Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican secretary of state, said that Europe must “rediscover itself” in order to be able to face the “major challenges” of culture, commerce, and migration. In a Feb. 15 interview with the daily Eco di Bergamo, the Vatican offi-cial recalled the “warning of St. John Paul II,” which Pope Francis has also taken up: “Europe, re-discover yourself, be yourself.”
The cardinal stressed that the Old Continent is suffering from a “crisis of ideas” that prevents it from facing the future: “Europe currently has good antibodies to hold up under crises and challen-ges. But the most serious problem is the lack of ideas for the future that allow it to respond with deter-mination to international compe-titors,” he said. Parolin specified that this weakness is due to the relationship that Europe has with its own history, the result of “a deep, and partly justified, fear of its past.” However, he emphasiz-ed that along with the dark episodes of its history, “there are many bright moments.”
In this regard, he referred to the debates on the European Constitution, in which an explicit reference to the continent’s Judeo-Christian roots was avoided, advocating for a generic mention of its “cultural, humanist, and religious heritage.” According to the cardinal, this weakened the continent’s awareness and the sense of European identity: “In-stead of building Europe on its deep foundations and roots, a changing consensus of values has been preferred. But the future can only be built on the past,” he pointed out.
Although Parolin said there were reasons to be concerned, especially in the face of “practi-cal atheism, populism, and reli-gious illiteracy,” he praised other “encouraging phenomena” such as the increase in requests for baptism by young French people.