Father Stan Says: When humans quarrel, become
contentious, even murderous, over religion, the Pope grows more and
more insistent on "respect for each other". This message has been
enunciated since the Benedictine Pope, Pope Gregory the Great, in 601
commissioned the Benedictine missionary Saint Augustine of Canterbury, "Do
not destroy temples -- remember the local sacred times".
Every Pope, when the need was evident, gave the same
counsel. Now with new and more murderous technology comes a new threat --
globalization, the destruction of all variety in races, all sacramentality in
peoples, all beauty of places and the "ever-presense" of sacred times
.
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Cultural Homogenization a
Danger of Globalization, Pope Says
"The Very View of Man Himself" Is at Stake, He Warns |
Pope John Paul II said a key challenge facing Christians today is to avoid
having globalization impose a cultural homogenization, to the detriment of
man's spiritual dignity.
The Pontiff made his appeal when he attended the sixth public session of
the members of the Pontifical academies, Vatican institutions composed of
scientists and thinkers who on this occasion addressed the topic "Cultural
Dimensions of Globalization: A Challenge for Christian Humanism."
The Holy Father explained that Christ's disciples are called to perceive
the "human, cultural and spiritual" implications of globalization, which
does not just affect the "economic and financial" spheres.
"What is the image of man [that globalization] proposes and, in a certain
sense, imposes?" the Pope asked. "What culture does it favor? What space
does it give to the experience of faith and the interior life?
"There is the impression that the complex dynamism caused by the
globalization of the economy and the media tends progressively to reduce
man to a market variable, to merchandise for exchange, to a totally
irrelevant factor in the most decisive options.
Thus, "man runs the risk of feeling trampled by faceless mechanisms of
world dimensions and increasingly loses his identity and his dignity as a
person,
"In virtue of such dynamism, cultures also, if they are not accepted and
respected in their own originality and richness, if they are adapted by
force to the exigencies of the market and fashions, might run the risk of
homogenization.
"From here is derived a cultural product characterized by a superficial
syncretism, in which new hierarchies of values are imposed, deduced from
criteria which are often arbitrary, materialistic and consumerist, opposed
to any kind of opening to the transcendent.
"This great challenge, which at the beginning of the new millennium puts
at stake the very view of man himself, of his destiny, and of the future
of humanity, makes imperative a careful and profound intellectual and
theological discernment of the anthropological-cultural paradigm produced
by these changes in time.
Hence, "it is necessary to conquer all fear and address these challenges,
trusting in the light and strength of the Spirit that the risen Lord
continues to give to his Church.."
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