Pope Leo XIV’s speech in Metz relaunches the true identity of the Old Continent: with today’s bureaucracy we risk a soulless Europe
The last stage of the Pope’s apostolic journey Leo XIV in France she didn’t go to high-sounding places like Paris or Lourdes, but to the less renowned town of Metz. A border place, marked for centuries by the passage of sovereignty between France and Germany. A place that evokes the name of Robert Schumanone of the founding fathers of united Europe. It is here that the Pontiff chose to talk about European identity, its deep Christian roots and the (increasingly concrete) risk that the Old Continent will lose its soul almost without realizing it.
What Europe cannot afford to forget
The underlying theme of the Pope’s speech Leo XIV it’s memory. The Old Continent, the Pontiff claims, is the result of a long sedimentation of civilizations, encounters and cultural syntheses. «Europe, in fact, gradually became aware of itself in the historical eras of the Hellenistic civilization, the Roman Empire and then the spread of Christianity, integrating, over time, new cultures such as, among others, the Germanic and Slavic ones».
From this perspective, Christianity does not present itself as one element among many, but as a decisive component. «Europe must therefore be understood as a cultural and historical reality even before being a geographical reality. We cannot therefore talk about Europe without mentioning Christianity”, said the Holy Father.
Leo XIV he also listed the concrete fruits of this Christian presence on the continent: «Help for the poor, the sick, the elderly; children’s education and universities; hospitals and medicine; architecture and engineering; the development of sciences; the law and organization of cities and states themselves”.
The echo of the words of Benedict XIV
The speech of Leo XIV it fits into a line already clearly traced by Benedict XVI. In 2012, Ratzinger he had distinguished two “souls” of Europe: on the one hand an abstract reason, which claims to emancipate itself from history and traditions; on the other, a Christian soul rooted in European history, “anchored to the roots that gave rise to this Europe, that built it in the great values, in the great intuitions, in the vision of the Christian faith”.
The substance of the message is the same: without those roots, Europe becomes something very difficult to define, something empty, incomplete.
The risk of a Europe without a soul
The Pontiff’s words therefore go beyond theology to flow into a political-cultural dimension, identifying the main risk for the future of the continent in the predominance of bureaucracy. A Europe reduced to mere procedures loses that strong cultural identity that has fueled, over the centuries, its development in every field of knowledge and human action.
It is not a criticism of the European institutions as such. Rather, it is a warning: institutions can only stand if they are based on something deeper. Those ancient Christian roots.
