Ten years after the publication of the Apostolic Exhortation "Ecclesia in Europa",
the operators of social communications have examined the challenges
facing the Church's missionary work in Europe today.
The annual meeting
of the Spokesperson and Press Officers promoted by CCEE took place June
12 through 15 in Bucharest, Romania, at the invitation of the Archbishop
of the Romanian Capital City and President of the Catholic Bishops’
Conference of Romania, Mgr. Ioan Robu.
Jesus Christ, who
lives in his Church, is a source of hope for Europe. Today, more than
ever, the message of hope of the Apostolic Exhortation seems prophetic
and topical for Europe. Our Continent, in fact, seems to go through a
time of bewilderment and dimming of hope. In this phase of crisis, many
people feel confused and disappointed by the institutions and have lost
the points of reference that had so far withstood our societies of the
Old Continent. The Europe of 2013 seems to be run through more by a wave
of uncertainty then by the desire of future. This crisis, though, is
not only economic, but also cultural, anthropological, ethical and
spiritual; it is an opportunity for Europe to get rid of practical
agnosticism and religious indifferentism and take decisions about its
own future out of the encounter with the Person and the message of Jesus
Christ (cf. Ecclesia in Europa, 2).
The main challenge therefore
is to understand who is the European man of 2013 and where he is
heading to. How can the Catholic Church be at his side, help him to
integrate the message of the Gospel in his daily experience and bring
forward the proposal, with new words and modern tools, also in terms of
communication, concerning the person of Jesus and the values which can
be found in his gospel.
The Europe of 2013
Through the
help of some experts - Prof. Andrea Pin, researcher and adjunct
professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Padua, Italy, Mgr.
Piotr Mazurkiewicz, official of the Pontifical Council for the Family,
and Prof. Manfred Spieker, who holds a chair of Social Sciences at the
University of Osnabrück, Germany, the participants have discussed about
the changes taking place in Europe today.
In the last few years,
several elements testify the changes in progress in the fields of
politics, economy and law. We are witnessing, for example, a
multiplication of rights: the so-called new rights – i.e., individual
rights – which are the very fruits of a society where individualism
reigns, where everything that is possible must be made lawful by means
of the law. These same new rights seem to have developed in parallel
with the expansion of the logic of economy in our society. In fact, the
current economic crisis and its answers clearly show how the economy is
becoming the benchmark for evaluating rules and is subtracting
decisional power to the individuals (and to democracy); economic
programs (and not social issues) often hold the balance in general
elections. Broadly speaking, the economy has become the highway through
which individual rights find their way of access, whose paradigm of
reference is an ethos that does not require to look into one's
conscience about what is the truth. At the same time, this system is
already showing off its limits. Our everyday experience testifies that
these rights do not comply with what they promise.
Gender theory, euthanasia and culture of death
During
the meeting we also analyzed topics such as the gender theory,
euthanasia, and the language of the culture of death. It is particularly
significant to note how often people use a law-based language – the
right to reproductive health to justify abortion or the right to
self-determination and to actively assisted death to justify euthanasia –
to foster a practice, a culture of death which is the ultimate man's
attempt to replace God: to be the masters of life rather than its mere
administrators.
We have also analyzed from the perspective of
communication some initiatives related to these themes, such as the
"manif pour tous" (rally for everyone) and the campaign of the Catholic
Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales against same sex marriage. The
resulting picture clearly testifies to the "fracture" that has come
about in these countries between representative democracy (the elect)
and participatory democracy (the people who do not feel represented),
thus showing how on these issues, the social debate is extremely
necessary and, at the same time, how it poses new challenges to the
Church.
In general, from the reflections and the debate in the
plenary session, it clearly came out that the question is ultimately of
an anthropological nature: what idea of man Europe wants to deliver to
the future?
Copyright and Privacy
Thanks to the
intervention of Ms. Elvana Thaçi, Head of the "Internet Governance" Unit
- Directorate "Information Society and Action against Crime" (Council
of Europe), we could check the state-of-the-art on the issues of
copyright and privacy and their effects on the life of the Church (as an
institution) and the faithful. The challenge is to regulate the
relationship between two fundamental rights: the right to intellectual
property and the right to freedom of expression. In fact, in many cases,
especially with the expansion of the Internet, these rights eventually
collide. Particular attention has been given to the protection and
treatment of private data.
News.va and PopeApp
During the
meeting, Mr. Thaddeus Milton Jones of the Pontifical Council for Social
Communications (Vatican) brought us the greetings of the President of
that Roman dicastery, Archbishop Claudio Maria Celli, and presented the
many activities of his pontifical council, particularly in the field of
the new media (PopeApp, the twitter account Pontifex, etc.) and the
union of the various instruments of communication of the Holy See in the
multilingual portal .
Romania
The participants have been
briefed on the situation of Christians in Romania and on the commitment
of the Romanian Church in the field of social communications by Fr.
Eduard Mihai Cosa, Secretary General of the Romanian Catholic Bishops’
Conference (CER), by Msgr. Cornel Damian, Auxiliary Bishop of Bucharest,
and by Fr. Francisc Dobos, spokesman of CER and co-organizer of the
meeting. Romania, a bridge country between East and West, is a specific
and very complex reality where we see a coexistence, not without
tensions, of various Christian denominations (Catholic, Orthodox and
Protestant) and linguistic minorities (Hungarian and German). In recent
years, the Catholic dioceses have invested heavily on communication,
also thanks to the new means of social communications and the Internet.
Virtually every diocese is equipped with a press office and a website.
The
Bishops' Conference of Romania, which is bi-ritual, as it includes
bishops of Latin rite and Greek-catholic bishops, is specially engaged
in the preparations for the beatification (August 31) of the Venerable
Vladimir Ghika (who died in 1954), a Romanian intellectual and priest,
who suffered martyrdom under the Communist regime. The testimony of many
Christian religious and lay faithful who suffered persecution during
the dark years of communism was presented by Mgr. Mihai Fratila,
Greek-catholic bishop of Bucarest, and Fr. Francisc Ungureanu,
postulator of the cause of beatification of the Venerable Ghika. The
testimony of these men and these women has allowed the Church to survive
during the totalitarian regime and it is an incentive for leading to
the fall of the masks of suspect which are still very strong in the
country.
The meeting concluded with an open discussion on some
particularly important events in the life of the Church in recent months
(Vatileaks, the renunciation of Pope Benedict XVI and the election of
Pope Francis) and a presentation of the activities of CCEE and ComECE.