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Catholic World News News Feature

French prelate fears European future "without a soul" May 20, 2005

The president of the Pontifical Council for Culture emphasized the importance of Europe's Christian heritage, and criticized the trend toward secularism, during an ecumenical conference in Romania.

Cardinal Paul Poupard noted that the idea of a European Union "was born of the will of men of faith and culture: Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer." Their vision, he continued, was of a union among many nations, drawn together by their shared patrimony-- which in turn is largely defined by Christian culture. "Certainly Europe today is a group of secular nations," the French cardinal said, "but all are built on the same Christian foundation-- which they, or at least their leaders, now seem to have forgotten."

Cardinal Poupard was speaking to a conference held in Cluj, Romania, at the Babe-Bolyai University. The conference drew together representatives of the school's four separate theology faculties: Roman Catholic, Byzantine Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.

The cardinal said that Pope Benedict XVI had deliberately taken the name of a patron saint of Europe to emphasize "the continuity of thought" within the Christian tradition in Europe. He lamented that this tradition has been lost, in an "amnesia" brought on by the desire of contemporary Europeans to satisfy "their desires and pleasures: to acquire, to know, and to have power."

"To create a Europe marked by freedom," the cardinal said that it would be necessary to "free men from the illusion that a better future will come through the magic of progress in science and medicine, and a market economy that creates ever-greater riches, without any religious or ethical component." That vision, he said, is a "utopia"-- but a utopia characterized by the fact that "it has no woul."

"It is not religion from which man must be liberated," Cardinal Poupard said. "It is the myth of a society without reference to God, which is the vision of a humanity without a soul and without an identity." The president of the Pontifical Council for Culture emphasized the importance of Europe's Christian heritage, and criticized the trend toward secularism, during an ecumenical conference in Romania.

Cardinal Paul Poupard noted that the idea of a European Union "was born of the will of men of faith and culture: Robert Schuman, Alcide De Gasperi, and Konrad Adenauer." Their vision, he continued, was of a union among many nations, drawn together by their shared patrimony-- which in turn is largely defined by Christian culture. "Certainly Europe today is a group of secular nations," the French cardinal said, "but all are built on the same Christian foundation-- which they, or at least their leaders, now seem to have forgotten."

Cardinal Poupard was speaking to a conference held in Cluj, Romania, at the Babe-Bolyai University. The conference drew together representatives of the school's four separate theology faculties: Roman Catholic, Byzantine Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant.

The cardinal said that Pope Benedict XVI had deliberately taken the name of a patron saint of Europe to emphasize "the continuity of thought" within the Christian tradition in Europe. He lamented that this tradition has been lost, in an "amnesia" brought on by the desire of contemporary Europeans to satisfy "their desires and pleasures: to acquire, to know, and to have power."

"To create a Europe marked by freedom," the cardinal said that it would be necessary to "free men from the illusion that a better future will come through the magic of progress in science and medicine, and a market economy that creates ever-greater riches, without any religious or ethical component." That vision, he said, is a "utopia"-- but a utopia characterized by the fact that "it has no woul."

"It is not religion from which man must be liberated," Cardinal Poupard said. "It is the myth of a society without reference to God, which is the vision of a humanity without a soul and without an identity."