Europe must be unafraid of faith, says Spanish cardinal

Rome, Italy, Oct 4, 2006 / 22:00 pm

During the European Symposium of University Professors taking place in Rome this week, the Archbishop of Toledo, Cardinal Antonio Cañizares Llovera, said Europe would remain Christian “as long as it maintains its roots.”

“The future of Europe, like it or not, is found in the faith,” he explained, and not in “empty cultures” of unrestrained “liberty,” “relativism,” and arrogant skepticism, which seem to have become prevalent in many European countries.  

If Europe does not have “the courage to once more confront the questions about the meaning of life and the basis of morality,” the cardinal went on, “it may see a resurgence of the ghosts and conflicts of the past” and it will confront “the ‘new things of today’ with the old ideas that have shown themselves to be useless.”

Cardinal Cañizares also warned that in various countries, such as Spain, there is great confusion between neutrality and secularism, “between what a non-sectarian, neutral State is, and what a secularist State is.”

In such countries, he added, there is a constant attempt to set “faith against reason, religiosity against science, as if faith and religiosity were something to be overcome and were up to each individual to practice in private,” and to give absolute priority “to human reason or to science and its own advances.”

Europe is not as much a geographical reality as a “cultural and historic concept,” the cardinal explained.  “Even more, it is a spiritual reality,” he said.