Madrid, Spain, Oct 11, 2006 / 22:00 pm
During her remarks at the World Congress of Catholic Television, the President of the Community of Madrid, Esperanza Aguirre, told participants, “The Church and the Gospel…together with Greek thought, and Roman law” are the three pillars “upon which Western Civilization rests.”
Aguirre - whose post is similar to that of a state governor in the US - thanked the Congress organizers for choosing Madrid for the event and underscored the duty of the Church to fulfill the mission “entrusted to her by Jesus Christ” to “spread the Gospel to the whole world and to all peoples.”
This “transcendental mission,” she went on, concerns not only the Church and Catholics, but all people, believers or not, who recognize in the Church and in the Gospel one of the three pillars, together with Greek thought and Roman law, upon which Western Civilization rests.”
It was Western Civilization, Aguirre said, that brought “dignity and equality to all men, in accord with the teaching of the Gospel, and that was the first to conceive of man as an end unto himself, free by nature and subject to inalienable rights.” It was also Western Civilization, she continued, “resting upon these three pillars that represent rational critical thought, law, and Judeo-Christian morality, that has made science and progress possible and has made the commandment of Genesis a reality: ‘be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it’,” she explained.
Nevertheless, Aguirre continued, “our age is characterized by an exacerbated and sometimes irrational criticism of the legacy and the values of Western Civilization, those values that are indisputably rooted in the teachings of the Gospel.”
Therefore she called on all “lovers of freedom, believers and non-believers alike,” to support those who have assumed the task of defending that legacy and “the values of Christian humanism, which have made the civilization of freedom and progress possible.”
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