Article originally published on https://vaticanreporting.blogspot.com/2023/07/quando-contano-le-religioni-nelle.html#more
The initial question seems to be a typo: ” When do religions matter in international relations” sounds awkward; it should have been more logical to ask ” How much do religions matter in international relations?” True, but at the same time, only up to a point. The question is well-posed; the “when” makes a lot of sense, especially nowadays.
So, when do religions matter? Religions matter when they know how to be free. Religions matter when they concern themselves with human beings, with communities, and are separate from political power; they transcend it, they cannot be ideologized, and their narratives cannot be bent by the political power of the day.
We are currently experiencing a war in Ukraine that has clearly demonstrated the problem of having Churches, like the Orthodox Church, autocephalous and nationalized, tied to their territory, and therefore somehow subject to political power in an embrace between throne and altar. Putin’s war narrative exploits this latent nationalism, develops it, and regenerates it to his advantage. Even history becomes a hypothesis, because what matters is no longer history, but how history is perceived.
It’s not just a problem of the Orthodox confessions. In general, it can be noted that the great religions have lost a lot by trying to dialogue with the world . There is no shortage of religiosity in the world, and there is a profound search for spirituality. This is evident, for example, in the proliferation of New Age , yoga , and meditation. So, it’s not that the world has become secularized. Religions have simply failed. They have set aside humanity to devote themselves to humanism. They have set aside the flesh and blood of people to enter into intellectual debates, to adopt the language of what Fulton Sheen rightly called “the great humanist.”
It’s a problem that is particularly evident when we talk about the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church has always had that cultural drive to be prophetic. The Second Vatican Council took place between 1962 and 1965, which means it ended three years before the Great Sexual Revolution of 1968. The ecumenical movement saw the first Catholic participation as early as the 1920s and 1930s, in a personal capacity, but nevertheless as an opening to something that would explode over the years. And how can we not mention Vatican Radio, established by Guglielmo Marconi himself , or the first interview of a Pope given to a secular and non-Italian newspaper, Le Monde , and what’s more, to a woman, by Leo XIII. The examples are countless .
Yet, today the Catholic Church seems to have retreated . Its thinking is not prophetic, but rather aligned with that of the world. There is a search to be present in this new humanist world, and in this way, however, the desire to be part of God is lost. I am generalizing, obviously, for the sake of exaggeration. Of course, however, in many speeches we find the rhetoric of the Sustainable Development Goals and that of human rights in the vein of international organizations , which then needs to be rebalanced with what the Church believes. There is no clear position, but rather an adaptation that leads to wanting to say what needs to be said without truly engaging in debate. It is fear, perhaps, or shyness, or a sense of inferiority.
How does this impact international relations? Because, in fact, if the Church loses the central meaning of its mission, which is the Eucharist, it loses its true center. From the Eucharist, that is, from the presence of Christ, true God and true man, among us, which springs from the historical coming of Jesus, everything else is born. There is no poor person, orphan, or widow to be welcomed unless we recognize that Christ is present in each of them , and that if Christ was man, then every person matters. If it becomes a humanist religion, with a vague concept of a God who is good for all seasons and a few (certainly laudable, but ultimately empty) humanist challenges, then Christianity no longer has any reason to exist. It is transformed—as Pope Francis denounces—into a “pitiful NGO.”
But if it’s a charitable NGO, then why should the Holy See be accredited to the United Nations as a Permanent Observer? It would be enough to call Caritas, or to include the Church among the NGOs—and there were campaigns, like the See Change campaign , that said precisely this, and they did so in the mid-1990s, in unsuspecting times.
This identity crisis thus involves a profound crisis for the Church, which also becomes a crisis of presence in international relations. Indeed, impartiality is not enough. Something more is needed. Today, with war at the heart of Europe, there is much talk of a new Helsinki spirit , that is, a new spirit that would lead to the declaration that founded the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
Beyond the fact that the men of Helsinki are missing, it must be said that that meeting was promoted by the Soviet Union, and it was the Soviet Union that wanted the Holy See there . And it was then the Holy See that brilliantly inserted the issue of religious freedom into the Helsinki Charter, which I believe was the real key that led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union . I wrote a book on the history of the Council of European Episcopal Conferences ( information here ), that is, a book on that prophetic body born from a simple note to the Second Vatican Council which, in the 1960s, already regarded Europe as a continent with two lungs, from the Atlantic to the Urals, despite the then prevailing and pre-eminent Iron Curtain. And on that occasion, I discovered that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, before he was Pope, immediately understood the historic significance of the Helsinki document, urging European bishops, particularly those beyond the Iron Curtain, to focus precisely on the theme of religious freedom in their speeches, activities, and programs. He did so as Pope, too, and it was a winning idea.
Today, in a world where religious freedom is confused with freedom of expression, and where freedom of expression even allows people to mock religions while religions are not even granted the freedom to maintain, for example, that a child is born from a man and a woman (hate speech, it is called); well, in this world it is difficult to find a prophetic position from the Holy See in this regard. And this is a shame, because it is precisely religions that are called to build peace, and to overcome the historical impasses that make Europe a continent both homogeneous and divided, united and wounded by a past that does not want to return, still reluctant to overcome the great scars left by the dissolution of the empires that later created the current world order, but also by the great genocides that arose around the new nation states.
Obviously, if identity is lacking, so are vocations, and this is true not only for the Catholic Church but for all major religious denominations. While the Protestant sects, with their prosperity theology embodied in aid, money, and the promotion of success, are gaining converts, Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants are bogged down in their own internal debates. In Germany, we have a synod that even wants to make binding decisions on issues like celibacy and sexual morality; the Orthodox have the major problem of relations with the states in which they find themselves; Anglicans leave their original confession, often to become Catholic, to overcome the new debates about female bishops and gay priests; Protestants focus their discourse on human rights, leaving theology aside. Here, too, we generalize for the sake of exaggeration, but it cannot be said that anyone familiar with these situations has not recognized themselves in something I have just said .
Vocations are lacking. But vocations are lacking because there is a lack of contact with the territory. And this is also where the problem of Pope Francis’s pontificate lies . Pope Francis wants a Church that reaches out to the peripheries, an outgoing Church, a missionary Church, and the Pope is the first who must be peripheral, outward, and missionary. But the Pope is not there to do all this . That’s what priests, missionaries, and bishops are for. The Pope is there to guarantee the unity of the Church . He is there because, ultimately, what Battiato would call ” a permanent center of gravity ” is needed.
The Church has never been homogeneous; there has always been discernment, even pragmatic ways of living the Gospel and the faith . But this was possible because there was a precise directive in Rome, a center, which intervened whenever the drift threatened to become heresy. Obviously, sometimes this intervention was exaggerated, other times nonexistent. Balance is needed in all things, and human affairs always have problems. But that’s the point .
In short, the Pope is not a lone, final leader . He is rather a general, and his colonels are the bishops. Bishops, however, must be numerous, they must know the territory. Today we have the idea that bishops are administrators and there are too many of them, and that being a bishop is a title and a privilege. But the anomaly is not that Italy has more than two hundred dioceses, it is that some territories like Brazil have too few. Indeed, there are places where not even the priest arrives more than once a month – and this is a topic that was much discussed at the Special Synod for the Pan-Amazon Region in 2019. In short, if there are no bishops, they cannot supervise and choose priests; if there are no priests, there is no formation of the faithful ; and if the Pope does not act as coordinator, but sometimes replaces bishops and priests with his person and his authority, then we are faced with something that cannot work .
Then, there is the concession to humanitarianism, which is the second problem . I always quote Father Piero Gheddo, the great Italian missionary who in 2014, faced with the disappearance of the missionary magazine Ad Gentes, wrote a text to remind us that if interest in the mission was waning, it was because the mission had become a social agency, no longer had the primary desire to bring Christ and speak of Christ ( here is the blog post I am referring to ). If, in short, the evangelical message becomes politicized or sociologized, in the end, the very meaning of faith is lost.
You might ask me: why does this impact international relations? Because everything must have a purpose, and because the Church’s purpose in international relations stems precisely from this primary message of Christ and from this desire to be close to humanity and to what Paul VI, with apt summation, called “integral human development.” If this is missing, the Church’s mission is missing. Yet, the Church has a mission to fulfill today for peace, starting precisely with healing the wounds of Europe’s peoples and history, to teach the forgiveness and separation from the past necessary to turn the page and close the door to all conflict.
Today, after all, it’s not true that men don’t believe in God. They believe in a God of science, a technocratic God with magnificent and progressive fortunes who is even capable of lowering the earth’s temperature by 1.5 degrees when, with all his science, he is still unable to predict earthquakes and eruptions, and can only delay death with his science, but cannot prevent it.
And how can one believe so blindly in a science that helps but gives nothing but the life of things to people, and offers no ideal to aspire to? It can be because if religions are missing, communities are missing. Religo , after all, means to connect, and ecclesia means “community.” During the atrocious epic of the lockdown, we all discovered ourselves to be more fragile, ultimately, because we were individualized. We couldn’t pray together, we couldn’t be together before the Eucharist , we couldn’t build community, believing in something higher that gave meaning to our lives. We were individuals.
Well, the individual is controllable. He still has some hedonistic pleasure, always granted, but it remains at the price of being terribly alone, even when faced with crucial life choices . And, alone, he is manipulable. He is afraid. Whereas, if there is a community nearby, he has a strength that no power can break. It is a strength that comes from a shared faith that there is something to fight for, because it transcends his own life and looks to the future. After all, those who built the great Gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages knew they would not see the completion of that work during their lifetime , but they left a legacy, they thought about what would remain after them, because they lived with a perspective of eternity. And they did so in a world where life expectancy was ridiculous. Today, when our life expectancy is very high, we find ourselves without a future, without purpose, almost without the desire to improve.
The antidote to this dictatorship of the present time was precisely faith, whatever faith it was, which, with its transcendent creed, allowed the desire to create a better future. From a pragmatic perspective, international relations should start from this to create a new world order, if only because it would be a world order for humanity . But today we create a man for the world order, and we do so because we desire a world order without God, where humanity is merely a cog in the great technocratic mosaic.
It’s not an international order that can hold up, because life always finds a way, as Jurassic Park says. Certainly, religions today could have a huge impact if only they understood how to exist in the world according to their own language. Because it’s easy to talk about violent religions, retrograde religions, and so on. But, ultimately, we must agree on what religion is. If it’s the group of men that constitutes its hierarchy, then yes, there are religious wars, violence in the name of faith. But that’s not religion. It’s the people who live (and use) religion. That’s a different thing.
If, on the other hand, religion is the faith common to all men, then we can, we must work. And we must work above all for freedom. If religions don’t feel free to say what they think, without pretense, they won’t be able to count internationally . Not only that: they will lose impact and credibility. Because scandals aren’t enough to bring everything down. They never have been enough. Those who have faith must stop believing. And this is probably one of the objectives of today’s world order. Religions will count, then, when they understand this and manage to be truly free.