Pontifical Council for the Pastoral
Care of Migrants
and Itinerant People
CONFERENCE (III)
Culture and Education
H.E.
Msgr.
Savio HON TAI-FAI
Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of the Peoples
I gladly accepted to take part in this meeting of international students who are
exchanging views and reflecting on the reality of culture and cultures. They
have become fundamental elements for the peaceful cohabitation among peoples if
relations are set up marked by respect and reciprocal enrichment in view of the
complete humanization of humanity.
This is a theme that interests us Christians, and especially you, the students,
who are called to play an important role in your countries and Churches in this
precise historical moment.
“Today, the human race is involved in a new stage of history. Profound and rapid
changes are spreading by degrees around the whole world...Hence we can already
speak of a true cultural and social transformation, one which has repercussions
on man's religious life as well” (Gaudium et Spes, No. 4).
Humanity finds itself in a phase of gestation of a new world (FABC: new-born
world), almost a break with the whole path it has followed until now. This
planetary transformation is not due to one precise and principal factor. It is
rather a complex of elements that have all emerged together synchronously.
Religion and religions, culture, philosophy, technology, politics and
communications have brought about a different view of man and society and
produced different cultural models, lifestyles and activities.
I will divide my talk into three points: 1. Cultural Transformations; 2. New
Frontiers of Education; 3.
Inculturation of the Gospel and Faith.
1.
Planetary Transformations
We have embarked on an unstoppable path whose outcome we cannot see yet.
The cultural passage is a global event. This is not the first case in history
which in some particular moments witnessed quality leaps that were surely
prepared by preceding circumstances but which exploded suddenly and affected not
only some sectors or particular contexts but all of human reality. This seems to
be one of the historic eras that will be remembered in this sense.
One of the main agents of this transformation is surely the world of
communications, which has put the most varied cultural models into contact
on a planetary level while at the same time influenced their choices too.
A new cultural order is being built.
Let us take the term culture as it is used by the Second Vatican Council in
Gaudium et Spes, No. 53, which says: “The word 'culture' in its general
sense indicates everything whereby man develops and perfects his many bodily and
spiritual qualities; he strives by his knowledge and his labor, to bring the
world itself under his control. He renders social life more human...through
improvement of customs and institutions. Throughout the course of time he
expresses, communicates and conserves in his works, great spiritual experiences
and desires, that they might be of advantage to the progress of many, even of
the whole human family”.
Why has culture taken on such an important role in our times?
Because it is like the fundamental dynamism of all social, economic,
political and international life that wants to be truly human.
Today it is understood as a constitutive reality of man as a human being.
In its anthropological meaning, it includes human reality with its
positive and negative elements in relation to an ideal culture considered as a
reference point, a means of humanization. Therefore, culture is like a people's
genius, and it can be more properly described as an organic whole of principles,
beliefs, life models and practices – handed down from the past generations,
practiced, changed, enriched or impoverished by the present generation and
transmitted to the future generation – through which a given group of people is
constituted and perpetuated as a human community. It is in this sense that the
Second Vatican Council said: “Man comes to a true and full humanity only through
culture, that is through the cultivation of the goods and values of nature.
Wherever human life is involved, therefore, nature and culture are quite
intimately connected one with the other” (No. 53). It enables man to not be or
feel like an isolated individual but a person in communication and communion
with his fellow men, a member of a community built on the permanent foundations
that we call cultural roots. It is the place of interaction where people
exercise reciprocal influence over each other and contribute to the progressive
process of humanization.
Therefore, every culture is almost like a living organism. Culture is human to
the extent that man is affirmed only for himself.
Now culture and the cultures are immersed in a qualitative change, so much so
that the Council in the 1960s already spoke about “a new age of human history”
(No. 54).
It is a delicate moment that calls for vigilance and discernment of the human
phenomenon.
If the fundamental models of peoples' lives are weakened, that is, if the
understanding of self, society and the universe change, it is almost like an
earthquake from the semantic viewpoint, which becomes a problem for any field of
action. Moreover, culture and the cultures cannot be fixed once and for all
because they are not static; they are dynamic and always evolving in order to
attain the maximum level of humanization. When they reject an evolutionary
dynamism, they become the subject of ethnological study and are destined to die.
2.
Constants of the Transformations
Human culture necessarily includes a historic and social aspect and the term
culture often takes on a sociological and ethnological meaning. In this sense,
we can talk about the plurality of cultures (No. 53,3). The reaffirmation of the
dignity and the originality of the religions, the social transformations, the
emergence of new mentalities and technological progress have profoundly changed
the way we conceive of culture and analyze social phenomena marked more and more
by a clear pluralism. Culture and the cultures. It is a centripetal and
centrifugal movement. While a
universal culture is becoming established from different viewpoints with regard
to understanding man and his international relations, there is also each
particular culture's demand for its own originality and specificity to the point
that it becomes a kind of culturalism or cultural tribalism.
Never as at this time, however, have cultures met or clashed so much and, in any
event, been so interdependent, and so they are all in the dynamics of
transformation.
The constants that characterize the changes can be summed up as follows:
·
a less enchanted and mystical view of the universe
·
man as the master of his history and destiny
·
crisis in the traditional social and religious values
·
economic, materialist, consumerist mentality
·
ethical relativism, absence of absolute ideologies
Together with these aspects, which can be described in a certain sense as
devastating, some positive values are emerging such as:
·
the search for a more authentic and human meaning of life
·
the aspiration to justice among peoples and peace
·
the dynamics of universal solidarity
·
the defense of human rights, especially of the weakest and the most vulnerable
peoples and classes
·
the emergence and importance of civil society
·
the encounter-dialogue between cultures and religions.
We are, so to speak, in the middle of the river's ford: the traditional cultural
models are going through a crisis but the new models have still not been made.
It is a moment of crisis but also of growth. There is widespread difficulty but,
at the same time, a historical opportunity to forge a new humanity with shared
universal values in respect for the cultural diversities of every human group.
It is in this sense that we have to take Paul VI's words already spoken in the
1960s: “The split between the Gospel and culture is without a doubt the drama of
our time, just as it was of other times” (Evangelii Nuntiandi, No. 20,
1975). In fact, “all human activity takes place within a culture and interacts
with culture” (Centesimus Annus, No. 51, 1991). If the Gospel does not
penetrate into the depths of the culture, man will never be capable of believing
with all his humanity. This is why Paul VI's description of evangelization
activity in Evangelii Nuntiandi continues to be valid: “What matters is
to evangelize man's culture and cultures (not in a purely decorative way, as it
were, by applying a thin veneer, but in a vital way, in depth and right to their
very roots), in the wide and rich sense which these terms have in
Gaudium et spes, [50] always taking
the person as one's starting-point and always coming back to the relationships
of people among themselves and with God” (No. 20).
This is why culture is indicated as the vast areopagus for the Church's mission
(Rmi, No. 37 & c).
3.
Cultural Identities and Education
The cultural element with its identities and differences constitutes a crucial
point for young people's growth in the sense that the fact that they are
different from others can take on weight and meaning first of all for themselves
and for building their identity.
To carry out correct intercultural educational processes, first a critical and
ongoing re-elaboration process is needed to appropriate the signs of the culture
on which one's roots are built.
Reflection on cultural identity in a fluid society marked by great phenomena is
not new. It puts the traditional concepts of culture and education up for
question and thus changes their formation processes.
Therefore, the close network of multiethnic, multicultural and multireligious
societies that has been set up in today's world is a process that urges us to
develop a new way of carrying out education and formation, even if from the
viewpoint of subjective processes it is hard for the logic of the monoculture to
disappear.
Just think of the return to the great tensions regarding identity, the nostalgia
for belonging, for one's country and local culture, which is making reciprocal
tolerance and coexistence more and more difficult between peoples who are from
the same cultural area but marked by different traditions, values and customs.
There is a need for dialogue and pluralism that open up to otherness and thus to
the riches of diversity. This calls for intercultural educational processes that
will favor the recognition and re-appropriation of each one's culture in order
to be able to interact with other cultures.
3.1
The globalization process has brought about the standardization of culture by
stifling particularities and penalizing diversities, putting personal and
cultural identities in crisis and creating inferiority/superiority complexes
among the cultures. We are before a
change that has set a profound crisis in motion in the way of thinking of self
and one's identity, in the way of perceiving and living reality, to the point
that it changes almost radically the paradigms that underpin culture and the
cultures. In a context of a culture of globalization, the cultural identities of
persons and institutions have lost their solidity and continuity in the complex,
globalized society. They have to be invented continuously, and they are
interchangeable according to the circumstances or the environment where one
lives. While this way of conceiving and creating one's identity is fascinating
on the one hand, on the other it is problematic.
This situation has put the question of individual and collective identities at
the center of education, the relations between men and women from different
cultures, the ability to live together in reciprocal respect for each one's
freedom as well as the question of handling violence and conflicts and the
balance of power between individuals, groups and institutions. But above all it
has put the traditional concepts of identity in crisis to the point that the
question of cultural identity, both individual and collective, has now become
one of the most urgent and most complex questions to be solved.
Therefore, a process of re-elaboration and re-definition needs to be set in
motion today to be carried out within one's cultural context and models until
the appropriation of the same and their reinterpretation.
4. But what are its necessary reference points?
As a missionary and the Secretary of the Congregation for the Evangelization of
Peoples, I call upon the Gospel, which is God's saving energy for those who
believe. I will borrow the title
and theme from the pastoral guidelines of the Italian Bishops' Conference:
Educating to the Good Life of the Gospel.
As we have seen, our era is building a new universal anthropology and new
particular anthropologies. Christians are called to get into these dynamics and
they cannot miss this historic appointment which will mark the future of
humanity.
It is urgent to educate the new generations and the intelligentsia of the
nations, especially where new cultural cultural models are being forged, to the
civilization of love which Christ commanded to us in the proclamation of the
Kingdom. Even if we do not like the
term, education must be able to form people to build an alternative society and
many times a counterculture to the one in force.
In this process there are two fundamental elements:
4.1 The
Culture of the Gospel
The Gospel has not lost any of its edge, fascination, attraction or validity.
On the contrary, today more than in the past it can be the content, path
and methodology of education.
There are some fundamental principles that make up the substance of the
educational content.
Man must be affirmed for himself in his dignity, his inviolable human rights,
and his freedom to present himself, but never as a means, always as an end.
Why? Against all the positivist and immanent anthropologies, man is conceived of
as the living image of the Living God who creates him and constitutes him in his
unrepeatable individuality, which is the human person. He is essentially open to
transcendence. It is on this fundamental reality that humanization, the goal of
humanity's educational process, unfolds and develops.
Christ, the Incarnate Word in time, is the foundation of this reality of the
human being. Indeed, every man is
destined to be congruent with the image of the Son.
He, as the image of the perfect man, places himself not only as an
exemplary model but also as the Teacher. He is the Rabbi who teaches with
authority.
What did he teach? What is the new
culture for the new humanity of which He has become the model?
The culture which He inserted at the roots of humanity is the culture of love,
fraternity, universal solidarity and the unity of all peoples.
The proclamation of the
It is a human but transcendent culture whose origin and perennial source is
God's Universal Fatherhood whereby all the men and women of all times and places
are sons and daughters of the one same Father and truly brothers and sisters. In
fact, we are God's offspring (Aratus, cited by
We are not creatures thrown into the nothingness of existence without
guidelines, or into the void, as Nietzsche claimed. We are children of a Father
who knows each one of us individually, who does not abandon us, who loves us as
his children and in whom we put our complete trust as children do with their
father.
Share what you are and what you have with the weakest, the abandoned and the
marginalized because they belong to your family. To each one according to his
needs. It is a culture of universal
solidarity, justice and love.
It is a culture of non-violence, which calls for responding to evil with good,
with forgiveness, in view of universal reconciliation, and to lead humankind to
unity. This goal is not possible
without the practice of forgiveness and love of one's enemies.
It is a culture of peace which must be the product of justice, which does not
tolerate any oppression, discrimination or exploitation.
This is the culture of the Gospel.
First of all it is necessary “to educate to the Good Life of the Gospel”. This
is the title and content which the Italian Bishops' Conference chose for “The
Pastoral Guidelines of the
4.2...inculturated
This culture has the characteristic of universality because in addition to being
it is an all-inclusive anthropological view. In the mystery of the Incarnate
Word it reveals and realizes the complete personal and social humanization of
every person and of humanity. It erases all the ethnic, racial, cultural and
religious barriers. It is the common language and the reality inherent in the
human being because it reveals and affirms the profound identity of every human
person, of each one of the billions of people conceived beneath the heart of his
mother, as Blessed John Paul II said in his first Encyclical Letter Redemptor
Hominis: