"The Second Vatican Council was a providential event, whereby the Church began the more immediate preparation for the Jubilee of the Second Millennium"…(TMA 17) Pope John Paul II writes in his apostolic letter Tertio Millennio adveniente. And not only symbolic was the connection, the close connection between the Vatican II and the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 highlighted by the Pope.

For the Church, the Council was an opportunity, starting from the mystery of Christ, to examine herself, her nature, her mission and to open a dialogue with the contemporary world. This opening, as Pope Wojtyla said in the letter, was "an evangelical response to recent changes in the world, including the profoundly disturbing experiences of the Twentieth Century, a century scarred by the First and Second World Wars, by the experience of concentration camps and by horrendous massacres…"(ibid).

Well: the approaching Jubilee will also be for the Church, for believers, an opportunity, an extraordinary opportunity for conversion, purification and spiritual, ecclesial and moral renewal. But this time, to whom must we address the "evangelical response" ? And what commitments, what challenges await the Catholic community as we pass into the 21^st century?

It is true that today the world appears profoundly changed compared to a few decades ago. For the Church, for religion, what was once enemy number one, namely Marxism, would seem to have disappeared for ever. But now appearing on the horizon is a threat still more insidious, indeed fatal: namely practical materialism which is leading many people, as the Pope often says, to live as if "God did not exist"; and which is already the cause – judging by the growing impermeability of even believers to the moral teaching of the Church – of widespread subjectivisation of the faith. Which means that the individual now tends to invent his "own" moral code, when he does not reach the point of constructing a religion to suit his own ends and purpose.

So it is, that after having fought the great battle against atheism, programmed atheism, set up as a system, imposed on hundreds of millions of people, on whole nations, the Pope and the Church must now fight an even harder, more difficult battle, the battle against indifference: to safeguard man from himself, from the desire to burn the bridges with his Creator.

And after having pronounced so many words to call for justice, peace, respect for the poor, the disinherited, the Pope and the Church will have to repeat again those words, now forgotten to most people, which mark – yesterday, today, and will mark tomorrow – the borderline between good and evil, between values and non-values.

So, more than thirty years after the end of the Council, this would seem to be the principle challenge which Catholicism will have to face in the future. A Catholicism, furthermore, destined to see ever more accentuated its minority condition in society. Even, and above all, there where once society was traditionally largely Christian.

Yes, certainly there remains the scandal of division among Christians. We must try soon to heal recent problems with the Orthodox Church (which accuses the Catholic Church of "proselytism" in Orthodox territories) and with the Anglican Church (now that the latter has decided to admit women to the priesthood).

Then there is Islam. Not only Muslim fundamentalism, bearer of extremism in which religion becomes ideological support and political propeller of intolerant regimes, closed to everything and everyone. But also more moderate Islam, which Christianity is bound to face on religious and cultural terms, since they are expressions of two fundamentally different civilizations.

Then there is the advance of the sects, which speculate on the poverty and ignorance people but also on the absence of the sacred which today many Churches and religions denounce. There is modernity of which too many aspects are still ambiguous. There are ever more dangerous wanderings of medical science beyond the set limits of the sacredness of life, of the respect owed to life. There is a world still crossed by wars and conflict, wounded by macroscopic injustice, without the former clear distinction between the North and the South of the planet.

But there is, above all, the human person ever less conscious of the meaning of life, of his or her intrinsic value and destiny. The person is in ever greater danger of being lost in solitude, in emptiness.

So then, will the Catholic Church be able to respond to this challenge – this decisive challenge?

Today, without a doubt, this is a Church which lives the Gospel transparently, bearing witness to it daily with great credibility, with great generosity. And naturally with great faith in Christ.

Yet, nevertheless, it would seem difficult to deny that Catholicism – at least in certain countries, in certain situations – is living a moment of stall, a sort of silence, on the level of creativity and ideas as well as those of pastoral activity, of evangelization. So, even with the growing, although contaminated by many impurities, demand for religion, there is also, paradoxically a spreading phenomenon of indifference. Obvious consequence, together with other causes, of the Church's failing to "respond".

Furthermore it would also be difficult to deny that certain ecclesiastical sectors are again on the defense, tending to listen only to their own voice. With the result, within the Church, of keeping the laity at a distance from authentic co-responsibility and continuing to restrict space for frank discussion within the Catholic community. Outside the Church, with the result of denying oneself confrontation with history – confrontation which should instead be bold and free of complex – precisely at a time when the world, ever more secularized, but also de-ideologized and in a phase of profound transformation, is in search of new balance and moral points of reference.

This is why, in view of the Great Jubilee, the Church must at last bring to completion the "revolution" begun in the 1960s, which remained unfinished. To do this, she must recuperate the authentic meaning of that great prophetic event, the Second Vatican Council. She must undertake that "examination of conscience" of which the Pope has spoken, implementing that part of the Council's teaching which has remained on paper or been only partially inserted into our ecclesial situations.

Only in this way will the Church be able to offer the men and women of today a new synthesis between earthly experience and transcendence, a supplement of soul to the people of Two Thousand, Since, according to Malraux. "the 21^st century will be religious, or it will not be".