Magnificent and prophetic speech from Cardinal Müller: "Without Christ there will be no new Europe"

In the imposing Monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, and as the solemn closing of the ISSEP Summer School, His Eminence Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller delivered a keynote lecture entitled "Christian Orientations for a New Europe" last Sunday, July 20. In it, the Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith addressed with theological firmness and philosophical clarity the spiritual, moral, and cultural crisis that Europe is experiencing, and proposed Christianity as the only reliable compass for its regeneration.

Before an attentive audience, Müller denounced the anthropological emptying of posthumanist ideologies, the nihilistic colonization of European thought, and the neglect of the Christian soul of the continent. Far from limiting himself to a nostalgic lament, his address was a call to recover the transcendent foundation of human dignity: the person created in the image of God and redeemed by Christ. The Cardinal reaffirmed the Church's prophetic mission in the midst of a fragmented civilization and warned that Europe, if it is to survive as a free and humane civilization, must reconcile itself with its Christian roots. With the lucidity of one who has contemplated the heart of the Gospel, Müller recalled that without Jesus Christ—the Way, the Truth, and the Life—there will be no true future for Europe.

Christian Orientations for a New Europe

By His Eminence, Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller

1. Europe and Christianity: Inseparable, but not identical

Europe, as a continent, is simply a territory inhabited by 740 million citizens.

Europe, as an idea (including its expansion into America and Australia, as well as its decisive influence in Africa and Asia), is an advanced world civilization. This Western Civilization—also called Christendom, of which Hispanic America is one of its most brilliant expressions—emerged from Christianity and, in short, with the Greek Logos and Roman legal and organizational thought, has consolidated itself as a universal historical fact.

Christian Europe is the historical project of the universal idea of man as a person created in the image and likeness of God. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) translated this revealed truth into a generally accessible truth of reason, a truth of philosophical anthropology: “Act so that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of any other, never merely as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals A 156; special edition AAIV, 429). The individual human being as a person always has absolute priority over any totalitarian ideology and, as a citizen, over the State. A democratic State based on law and justice is legitimized exclusively through its service to the common good and differs from totalitarianism in that it never elevates itself as the master of life and death or claims to be the arbiter of the spiritual and moral conscience of its inhabitants.

It is true that there has been a program of radical de-Christianization in Europe over the past 300 years. It was initiated by the radical French Jacobins and theoretically supported by 19th-century religious criticism, later materializing in the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century. But this program of de-Christianization did not succeed in erasing the Christian ideas that shaped Europe, but only in secularizing them. The main ones are: the inviolable dignity of each individual; the fraternal unity of the human race; the primacy of the individual over the community; the orientation of history toward the future; and freedom and justice as principles of social cohesion, to religious freedom, tolerance, and humanism. After the catastrophes of the two world wars and the genocides perpetrated by the atheistic dictatorships of German National Socialism and Soviet and Chinese Communism, the founding fathers of Europe (Konrad Adenauer, Alcide De Gasperi, Robert Schumann), based on their moral conscience and Christian upbringing, created a new Europe. Their purpose was to remain faithful to its great traditions and cultural achievements and to introduce the values of Christian humanism into a globally interconnected world society. This new Europe was conceived as a model for the peaceful coexistence of nations.

2. Christianity as a personal relationship with God in Jesus Christ

It is impossible to define Europe without Christianity. But, conversely, Christianity is not bound to Europe in its origins or essence, nor is it limited to its territory and culture. Rather—as the Apostle Paul put it!—Christianity consists of “my gospel and the message of Jesus Christ, which I proclaim, according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret for ages past, but now made manifest through the prophetic Scriptures, made known by the will of the eternal God, so that all nations might be brought to the obedience of faith” (Rom 16:25ff).

A Christian does not define themselves passively and merely receptively based on the conventional traditions and customs to which they owe their cultural identity. Therefore, it is worth asking what Christianity is in itself, independently of Europe as a continent and as a global high culture, as a spiritual act of personal faith “by which man freely and completely entrusts himself to God” (Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum 5).

It has attracted considerable attention that Pope Leo XIV, from the beginning of his pontificate, has placed Jesus Christ at the center of his preaching. People had already grown accustomed to the fact that, following the "death of God," which Friedrich Nietzsche ("The Gay Science," 125) grimly prophesied as the fate of humanity, the Church sought to justify its right to exist in a secularized world solely through the humanitarian and civilizing effects of Christianity.

Pope Benedict XVI had already emphasized, against this self-secularization of the Church, that Christianity is not an idea or theory of the God-man-world triad in the sense of classical metaphysics and German idealism, that is, a philosophical system of thought. Nor is it an enterprise that, while opposing Marxism, would compete with it to improve this world. Nor is it an agenda for the natural perfection of humanity in the sense of the Kantian ideal of being human. Nor is it, ultimately, the utopia of a society without class struggle and conflict, capable of establishing a paradise on earth, a paradise governed by materialistic consumption under the auspices of socialism or capitalism.

Rather, Christianity is a person with whom we have a totally personal relationship based on faith, hope, and love. "Person, relationship, and communion" are the fundamental concepts of the relationship mediated by Christ with God, Creator, redeemer, and perfecter of all creation and of every human being. From this stems the certain understanding that no created reality, whether the forces of nature or politics, can surpass the human being as the source of meaning and purpose to which all of God's actions in the world refer. The centrality of the human being is the true point of contention between a Europe that draws on its Christian sources and a Europe that denies its Christian identity and, consequently, must open itself to atheistic, anti-humanist, or post-humanist ideologies. This is what today's culture war is all about.

The great German poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was able to return this relentless intellectual struggle over the truth of the human being to its deepest principle: “The true, unique, and deepest theme of world and human history, to which all others are subordinated, remains the conflict between unbelief and faith. All epochs in which faith reigns… are brilliant, inspiring, and fruitful for our contemporaries and posterity. All epochs, on the other hand, in which unbelief… asserts a narrow victory… fade before posterity, because no one likes to torment himself with the knowledge of what is fruitless.” (Divan of East and West: Goethe-Werke II, Hamburg, 9th ed., 1972, 208)

3. The nihilistic vision of humanity in post-Christian ideologies

In opposition to Christian anthropology, Sigmund Freud (A Difficulty of Psychoanalysis, 1917) developed the theory of the three narcissistic humiliations of humanity through three revolutions: that of the cosmological worldview (Copernicus), the biological-evolutionary (Darwin), and that of human depth psychology (Freud himself). And to this day, scientists, social engineers, and philosophers continue to invent new ways to humiliate this view that values ​​human beings as the center and end of all creation. The intention behind these pseudoscientific fantasies is always the same: to demonstrate that humanity's privileged position in the cosmos is invalid, since no God is needed as a hypothesis for the physical and biochemical explanation of the origin of the cosmos and the evolution of life and, therefore, no Creator God who really exists is needed. Consequently, God exists only in people's minds as an ideal of pure reason, as a projection and illusion of the imagination (Feuerbach, Freud), or as a symptom of the "God delusion" (The God delusion, according to Dawkins and his colleagues, the New Atheists). This, however, goes hand in hand with the "abolition of humanity," which Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) already recognized as a paradoxical consequence of the self-creation and self-redemption ideologies of posthumanism and transhumanism. Here, human beings must ultimately abdicate as the crown and goal of creation, because they recognize themselves as an obsolete harbinger of a new "cyberworld" where biotechnological hybrids have taken over and need humans only as biological material. But the "cyborg," this biomechanical hybrid, is not a person with whom one can unite in love, but simply a technically and bureaucratically controlled system of rules into which one must fit like a small cog.

4. The positive vision of humanity from the Christian Faith

In reality, this Gnostic nihilism, which absolutely denies humankind, reducing them to a random product of matter, does not arise from modern natural and social sciences. No, this nihilism arises from the loss of belief in the identity of God and the Logos, to which humanity corresponds as the being who—in Aristotle's words—possesses Logos. According to Thomas Aquinas, the term "person" denotes the most perfect of all nature, that is, that which subsists in a rational nature ("subsistens in rationali natura": S.th. I q. 29 a.3). The goal of the human being, created by God and for God, can only be eternal happiness in God. Their physical existence in the material world and their social nature in the family and society are merely the means to achieving perfection in God. And by virtue of their metaphysical and moral reason, which delves beyond beings into being and its reasons, human beings can infer the eternal power and divinity of God in the mirror of creation (Rom 1:19ff.). Faith, in the Christian sense, is therefore a rational and moral act by which the human person voluntarily orients themselves toward God, and not a mere bathing in religious feelings and spiritual experiences.

5. Linear and eschatological understanding of history

The understanding of God as the origin and end of all creation also gives rise to a linear understanding of history in Judaism and Christianity (and, since then, also in Islam). Where God is not recognized as Creator of the world and Lord of history, but rather identified with the totality of the cosmos or of being, cyclical concepts of time result, such as a mythical reincarnation of souls or their depersonalization in Nirvana.

If we want to speak of a humiliation of human pride, we must look beyond the secondary effects to original sin as the primary cause of the disorder in creation. Adam's sin is present in us as the constant temptation to "want to be like God" (Gen 3:5). This means that we do not want to recognize God as our Creator, who created us out of pure love with nothing to gain or lose, and who has called us to share his divinity as sons and daughters in Christ, the Son consubstantial with God, his Father. Redemption does not mean that God corrects himself, but rather that he gives us the opportunity for conversion and renewal, that is, to "break free from the bondage of decay into the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rom 8:21).

Evil does not arise from a tragic confluence of circumstances, nor from a blindly furious material world, nor from the fate to which an evil God, in the sense of dualistic gnosis, would have mercilessly condemned us. Evil entered the world through free will, which turned away from God. And it can also be overcome by free will toward good if human beings entrust themselves to the grace of the God who forgives and renews. Grace does not destroy nature, but liberates and exalts it. Thus, our greatest dignity lies in developing all our talents and cooperating with God for the temporal salvation of our neighbors in society, the State, science, and culture. And beyond that, we can even contribute to the building of the Kingdom of God by working for our eternal salvation through faith in the God of truth and love, the reception of the sacraments, and a life following Christ.

6. Reasons for hope beyond pessimism and optimism

As Christians, we cannot pessimistically proclaim our destruction for having culpably lost the Logos as the origin, meaning, and end of all being. Nor can we, with blind optimism, trust that fate, by pure chance, will make everything work out for us at the last moment. Nor should we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by modern technology, as if it were unleashing the uncontrollable forces of total destruction, causing the world to melodramatically shatter after the twilight of the gods, as in a Wagnerian opera.

Even the most modern technology, of which "artificial intelligence" represents only a part and its most advanced stage, is technically controllable by human instrumental reason. But we have an even greater chance of directing it toward good by virtue of metaphysical and moral reason, which is always qualitatively superior, if we base it on the ethical criterion of good and evil. Since the dawn of technology, humanity has always faced the same moral dilemma: use its ingenious devices as tools of construction or as weapons of destruction.

Wars, persecutions, slavery, and genocides that defy all reason not only contradict our innate compassion and sense of justice. They further betray the profound logic of all creation. For in the beginning, before all creation, from eternity, there was the Logos, the divine reason in the second person of the Trinity. All that existed came through the Logos, whom we recognize since the Incarnation as Jesus, the Christ, the eternal Son of the Father. In this Logos was life. This life, which comes from the Logos and is found in the reason of the personal God, is the "light of men" (Jn 1:4), that is, it is the reason by which we recognize God, the world, and ourselves. And in the depths of conscience, where each of us is completely alone and intimate with God, we judge ourselves and present ourselves before God as our merciful and, at the same time, incorruptible judge.

Even if one admits that the material world, to the extent that it can be represented with mathematical logic, is the expression of a Logos imprinted within it, still, in light of historical chaos, in which evil often has the last word, one might doubt the power of the Logos regarding the origin and destiny of humanity. Undoubtedly, history, in its causes and effects, is neither transparent nor calculable to finite reason. For history is the time-space of the encounter of freedoms, both in their responsible cooperation and in their irresponsible opposition. Nevertheless, we are convinced, in faith, that divine reason ultimately guides history toward good, and that love reveals itself as the Logos of freedom. In the end, evil and death do not triumph over God's universal will for salvation.

7. What can the Church offer Europe today?

In this regard, we can join Pope John Paul II's post-synodal exhortation, "Ecclesia in Europa," on the theme: "Jesus Christ in His Church. Source of Hope for Europe" (June 28, 2003). It begins programmatically with a declaration on the "loss of Christian memory and heritage" (no. 7). Despite the numerous witnesses of the Christian faith (Saint Maximilian Kolbe and the Protestant pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer against the Nazi dictatorship, or Saint Teresa of Calcutta and Saint Oscar Romero in the struggle for the human dignity of the poor and marginalized), one can diagnose a growing forgetfulness of God and religious indifference in Europe. Respect for human dignity and quality of life is counterbalanced by a widespread fear of the future (no. 8), a "general fragmentation of existence," and a "growing weakening of solidarity" (no. 8). While there are clear signs of a new and reconciled way of relating within the European family of nations, the loss of our common heritage also gives rise to an anthropology that seeks to explain the origins and future of humanity without God. Metaphysical and moral relativism, cynical hedonism, and a scandalous greed for profit lead to a complete opacity of the normative reference to God. Many people, including baptized Christians, live as if God did not exist.

But beyond the mere economic and political union of Europe, the horizon of a cultural and ethical-moral unity opens up. This hope, found concretely in the Gospel of Christ, shows that a community of nations in peace and freedom is possible.

The widespread disorientation must be countered by that fundamental certainty that can only arise from the rootedness of human beings in Jesus Christ. Since its founding by Jesus Christ, the Church has been sent into the world to proclaim to humankind the definitive revelation in Jesus Christ. The Church is not an NGO dedicated to improving material living conditions, but rather "is in Christ as a sacrament, that is, a sign and instrument of intimate union with God and of the unity of the entire human race" (Lumen Gentium 1).

Faced with the nightmare of a Third World War that would plunge all of humanity into the abyss, Christians keep alive the hope for a better world, both here and now and in the life to come.

Thus, Christianity becomes the pillar of a New Europe of peace, freedom, and social justice. The Church can make an important contribution in this regard, as she herself has always been a "model" of fraternal unity in the diversity of cultural expressions. A human-centered morality can only be communicated sustainably if political decisions and social policies always refer to a transcendent Absolute that remains beyond human manipulation. And I conclude with the words of the Council Fathers of Vatican II in the “Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World”:

“Though mankind is stricken with wonder at its own discoveries and its power, it often raises anxious questions about the current trend of the world, about the place and role of man in the universe, about the meaning of its individual and collective strivings, and about the ultimate destiny of reality and of humanity. Hence, giving witness and voice to the faith of the whole people of God gathered together by Christ, this council can provide no more eloquent proof of its solidarity with, as well as its respect and love for the entire human family with which it is bound up, than by engaging with it in conversation about these various problems. The council brings to mankind light kindled from the Gospel, and puts at its disposal those saving resources which the Church herself, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, receives from her Founder. For the human person deserves to be preserved; human society deserves to be renewed. Hence the focal point of our total presentation will be man himself, whole and entire, body and soul, heart and conscience, mind and will.

Therefore, this sacred synod, proclaiming the noble destiny of man and championing the Godlike seed which has been sown in him, offers to mankind the honest assistance of the Church in fostering that brotherhood of all men which corresponds to this destiny of theirs. Inspired by no earthly ambition, the Church seeks but a solitary goal: to carry forward the work of Christ under the lead of the befriending Spirit. And Christ entered this world to give witness to the truth, to rescue and not to sit in judgment, to serve and not to be served."

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