The Pope's visit to Verona last week was short but significant. His speech to Italian Catholic leaders was particularly interesting and important. Benedict XVI said that unless the West returns to its Christian roots it will, among other things, be unable to dialogue with other religious cultures.
The Pope's hour-long speech, frequently interrupted by applause, explored a favourite topic of his 18-month-old pontificate: that personal faith should have a cultural impact. He mentioned four areas where this impact should be more strongly felt: the family, marriage, protection of human life and education.
Unfortunately there is a tendency today to consider religion as a purely private affair and consequently God, in this perspective, would be excluded from public life. The human person, divorced from God, is impoverished and as the Pope said, could be treated "like any other animal". As a result, moral and ethical norms are weakened. This is a culture which brings about not only a radical and profound separation from Christianity but more generally from the religious and moral traditions of humanity.
Quite naturally the Pope is very critical of such a culture. One of its consequences, according to Pope Benedict, is that Western culture "is not able to undertake a real dialogue with other cultures in which the religious dimension is strongly present".
The Pope did not make any reference to any particular religion or region but it is very clear that he must have had Muslim cultures and communities in mind. These cultures and communities have religion at their heart. They not only find it difficult to understand a culture which abandons God and religion but they also find it difficult to dialogue with such a culture. Religion, thus, helps in building a bridge between our and the Muslim cultures.
The Pope also said that contemporary Western culture is unable to respond to the fundamental questions about the meaning of life. The Western culture's focus on rationality as the measure of all things and its "overly individualistic" ethics have led to a real risk of "detachment from the Christian roots of our civilisation," he said.
Among the victims of this culture is the traditional concept of marriage and the family. This is being abandoned in favour of what the Pope termed as a "weak and deviant forms of love and the counterfeiting of freedom." This deviant form of love is manifested in support for public recognition of, for example, gay marriage. The Church's stand against such union is presented in negative terms but in reality is a positive stance as it is a "yes" to authentic love.
The Pope was speaking to Italian Catholic leaders but what he said is equally applicable to our situation in Malta as the same cultural trends are also blowing in our direction. These trends have not been, so far, translated into legislative proposals. No one is proposing same sex marriages, abortion or euthanasia. But the cultural infrastructure consisting of an increased individualistic and relativistic mentality is there. We cannot wait for the legislative proposal before we take concrete actions.
The Pope, during this Verona speech, gave general outlines for a possible strategy. He said that Catholics should advance their arguments in a positive and convincing way in the public forum. Both of these characteristics are essential. The Catholic position should be positive. We should not react but be pro-active. There is no place for a Jeremiah type of mentality where everything is painted black. The Catholic position should also be convincing. It should be based on study and research.
The Catholic strategy is not like any other marketing or PR strategy. This should be a strategy based on strong personal faith. "The starting point for being a Christian - and therefore the origin of our witness as believers - is not an ethical decision or a great idea, but the encounter with the person of Jesus Christ," he said.
The Catholic strategy should be free of partisan political sympathies but it should be political just the same, i.e. it is also played at the political level. The church does not want to act as a political agent, but counts on educated Catholic laity to work to implement the church's teachings about justice and morality also through the tools provided in the political arena.
The Catholic strategy should also have an international dimension. We should use our position in the European Union to team up with other Catholics in politics or civil society to help the member states re-discover their Christian roots and let the Christian ethos influence society.