the Christians have never threatened anyone, but are rather the victims of those who in the name of religion carry out massacres and spread fear and death.

“Unfortunately  perceptions are radically different between one side and the another of the Mediterranean. In the West many feel under attack from Islam, while in the East many consider that it is Islam that is being attacked. The media are responsible for this too. However, we must keep to the facts: it is not the first time that  terrorists, claiming to act in the name of Islam, have carried out  abominable suicide attacks in a church where a group of Christian faithful had gathered to pray”.

Benedict XVI has asked for protection for all Christians. How do you explain that this position has been labelled as interference?

“The Pope is not asking for any special treatment for Christians. He asks for the respect of the fundamental rights of every man, among which there is obviously the right to live, to publicly profess a religion and to not  be driven out of one’s own country. As in the attacks in Alexandria, like in Baghdad in October and Nag Hammadi a year ago,  in Pakistan very frequently and in India or in China, it is the Christians that are hit, the Pope, who bears the responsibility of over one billion faithful, considered it his duty to call the world’s attention to the problem of the persecution of the Christians”.  

What is Europe’s role?

“Europe must act in a more clear-cut way for the respect of fundamental rights, and have the courage to not subordinate them to economic interests. Moreover, Europe can promote, through facts, a model of plural society in which the different members recognise each other starting with the practical good of being together. This is an idea on which the lay and the believers of the various religions can find a meeting point. An idea which, in the medium term, can be a paradigm for all countries”.

On the very same day as the terrorist attack in Cairo, the Pope had announced that he will take part in the interreligious meeting in Assisi in October…

“The meeting in Assisi has exactly this meaning: terrorism, even before being a problem of security and intelligence, raises an issue of experience and culture. There exists a violence that is perpetrated in the name of God. Religions must remove all legitimacy from these criminal acts. We must not only say it is wrong, but also why it is wrong”

The Islamic kamikaze terrorists consider themselves martyrs. For Christians too, martyrs are called upon to bear witness to Christ in the highest and most definitive way. What difference is there?

“The difference between a martyr and a suicide terrorist is radical. In his offering the first embraces his own persecutor beforehand. His prior forgiveness thus wins over an unjustifiable evil. The suicide terrorist prepares to die, but his gesture is aimed at the destruction of others. For this reason it is intrinsically an evil, a negation of the human”.

In the past centuries Christians and Jews were forced to live like ‘dhimmi’, subjugated, under Islam. Is this inevitable?

“Absolutely not. The words of the imam El Tayeb  in the interview that you mention were  quite clear. And to tell the truth, the imam had already expressed his position also in other circumstances, for example in an interview to the Lebanese newspaper an-Nahar some months ago. I was able to read a preview of it prepared for the next Oasis newsletter. In the Muslim world a battle of ideas is going on, next to that of arms which  everyone can see: anyone who thinks that nothing is moving would be wrong”. 

(M. Antonietta Calabrò)

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.

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.

Participant: His Excellency Cardinal Angelo Scola, Patriarch of Venice. Introduced by Giancarlo Cesana, Professor of Hygiene at University of Milano Bicocca.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPFKihHKn2o

Translation by ZENIT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here some pictures of the procession:

Procession from Santa Maria Formosa to the Basilica, Scripture Reading: Lk 19: 28-40

Holy Mass, Scripture Readings: Is 50:4-7; Psalm 22 (21), 17-18.19-20.23-24; Phil 2:6-11; Lk 22, 14-23.56

1. «As he moved off, people spread their cloaks in the road, and now, as he was approaching the downward slope of the Mount of Olives, the whole group of the disciples joyfully began to praise God at the top of their voices for all the miracles they had seen» (Lk 19:36-37).

Dear brothers and sisters. This commemoration is not a mere participation to a sacred representation nor a human deed to celebrate the beginning of the great events of the Holy Week; it is a liturgical action, an act of God. Its final meaning is given by the Opening Prayer we have said at the beginning of the procession carrying palm branches: “Almighty God, we pray you bless these branches and make them holy. Today we joyfully acclaim Jesus our Messiah and King. May we reach one day to the new and everlasting Jerusalem by faithfully following him”.

Like his disciples, we have accompanied the Lord who, determined, has entered into the Jerusalem of his passion in order to get to the Jerusalem of his glory. But the method (path) of this passage (Easter) is humiliation, suffering and death, as we have listened to in the whole Passion Reading according to St. Luke. “Regnavit lingo Deus” an ancient hymn declares.

2. The “world” was, and still is, full of mockery regarding this type of royalty: “If you are the king of the Jews save yourself! “ (Lk 23:37). The Crucified has never ceased to be a scandal and a folly.

Where was the crowd, when Jesus was agonizing on the cross, and those who had acclaimed him Messiah when he was entering Jerusalem? Weakness is man (also the power of the Roman Procurator Pilate is intrinsic deep weakness and manifests a repulsive cowardliness). Man is absolutely weak, full of incoherence and frailty, easy to doubt and still more to scandal. Powerful is Christ, powerful is his obedience, unshakable his decision, without limits his fidelity. Against Him the world can do nothing. He does not draw back but, as the First Reading states, He goes towards the extreme sacrifice with sovereign liberty: “I have not turned away. I have offered my back to those who struck me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; I have not turned my face away from insult and spitting” (Is 50:5-6). The insults of the soldiers, the flight of the disciples, the wickedness of the high priests and the accomplice alliance of the powerful do not bent him. [“And though Herod and Pilate had been enemies, they were reconciled that same day”] (Lk 23:12).

Nothing shows God’s omnipotence as the power of Christ during his passion.

3. “…He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death” (Phil 2:7-8), the Second Reading proclaimed. In obedience to God’s plan Christ assumed human flesh with all its components, except sin (precisely disobedience). The secret of his strenght is his obedience, that is his powerful relationship with the Father.

Definitively, every “power” is based on the primary acknowledgement proper of the constitutive relationships. A mother that smiles to her child, “recognizes” him as such, and she exercises power over him. Each one of us, actually, exercises a power and is an object of power. It is a bond between subjects, which in no way could be avoided, because it is constitutive of the vital dynamism in which the human person is inserted. Not only, but according to the measure in which the human person is placed in the condition of exercising a power of acknowledgment, the person exercises also a power of authority. Therefore, authority, very often in our days considered to be an outward yoke, is instead required as an inward bond to the dynamism of liberty itself which for this reason does not lose its sovereignty. The logic of a correct power can only be the logic of love. In this context the word “service”, which often evokes an unpleasant perception of submission, receives its true meaning: “But he said to them, ‘Among the Gentiles it is the kings who lord it over them, and those who have authority over them are given the title Benefactor. With you this must not happen. No; the greatest among you must behave as if he were the youngest, the leader as if he were the one who serves” (Lk 22,25-27).

4. In the account of the Passion according to St. Luke the loving power of the relationship of Jesus with the Father remains in the first place also during the dramatic and dark hours of the crucifixion and of death. The terrible cry of abandonment given by Matthew and Mark in Luke it reaches the highest degree of confident entrust: “ Jesus cried out in a loud voice saying, ’Father, into your hands I commit my spirit’ “ (Lk 23: 46). An indefinable something of the grace pouring from the extreme consignment of His love pervades the prayer of the Good Thief.[“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (Lk 23: 42)]. And, after his death, it penetrates the Centurion and the crowd present at the Calvary: “When the Centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God and said, ‘Certainly this man was innocent. And when all the crowds who had gathered there for this spectacle saw what had taken place, they returned home, beating their breasts” (Lk 23, 47-48).

5. Let us live the development of the Holy week, that the Church proposes to us as a figure of the journey of our life, in spirit of prayer, in imitation of the Faithful witness, the Lord Jesus who intensely lived the experience of the Holy Week in his own person and during those dramatic hours has several times invited his disciples to do the same: ”Pray not to be put to the test” (Lk 22:40); “He knelt down and prayed” (Lk 22:41); “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly” (Lk 22:44). Prayer, infact, keeps intact and enduring the bond which spares us the great temptation. [There is an abyss between knowing and doing, between understanding death (our death) and going through… See what our flesh and our temptation is. Be alert and pray” (C. Péguy, Gethsemane)]. Prayer is the chain which does not allow us to separate ourselves from Him, because He is the Faithful.

We will also experience mercy, so impossible and so much longed for by our heart. As Peter: “The Lord turned and looked at Peter. Then Peter remembered the word of the Lord, when he had sad to him, ‘Before the cock crows today, you will deny me three times. And he went our and wept bitterly” (Lk 22: 61-62); or like the Good Thief: “Jesus remember me when you come into your kingdom. He replied, ‘Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Lk 23, 42-43).

In the fully crowed stadium, among the young players, the official teams and team’s managers, and the relatives of the player, he said: “you will achieve more goals if you know where you are going in your life, staing closed to Jesus”.

Here you will find the immages of the meeting.