Prayer Time in Front of Notre-Dame de Paris, December 2, 2023. (Photo by VINCENT ISORE / IP3 PRESS/MAXPPP)
By Laurent Stalla-Bourdillon
Jan 9 2024
Feared by some and cherished by others, religion could be a force for unity or a new source of division in this new year of 2024. Modernity has not eliminated the need for belief or the search for the meaning of existence. Even artificial intelligence is trained on religious issues and can answer various questions. But AI lacks life and spirit. It can do nothing for what each individual must achieve in their own life without being able to delegate it to anyone else.
From an anthropological perspective, religion reflects that unknown part of existence that no human thought can explain. It serves as a constant reminder that “man infinitely transcends man,” as Blaise Pascal said. The concept of “God” affirms the permanence of the unknowable for the intelligent creatures that we are. This ignorance often appears as an unbearable and humiliating flaw.
If, in the 20th century, the attempt to eliminate God from the horizon of thought allowed for self-reference, the elimination of the thirst for meaning – the quest for transcendence – seems to be the attempt of the 21st century: to make the human being perfectly transparent to oneself and to renounce the pursuit of this truth that transcends them. Only wonder embraces this transcendence.
Delivering religion from its counterfeits
From a political perspective, the various religions play a role in the governance of peoples. Autocratic regimes know this and find in religion a very powerful adjunct to their politics. Unfortunately, many conflicts have religious pretexts, justifying the desire for domination. Invoking heaven’s will to impose it often produces chaos on earth. Therefore, many of our contemporaries view religion as a plague and the cause of war. They turn away from it for good reason. Delivering religion from its counterfeits remains an unfinished task. Renouncing religion does not make one stronger, but rather more fragile, as faith engages reason, and reason stimulates faith.
For several years we have seen that economic and technological globalization does not create a more united humanity. Technologies bring people closer but do not make them brothers and sisters. Who can help humanity think about its unity? This path toward unity is the only way to free humanity from the absurdity of its wars. Pope Francis tirelessly urges us to find in friendship and fraternity the answer to this “piecemeal third world war”. Humanity is clearly challenged by its unity and must urgently discover the key so that the tragedies of its history do not repeat themselves. This is our dearest wish for 2024!
Religion as an identity marker
Religious affiliation has become more about being an identity markers than an intellectual or spiritual resource. Far from connecting and unifying people through the search for and listening to truth, they politically serve as exclusionary forces. In Russia, India, Turkey, and China, religious references boost nationalist and patriotic speeches. Religion will not be saved by abandoning it to those who corrupt it or by seeking refuge in new individual and institutionally unstructured spiritualities.
Faced with new political-religious tyrannies, the common effort must focus on the truth of human nature. Science has made immense progress in understanding the living world. Religion should draw inspiration from this to contemplate the wisdom that is its principle. For Christians, this wisdom has the face of Jesus, the face of Christ’s love. The fading of Christianity in Europe paradoxically and providentially removes it from the game of power relations. It is not – and should no longer strive to be – a religion of domination but one of service. If it were to engage in the mimetic game of conquerors, it would lose its essence.
Its true progress has led it to honor consciences above all else, believing that they are the place of were God is made manifest to the human creature. Christianity does not aim for triumph but for the revelation of truth, which unfolds through the power of truth itself. Christians have love as their universal language to transform this world and make it livable.
“The Christian is not the one who is not Muslim, not Jewish, not Shinto, not Hindu… The Christian is the one who is only love, in whom love lives, and who approaches others only with love, arousing in them a new love,” said the Swiss priest and theologian Maurice Zundel (1897-1975). For a Christian, “good” is not something to do but someone to love.
Strengthening the Christian imperative
The religious tensions observed in the world only reinforce the Christian imperative. The imperative to denounce the political counterfeits of religion. Christians should not seek conquest as much as the fulfillment of their humanity, still largely unfinished. Christianity aims to strive with all its might toward the unity of the human family. Humanity cannot free itself from the evil that plagues it. It cannot create a new humanity technically, ethnically, or religiously. It must let itself be loved and discovered from a gaze that does not come from within: the gaze of Christ.
Europe, which has seen Christianity bear its most beautiful fruits, must now find spiritual guides who live in the light of this gaze. Europe, as we can see when bidding farewell to Jacques Delors, is instinctively seeking to testify to this unity it received in Christ. Europe, along with France and the nations that compose it, bears the awareness that a universal capacity to love has been deposited in every human being. This openness to something beyond oneself can conquer the distress of living in a closed world. It is the most beautiful and urgent service that the various religions can jointly fulfill.
May this new year 2024, which will see the European elections, the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris, and the preparation for the Jubilee of 2025, be a year where peace and unity triumph. Let it be a year of great spiritual revival!
Laurent Stalla-Bourdillon is a priest of the Archdiocese of Paris where he is director of pastoral engagement with the world of politics and a professor at the Collège des Bernardins.– La Croix International
