If Christianity loses its identity, and Europe remains anesthetized, the challenge with Islam is lost
In his Sunday essays, Eugenio Scalfari, from the height of his 95 years, which left him with existential doubt but increasingly calmed by constant dialogue with the Pope, constantly returns to the pontifical message of the one God. There seems to be a path in his religious path, dominated by the philosophical mystery of the cosmos, even more than by the much more common one of the afterlife: if there is a creator God, he can only be one, even if worshiped in a historically different way, with a virtuous effect of uniting all men beyond any faith. Only that this presupposes above all a general agreement on the very existence of a creator God, with a projection beyond the insurmountable limit of the big bang , in front of which we are condemned to stop a few moments before. Certainly, faith skips the insoluble mystery, replacing reason with an inner conviction, acquired from birth or conquered later, with a desire for certainty frustrated by everyday reality itself. So Scalfari, echoing the Pope, speaks to men of faith, albeit of any faith, who have a single supernatural entity as a referent: but this is not so, because Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, do not have this as an acquired fact. and Hinduism has a multiple and varied Olympus.
To close, the discourse concerns the three monotheistic religions, those of the book, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, but here there is a first fundamental difference: Judaism has Yahweh, Islamism has Allah, but the Christianity has Christ, albeit placed within the abstruse dogma of a Trinitarian God, little or nothing relevant to a religion founded on a God incarnate to end up crucified as a ransom for man's sin, perceived not as the legendary one of Adam, but as that of each of us in the precarious course of our human journey. Here lies the essential gap between the two religions that consider the gap between their God and man to be infinite, so much so that they consider that God to the limit unpronounceable and certainly not representable, and one that is entirely founded on Christ, seen much more as a man. that like God, an almost sacrilege for Judaism and Islam.
It can also be said that there is only one God, but what constitutes the end of the discourse in Judaism and Islam, constitutes only the principle for Christianity: not a historical difference, which can be overcome with a good dose of simple ecumenism, but an intrinsic characteristic of Christianity, so much so as to be defined in the name of Christ, with a book not the old testament, but the new one, the Gospel, totally ahistorical, not confined or confined to the time of a nomadic society, itinerant in the desert, was that of the Sinai or the Arabian desert; and as a symbol the cross of Calvary.
If the message of the one God is interpreted as a wish for brotherhood in the name of common humanity, beyond any difference of any nature, including religious, nothing to say, but this is already proper to Christianity, that is precisely to the his evangelical spirit, well; but it is not good if this leads to a flattening into the generic and ambiguous concept of the one God of what constitutes the essence of Christianity.
If Christianity loses its identity, the bet with the other expansionist religion, that is, tendentially open to all, Islamism, is lost from the start, because the latter preserves it with all its exclusionary aggressiveness, whose fundamentalism remained, largely protected from any secularization, it dominates the largest part of the countries where it remains state religion. We must look at the situation of these countries, where the denial of religious freedom often borders on fanatical intolerance, with persecutions that find little or no echo in an anesthetized Europe, which believes it can survive on the elimination of any identity, as if the only one that belongs to it for a two-thousand-year history was not the Christian one, which made it the privileged seat of philosophical and artistic culture. We must not limit ourselves to judging by how the masses of immigrant Muslims behave. Of course, today their integration into a secularized and pluralist reality is unquestionable, but they rigidly maintain their faith, in the public and in the private sector. What will happen tomorrow when they are a significant minority and found an Islamic party? Why not, didn't the Catholics do it? All right, but will they find another De Gasperi?
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/se-il-cristianesimo-perde-la-sua-identita-e-leuropa-resta-anestetizzata-la-sfida-con-lislamismo-e-perduta/ on Wed, 14 Oct 2020 03:47:00 +0000.