Europe is doomed if it doesn’t rediscover the true meaning of
conscience, warned Pope Benedict XVI on the first day of his visit to
Croatia.
“If, in keeping with the prevailing modern idea, conscience is
reduced to the subjective field to which religion and morality have been
banished, then the crisis of the West has no remedy and Europe is
destined to collapse in on itself,” the Pope told a gathering of members
from Croatia’s civil society in the capital of Zagreb on June 4.
“If, on the other hand, conscience is rediscovered as the place in
which to listen to truth and good, the place of responsibility before
God and before fellow human beings – in other words, the bulwark against
all forms of tyranny – then there is hope for the future.”
Several hundred key figures from the world of Croatian politics,
academia, culture, arts and sport gathered at the country’s national
theatre to hear the Pope. His speech echoed his prior warnings against
the “dictatorship of relativism.”
He told the assembled dignitaries that many of the “great
achievements of the modern age” such as “the recognition and guarantee
of freedom of conscience, of human rights, of the freedom of science and
hence of a free society” would be undone unless “reason and freedom”
were kept rooted in “their transcendent foundation” of God.
To make his point, the Pope drew upon the life and work of Father
Ruder Josip Boskovic, an early 18th century Croatian Jesuit, who was a
great theologian, physicist, astronomer, mathematician, philosopher and
poet.
Boskovic, said the Pope, was a clear example of “the happy symbiosis
of faith and scholarship” in which “there is study of multiple branches
of knowledge, but there is also a passion for unity,” and where learning
is both “diversified and capable of synthesis.”
This forming of consciences rooted in faith and reason is where “the
Church makes her most specific and valuable contribution to society,”
said the Pope, stressing that this formation should begin in the home,
the parish and the school.
In this way children “learn what it means for a community to be built
upon gift, not upon economic interests or ideology, but upon love,” and
so society is transformed for the better.
Pope Benedict explained that the impact of living in this selfless
way, when “learnt in infancy and adolescence, is then lived out in every
area of life, in games, in sport, in interpersonal relations, in art,
in voluntary service to the poor and the suffering.”
And once this way of life has taken root, "it can be applied to the
most complex areas of political and economic life so as to build up a
polis that is welcoming and hospitable, but at the same time not empty,
not falsely neutral, but rich in humanity, with a strongly ethical
dimension.”