Speech of Alejo Vidal-Quadras Roca, First vice president of the European parliament

Your Excellency Mr. President of the Republic,
Your Excellency Mr. Chairman of the Senate,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Allow me to begin transmitting to you the satisfaction and gratitude of the President of the European Parliament, whom I have the honor to represent in this event, for the kind invitation to participate in this ²²-nd Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions.

The European Parliament, in whose hemicycle sit Parliamentarians of twenty five states, and that legislates for four hundred and fifty million citizens, associates itself without any reservation to this great gathering of spiritual guides who have traveled from the four cardinal points to exchange ideas, proposals, concerns and yearns in the benefit of peace, justice and solidarity between all human beings.

Because Europe, which is without a doubt a continent, is not one in the geographical sense, as can be said of the other four. This western appendix of Asia is not separated by any ocean from this immensity that spreads from the Pacific to the Urals, and this mountain range is not even an interstate border.

Therefore, it is not geography that defines Europe; it is not physical reality that has configured it as a continent deserving such a name throughout History, but an intangible content, a spirit, a certain conception of Man and of society.

And it is of this spirit that I would briefly like to talk to you, of the ethical principles that inspire the European integration process that, on the top of being a legal and political entity and a single market, is, over and above all, a moral undertaking.

Article six of the European Union is unequivocal in this respect and its first point reads as follows: "The Union is founded on the principles of liberty, democracy, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms, and the rule of law, principles that are common to the Member States". Since the origin of the European Community half a century ago, these principles have permeated the rulings of the European Court of Justice, are present in all European national Constitutions and are also the backbone of the Union's Charter of Fundamental Rights, solemnly proclaimed by its Heads of State and Government in December of 2000, a concise and categorical text displaying a set of political, civil and social rights among the most advanced in the world.

If we had to describe today's European society with the most appropriate term it would be that of a pluralist society or, what is the same, an open society in the sense masterly theorized by Karl Popper. A society characterized by the respect of human rights, the majority rule, civil and political liberties, checks and balances, the mutual independence between the religious and the civil spheres, gender equality, the submission of the military instances to the civil ones, political mandates that are limited in time and revocable, a well developed system of social protection and the existence of a public sphere of debate and opinion without governmental interference.

This pluralist society is the result of a long historical evolution of two thousand five hundred years, in which the principal ingredients have been the classical Greek and Roman legacy, Christianity and the Enlightenment. The 21^st Century Europeans live together immersed in a normative and intellectual climate of which the basic ingredients are critical rationalism, tolerance and individual freedom, but the road up to this stage of our civilization has not be a straight line and, together with periods of brilliant steps forward, it has suffered disheartening setbacks and falls. There is no need to look any further than the 20^th Century, described not without reason as "a century of horrors", during which Europe suffered the devastation of two dreadful wars, the disgrace of Nazism and the oppression of Soviet Communism.

One has to wonder, how people capable of giving birth to the most sublime products of universal art and literature and of the most decisive scientific and technical discoveries could so recently fall into a chilling abyss of violence and barbarism. Maybe the answer, one which has already been subject to much reflection, will be addressed to this Congress, since it is directly related with the religious dimension of man. Western civilization, born and developed in Europe, holds all the elements to provide human beings with happiness, dignity and prosperity up to a remarkable level. The Greek taught us to love beauty, to place man as measure of all things and opened the way to rational knowledge.

The splendid bodies of their sculptures, exhibited lying bare, show us the triumph of humanism over the darkness of tribal instinct. In Sophocles' Antigone, the chorus exclaim: "Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man". Christianity brought us the conscience of the intrinsic dignity of the human being as created by God in his own image and the crucial revelation that the respect we owe to our kind derives from who and not what they are. The Enlightenment established in a final manner critical rationalism as the most powerful method of analysis of reality and the idea of man as an autonomous being able to govern himself and subject to universal rights. With this premises, Europe has a vision of the world and of Humanity, a vision consisting of a delicate balance between immanency and transcendence, between science and faith, between freedom and linkage to God, between technological development and preservation of nature. A narrow path that requires constant vigilance to avoid falling in the perils that lie in wait should we abandon it: nihilism, moral relativism, totalitarianism or intolerant fanaticism.

For we should not forget that the essence of the open, humanist and pluralist European culture is freedom. And for the European, freedom is the founding value of all the others, it is a calling that reached us from Above. "The Truth will set you free" is the key affirmation of the New Testament. Indeed, for us European Truth and Freedom are inseparable, they are two sides of the same coin. We are free to search for the Truth, but it is its search that makes us genuinely free. No one or nothing is legitimized to impose its truth through coercion or violence. God enlightens man's freedom, He doesn't destroy it. In a society of free citizens, that is, a pluralist society, religion and State must be independent from one another and, consequently, a pluralist society has to be a secular society, in which the religious and civil domains respect and cooperate with each other, but without interfering with one another. The scission of what is human and what is divine unhinges man who, in his contingent solitude, is "inhaled by the vacuum", in the words of George Bernanos. But the invalidation of human freedom perpetrated by religious fundamentalisms is a form of sacrilege, because a God that crushes Man, that degrades him from end to mean, cannot give him salvation.

I am convinced that this Congress will uphold the moral values of freedom and pluralism as inalienable and will condemn intolerance and dogmatism. Voltaire observed that "if there were only one religion in England there would be danger of despotism; if there were two they would cut each other's throats. But there are thirty, and they live in peace and happiness". At the end of the day, all faiths here represented share the thought of Karl Jaspers that "the existence that we can be is not real unless united to the transcendence that makes us be". And it is from the things that unite us that we can work constructively for the general good.

While contemplating the destruction left by the Second World War, Gabriel Marcel pronounced a startling judgment: "Some wounds never heal". The European Union is the example of how the will and generosity of human kind, motivated by noble ideals, can appease the most acrimonious resentments. The crumbling of the New York Twin Towers also inflicted seemingly irreparable damage caving a moat of frightening depth.

I believe that in this opening ceremony, all of us overwhelmed by the emotion of the sacred memory of all the victims of hate who have passed away and suffered and that die and suffer every day in our respective countries, it is fitting to remember the enlightening intuition of Saint-Exupery when he wrote: "Love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction". I invite you all, while I transmit to you the sincere wishes of success on behalf of the President and of all my colleagues of the European Parliament for this Second Congress, to look together to the future, to unite our hearts in the direction of hope, of mutual understanding, of peace and unity of all men of good and firm will.