The conference on ‘The Church and Europe’ is justified by the need to highlight our roots as European citizens at a time when there are attempts to ignore or deny those roots altogether, as if European history began only with the Enlightenment and the revolution of 1789, assigning to the entire previous, long period a strongly negative qualification inasmuch as it was characterised by the Christian-Catholic presence.

Some clarifications are urgently needed, however brief. The negativity of Christian-Catholic predominance, especially in the political sphere, did not prevent, but rather encouraged, the flourishing of an immense civilisation of which we should be proud, comparable only to that of the Greco-Hellenistic world. Secondly, we cannot evaluate that long historical period negatively, imposing our current way of thinking and our sensibilities as a yardstick, starting from the consideration that today we enjoy guarantees and rights which were not present in the Christian past, and which consequently qualify it negatively.

I believe, however, that the maturation of the rights and I believe, instead, that the maturation of the rights and guarantees we enjoy would have occurred anyway as a progressive development of humanity, as a refinement of human sensibilities, both in the presence and in the absence of Christianity. 

I believe, in fact, that the presence of Christianity facilitated this process of maturation and development, at least as a very strong reaction to Christian omnipresence.