\u201cWho enters here is attracted by the tabernacle, which we Catholics have and the others do not,\u201d said some time ago a Swedish priest trying to find reasons to explain the impetuous growth of conversions in his land, among the first to have encountered secularization that has made faith a more cultural than spiritual element.\u00a0Sweden, and more generally all of Scandinavia, for at least a decade has represented the countertrend in a Europe disinterested in the religious factor.\u00a0The numbers say so, especially those of baptisms, which increase year after year.\u00a0Also in France, another secular temple in the heart of the continent, the same phenomenon is noted: this year, during the Easter Vigil, adult baptisms were ten thousand, not rarely these are people coming from atheist or agnostic contexts, where religion is not spoken of.\u00a0In all cases, the growth is due mostly to young people under twenty-five years of age, who crowd pilgrimages and processions and who, at the end of a path of progressive approach, ask to enter the Church.<\/p>\n
Among the given motivations is also the perception of living in a different cultural context, where the Christian influence, even if weakened, is still felt.\u00a0Three of the founding fathers of modern united Europe were Catholics: Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi and Robert Schuman.\u00a0The latter, who among other things was the first president of the European parliamentary Assembly, conceived Europe, devastated by two world wars, as a harmony of cathedrals, the Gothic-style buildings that dot the heart of the continent and represent the ideal point of unity between France and Germany, countries that until then had clashed with cannons and trenches.\u00a0Christian Europe already then was more of a nostalgic ideal: secularization was advancing impetuously, since the 1930s the Dutch and French bishops sent alarmed notes to Rome in which they emphasized the dechristianization of their lands and an ever weaker adherence to Christian values as until then universally recognized.\u00a0Decolonization first and globalization later would make Schuman\u2019s dream utopian: Christendom, understood as a daily rhythm marked by the chimes of the bell tower, was over, and already in the 1950s Pasolini had celebrated its funeral, warning that an era had definitively ended.\u00a0Immigration from Islamic areas, mostly in northern Europe, made the Christian sense dilute to the point of becoming irrelevant.\u00a0Italy resisted because it was the Pope\u2019s homeland, Francoist Spain and Poland which had in the Church\u2019s capillary network the true counter-power to Moscow.\u00a0As the decades passed, even these islands were infected by the spread of a laicism that made religious demand fade away, and all sociological surveys about people\u2019s religious beliefs concluded with the same answer: the European of the Third millennium did not define himself as atheist or agnostic but more simply as uninterested in the religious question.\u00a0Then the death bells rang, thick essays were written on the sunset of the West and on the end of European Christianity, also because of the refusal to insert in the draft of the European Constitution \u2013 which then never saw the light due to the rejection expressed via referendum by France and the Netherlands \u2013 the reference to Judeo-Christian roots, as John Paul II had implored until the last moment.\u00a0A request dropped into the void by the president of the Convention, the even Catholic Val\u00e9ry Giscard d\u2019Estaing.\u00a0A fact that fed misunderstandings not only between Brussels and the Holy See but that was the cause of a stiffening of the more conservative Catholic sectors which then, over time, would slip into the terrain of sovereigntism, rediscovering nationalist impulses thought to be archived.<\/p>\n
The fact is that it was a huge misunderstanding, according to Cardinal Angelo Scola, who for a long time focused on the European question:\u00a0\u201cWhen we speak of the Christian roots of Europe, in fact, we do not mean to preserve a fossil, but to underline how Christianity can continue to be a particularly stimulating resource for identifying the new lifestyle of the European man.\u201d\u00a0Scola, among other things, was the great theorist of the \u201cmetissage of civilizations,\u201d that is, of a Europe which, while preserving its own Christian soul, is open to other influences:\u00a0\u201cThe \u2018metissage of civilizations\u2019 is a process and not a prescriptive program; but Europeans, I would dare say especially Christians, have all the cultural tools to take up the challenge of plurality.\u201d<\/p>\n
In all this process Pope Francis inserted himself, who did not fail to express annoyance toward a European Union which in his judgment has become a purely bureaucratic organism that considers little the aspirations of peoples.\u00a0A Pope born and raised in a context far from the one dear to Schuman, who did not live on his own skin\u2014as was the case for John Paul II and Joseph Ratzinger\u2014the drama of the Second World War.\u00a0In Viktor Orb\u00e1n, Francis found the perfect representative of his ideal Europe, as he said during his second trip to Budapest, in 2023:\u00a0\u201cHow beautiful to build a Europe centered on the person and peoples, where there are effective policies for birthrates and the family, pursued with attention in this country, where different nations are a family in which the growth and singularity of each are safeguarded. The most famous bridge in Budapest, the chain bridge, helps us imagine a similar Europe, formed by many great different links, that find their strength in forming together solid bonds.\u201d\u00a0A Europe that is welcoming to all\u2014todos, todos, todos\u2014but that recovers its soul.\u00a0A bit like what was expressed by the tens of thousands of young people who last June, on the eve of Pentecost, walked through the French fields to reach the ancient cathedral of Chartres and there stop in prayer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cWho enters here is attracted by the tabernacle, which we Catholics have and the others do not,\u201d said some time ago a Swedish priest trying to find reasons to explain the impetuous growth of conversions in his land, among the first to have encountered secularization that has made faith a more cultural than spiritual element.\u00a0Sweden, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4048,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":35,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4085"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4261,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions\/4261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}