Francesco Paolo Casavola

The time of life unwinds in days and years, that of history for centuries, and that of millennia? Here we invert the indicators of measuring time, which we perceive and express before we address its meanings. In the world of Christians, with a large approximation, the third millennium which is about to open will be the third coming of Christ. If we remain in the circle of faith, we can recover some points of previous millenniums. The first was that of the incarnation of the Son of God, of the propagation of the Gospels, of the formation of the Catholic Church, of the apologetics against the pagans, of patristic theology, but also of the ending of the eschatological wait. The millenniumism, the belief, that is of desire and terror, that the dawn of the second millennium would have signaled the end of the world, but that dawn ended and left behind the idea of an undetermined amount of time to Christian history.

The second millennium is therefore a stable root of Christianity in the history of the world, and especially in Europe. The end of the centrality of the ancient Mediterranean, as whole sea to three continents, Asia, Africa, Europe, the separation of the East and West, and later in Islamic South and Christian North, all this reduces Catholic Christianity to the religion in western Europe. The second millennium, is therefore the time of translation of the Christian faith into a historic civilization. Catholicism is an active religion, not contemplative.

The works of the Holy Spirit are not achieved soley in the interior life, as the churches and monasteries of the East say, instead they transmit the logic of the medieval schools, the ecclesiastic and civil news, the preservation and the transmission of literary monuments of pagan antiquity, the formation of the canonic rights against the roman rights, the legitimization of the political power on the part of the Church. These are the points of the diagram. But underneath, there are lines drawn which continue the absolute civil functions of the Church to later be presented to society, by parish registers of births, deaths, marriages, to the institutions of charity, to orphans, geriatric homes, hospitals, primary and secondary schools, to the universities and cooperatives of artisans. The processes of secularization in the environment of the scientific and philosophic culture are worthy of preserving the distinction between faith and reason, and in the environment of civil structures they are symptomatic of the absorbing of evangelical persuasions in the patrimony of the ethic values of the culture of the Europeans.

The superiority of European science with respect to the work produced by the men in the other continents propelled Christian civilization, and not necessarily the religion, in every part of the world. If the voyages of John Paul II have an epochal significance, it rests in having brought to every corner of the world the sign of the Catholic faith which had been preceded, and also obfuscated, by the many symbols of the Christian-European civilization.

After the navigators, the explorers, the merchants, the colonizers, the armies, the judicial and administrative systems, after chemistry, medicine, mathematics and physics, automobiles, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the television and all of the technologies of communication and transpiration and energies, the civilization that was initially European, but became a global one, found in the Catholic Pope the man that would again evoke the first roots, the faith in the Son of God.

That this should happen towards the end of our century is not by happenstance. As has already come to pass, with the European secularization, in the rest of the world the Christian civilization of the Europeans is assimilating itself in the material culture, objects, instruments, clothing, diets, hygienic habits, daily behaviors and in the intellectual culture, sciences of man and of nature, art, entertainment, collective mentality, with various combinations with the original civilizations and with a progressive detachment from the centers of irradiation in Europe.

The third millennium could bring the world to a phase of civilization characterized by the homologation of all populations to the standards of material and intellectual culture that preside in the West, on this and that side of the Atlantic Ocean. But with the increasing permanence of divisions no longer neither cultural nor ideological, but rather nationalistic, when not, unfortunately, ethnic. The example, that we have had just recently in front of our very eyes, of Hong Kong being returned after a century and half to the Chinese nation, is highly symbolic. The divisions can regenerate conflicts.

Despite the globilization of the economy, despite the elimination of time in the realm of communications, and the reduction of distances in transportation, men could return to feeling distant from each other. It is Christian universality that experienced a crisis hand in hand with the progression of the material and utilitarian characteristics of the Western civilization in its expansion to the entire human race.

That is why the third millennium presents itself as an enigma, with ambiguous outcomes, either of peace and unity, or of war and division. John Paul II recalls the inspiration of faith above and beyond the civilization. We know, with Him, how to break down the enigma of the new millennium.