European Christians must have the courage to promote a common European sentiment, Prof Andrea Riccardi, founder of the St Egidio Community, told a conference on Europe at the weekend. It should be able "to attract and engage other Europeans in a sense of common destiny", he said.
He was taking part in the Together for Europe conference at Stuttgart, Germany, held to mark the 50th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome, and which was broadcast simultaneously to NUI Maynooth and Belfast.
A group from the Focolare centre at Prosperous, Co Kildare, were among 11,000 people who attended the conference in Stuttgart to give witness to a view that Europe is more than an economy and has a Christian soul.
Some 60 members of Tine, a network of leaders of Catholic Church movements, communities and parishes from all over Ireland, took part in the conference, via satellite link, from Maynooth.
Altogether there were broadcasts to 135 European cities, with an estimated 100,000 people taking part.
Prof Riccardi said that Europeans held "precious values that are important for the future of the world, such as freedom, faith, solidarity, culture, and humanism. We cannot afford to lose our way because we would be losing an important part of the humanism of the world of today".
As "united Europeans in diversity, we will be, in the world, a gentle and solid human force, a resource of humanism," he continued. Christians could be at the heart of that humanism, he said.
Chiara Lubich, founder of the Focolare movement, told the conference that "for us in Europe, God no longer seems to be the one to whom we turn in order in resolve our problems and answer the questions we are most concerned about. We note with concern that Christian values are less and less the norm and only rarely do people declare themselves Christians".
