The search for God of necessity entails a commitment to the Kingdom and its values. That Kingdom is a present and future reality. Out of our fumblings and failures, our confusion and darkness, our dreams and ceaseless striving, the Lord of history reveals his kingdom among us and brings to pass his purposes.

Inevitably the process involves repeated death and resurrection. When everything seems lost and darkness reigns, the power of God is most clearly manifested in our weakness.

The Church, we know, has no political agenda. It has, however, a divine mission to proclaim the Kingdom, witness to its values, be a sign and source of universal reconciliation and human renewal. The Church and its members must be a prophetic voice in society. We must seek always to discern the signs of the time and be agents of constructive change at every level. Experience, however teaches us that members of the Church may not speak with one voice for the way ahead is sometimes unclear.

The Church’s mission is both universal and particular. There is a global responsibility as well as one which is national and continental. The concern for our immediate country and its neighbours must never for instance blind us to the needs of the Southern hemisphere. To the best of our ability we must keep alive in our continent the sense that solidarity, interdependence and practical concern embrace the whole planet. In this connection I would remind you of what the Holy Father wrote in his most recent Encyclical Centesimus Annus concerning the universal destination of the goods of creation, both material and spiritual.

Europe’s recovery from the destruction of World War II was slow, and achieved only with massive U.S. aid. Europe was shattered psychologically as well as physically. Since the late 19th century the major European powers had lost their economic lead to the U.S.A., and probably also to the dynamic Russian Empire. But Russia’s isolation after 1918 and American isolationism had obscured this reality until the end of the war, when these two countries emerged, to many it seemed overnight, as nuclear superpowers, glowering at each other across a prostrate Europe. It seemed as if Europe had been definitively side-lined as a major player on the world stage.

The post-war attempt to unite western Europe economically and politically was designed to challenge what seemed to many to have been an inexorable shift in the global power balance. But even if European unity were ultimately to be achieved through this process—and at first the most that seemed attainable was a limited measure of economic integration between six of Europe’s thirty-odd states—it appeared unlikely that this could ever produce much more than a slowing down of the process of Europe’s relative decline vis-ik-vis the new super-powers.

Yet forty years later the Europe thus launched is being called in aid by a collapsing Soviet Union to save it from disaster and possible famine. Moreover within Europe itself the attractive power of the European Community is proving embarrassingly strong, with applications for membership currently threatening to overwhelm it. And it is towards the much more open economy of western Europe rather than towards the U.S. that many countries in the rest of the world now look when seeking to improve their trading opportunities.

My original title for this paper asked a question: The Church—Focus for European Integration? Of course there is a great deal that the Church, whether we mean those of us in communion with Rome or include Christians of the Reformed and Orthodox Churches, is able and likely to do to focus integration in Europe. But as I come now to write it I find that the emphasis in what I want to say suggests a fairly modest proposal for some work at national level which would necessarily be ecumenical in character.

Christians, in Europe at least, are perhaps more of an obstacle in the way rather than any kind of focus of integration. True, not all the ancient and venomous conflicts that you see almost wherever you look in ‘Europe’ have religious or if you like ecclesiastical origins or dimensions. The problem of Basque separatism in Spain doesn’t have any religious dimension. But whether it is Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Croatian Catholics and Orthodox Serbs, or Christians and Muslims in Cyprus, to mention only the three bitterest conflicts (and religion is not the only factor in any of these cases), it is tempting to suggest that if there were a lot less religion around it would be easier to see how Europeans might be united in peace and prosperity. There are ancient Christian countries in Europe where anti-semitism isn’t totally absent and it may be wondered whether Christians in Europe are any better placed to cope with Islam than our ancestors were at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

After the political revolutions of 1989, the former eastern bloc countries, although at differing speeds and in a different order, started a process leading to the abolition of the basic principles upon which real socialism was founded. The identity of their social, economic and political systems is being qualitatively changed

The post-revolutionary system, however, is taking a long time to establish itself. The rather open nature of the new legal framework makes it difficult to forecast the final outcome of post-communist societies. Meanwhile, one can remark on the constraints that exist in the postcommunist period. Instead of thinking in terms of final results, it would perhaps be more helpful to start from the remnants of communism and to ask ourselves how sociopolitical realities can be matched with the new principles of democracy, market economy and capitalism. It is important to have a clear insight into the means that will be used to obtain real owners. These real owners are, as a matter of fact, a prerequisite for a capitalist system. Finally, an assessment has to be mack of the ‘moral climate’ in which transformation has to proceed.

In his Apologia Newman writes

The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent sweeping changes that have taken place in the political configuration of Europe force us to go beyond territorial concerns in our consideration of unity. More than simply a geographical reality, in fact, unity is something that encompasses history, culture and tradition, and which has in Christianity its first matrix.

My subject is the Christian scene in the Mediterranean area, the ‘south’ of Europe. Our first task, therefore, must be to rid ourselves of those all too common prejudices which equate the ‘south’ with regress and cultural backwardness. After all, depending on one’s perspective, every country is always to the ‘south’ of another. To deal comprehensively with the situation of Christianity in the Mediterranean area in the short space allocated to me is practically impossible, and would require a knowledge of social and cultural phenomena which do not easily lend themselves to synthesis. Given my background, therefore, the analysis which follows has to be restricted to the Italian situation.

The situation in Italy, however, is also one which does not easily lend itself to brief description. A great deal of space would be required even to sketch the background against which the current situation of Christianity has come to be created. I have decided, therefore, to concentrate on two areas: firstly, the general situation of the life of believers in Italy and, secondly, the situation of Italian theology. Taken together, these two perspectives should give some indication of the global condition of the country with regard to Christianity.

By indulging in a cold war Europe managed to disguise from itself for over forty years the true nature of its malaise. Perhaps that was why it lasted so long. Unconsciously, we hid our plight from ourselves partly by exporting our conflicts (and the armaments to go with them) and partly by suppressing them through coercion and obfuscation at home. By August 1991 the results of these self-deceptions had become crystal clear. The Gulf War and civil strife in Yugoslavia throw up horrible but revealing images of what we have been up to in these last few decades. Conversely, the failure of the coup in the USSR points to a more hopeful future. I want to discuss some of the implications for the Church of these various events.

Our self-deceptions were compounded by the absence of any really searching parliamentary debate about the principles which should govern European security. Those on both sides of the cold war who tried to put forward alternative military strategies or, more radically, new approaches to the concept of security itself were marginalised by the political elites. Creative thinking was undervalued, even suppressed, and parliaments confined themselves to technical minutiae on weapons procurement and the like. The absence of a discussion of fundamentals is the more remarkable when contrasted with the full and wide-ranging parliamentary scrutiny on other issues of principle, for example political union, the limits of national sovereignty or the possible benefits of a western European federation.

The fact that a Hungarian has been asked to contribute a paper on the theme of Christian hope in Europe’s future might suggest that a ray of hope for European Christianity is expected from the eastern edge of our continent: ex oriente lux. Can my message reassure the aging and, in many respects, decadent Christianity of the west?

Many outward signs have indeed been pointing in this direction. I do not believe, however, that we can judge simply from the recent papal visit to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Though spectacular crowds on our television screens have an eminent value for religious propaganda, we in the west expect something more behind these scenes. My real task should therefore be a foray into the background of the east European landscape.

My foray will be limited, since I do not trust myself outside the confines of my native Hungary. It will be uncertain, since I am going to speak of a situation reminding us of the very beginning: ‘...and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep’. At the same time we can feel that ‘the Spirit of God was brooding over the chaos’ which the last forty years of desert wandering ‘uncreated’ in a part of our common European homeland.

During this conference, I suggest, we have taken part in a process of demystification of various illusions about the spiritual or moral roots of the new Europe.

Garrett Fitzgerald suggested that the European Community had brought about a revolution in consciousness in three areas: it had abandoned war as a means of settling internal disputes; it had produced a Convention on Human Rights enforceable by the European Court; and it had recognised Europe’s duty towards the Third World both in the Lomé Convention and other Community structures and in individual country aid programmes. Dr Fitzgerald anticipated criticism, and backtracked a little to say that these were all revolutions in principle. With regard to the church, he was much less positive. He said that in Ireland there was an underground church, waiting for the day when the values of Vatican II would be proclaimed anew. This note was struck in all the other reports from local churches. From France and Italy too we heard of an institutional church failing to meet the needs and aspirations of many of its members, who were turning to a variety of small groups, often viewed with concern by the hierarchy. George Vass, too, discussing Eastern Europe, questioned the assumption implicit in many discussions of lux ex Oriente. The light shining in the East is less a beacon than scattered sparks. Even the small communities which have carried the weight of renewal, he suggested, may not survive emerging from the cosy excitement of the underground into the cold wind of a pluralist society.