THERE was an interesting contrast between the way Pope Francis
spoke to the Muslims of the world, during his visit to Turkey this
week, and the way he spoke to the politicians of Europe, lamenting
that our continent has lost something integral to the vision of
human dignity on which our common culture claims to be based.
In Istanbul, he moved with diplomatic delicacy. The Turkish
President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had wagged a finger, with a
warning that Islamic extremist groups were a consequence of the
"serious and rapid rise of Islamophobia" in the West. A sense of
"rejection" among Muslims in Europe was a factor behind the
radicalisation of the young men who joined violent groups.
The Pope responded with the gentlest of exhortations. It would
be, he said, "beautiful" if Islamic leaders would speak out clearly
and condemn such violence, "because this would help the majority of
Muslim people", who were people of peace.
A few days before, on his visit to the European Parliament in
Strasbourg, he had been more analytical and more admonitory. News
headlines reported how he chastised politicians for their policies
on immigration, and for their bureaucratic insensitivity to the
needs of ordinary individuals. They had allowed Europe to turn into
an "old and haggard" continent that had become, he added rather
tactlessly, like an ageing grandmother, who is "no longer fertile
and vibrant".
What was not widely reported was another image he used. He
recalled a Vatican fresco by Raphael, depicting the School of
Athens philosophers. He said: "Plato and Aristotle are in the
centre. Plato's finger is pointed upward, to the world of ideas, to
the sky; to heaven, as we might say. Aristotle holds his hand out
before him, towards the viewer, towards the world; concrete
reality. This strikes me as a very apt image of Europe and her
history, made up of the constant interplay between heaven and
earth, where the sky suggests that openness to the transcendent -
to God - which has always distinguished the peoples of Europe,
while the earth represents Europe's practical and concrete ability
to confront situations and problems."
What Europe had lost, he suggested, was that balance between the
transcendent and the earthly realities. One of the founding
principles of modern politics, he continued, is human rights. These
are rooted in an awareness of the unique worth of each individual
human person - an idea Europe inherited from Christianity, as well
as from ancient Greece. But the ideal has become corrupted by the
notion that human rights belong to individuals, ignoring the fact
that each person's rights are bound up with those of other
people.
The result in Europe today is the loneliness of those who have
no connection with others: the elderly, the unemployed, the
homeless, young people bereft of prospects, the ill and vulnerable,
the children who are killed in the womb. We have confused means and
ends, and become mere cogs of consumption.
Sad that it should take an outsider - a pope from Argentina - to
see so clearly what we in Europe can apparently no longer see of
ourselves.
Paul Vallely is a Senior Fellow at the Brooks World Poverty
Institute at the University of Manchester.