VATICAN CITY, 8 MAR 2008 (VIS) - The Holy Father today received participants in the plenary session of the Pontifical Council for Culture who have been meeting to study the question of "the Church and the challenge of secularisation".
"Today more than ever", the Holy Father told them, "reciprocal openness between cultures is an important field for dialogue between men and women committed to seeking authentic humanism, over and above the differences that separate them".
Secularisation, he said, "invades all aspects of daily life and causes the development of a mentality in which God is effectively absent, entirely or in part, from human life and conscience". This "is not just an external threat to believers, but has for some time been evident in the bosom of the Church herself".
Benedict XVI expressed the view that believers are being conditioned by a "culture of images which imposes contradictory models and impulses, with the effective negation of God". Hence people come to believe "there is no longer any need for God, to think of Him or to return to Him", said the Pope. "Furthermore, the predominant hedonistic and consumer mentality favours, in the faithful as in pastors, a drift towards superficiality and selfishness which damages ecclesial life".
The Holy Father warned of "the risk of falling into spiritual atrophy and emptiness of heart", and highlighted the need to react to such a situation by re-appropriating "the exalted values of existence which give meaning to life and can satisfy the disquiet of the human heart in its search for happiness". These include "the dignity and freedom of the person, the equality of all mankind, and the sense of life and death and of what awaits us at the end of earthly existence".
"The phrase 'etsi Deus non daretur' [as if there were no God] is becoming a way of life which has its roots in a kind of 'arrogance' of reason", he said. Reason "was actually created and loved by God" but is now "held to be sufficient unto itself and closes itself off from contemplating and seeking a Truth that lies beyond it".
Benedict XVI indicated that the Pontifical Council for Culture must remain committed to "fruitful dialogue between science and faith", respecting the ambit and methodology of each of them, in order "to serve man and humanity, favouring the integral development and growth of each and of all.
"Above all", he added in conclusion, "I exhort pastors of the flock of God to a tireless and generous mission to counteract - in the field of dialogue and meeting between cultures, of announcement and testimony of the Gospel - the worrying phenomenon of secularisation which weakens man and hinders his innate longing for the entire Truth".
AC/CHURCH SECULARISATION/... VIS 20080310 (470)
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