Last week I attended speeches given by two very different political leaders. The first, by Tony Blair as President of the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, at the Catholic University in Milan. The second, by the President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, at the Pontifical Gregorian University here in Rome.
What was striking is that both speeches were responding directly to the challenge set by Pope Benedict XVI – including during his visit last year to Britain– that a healthy society requires a profound and ongoing dialogue between faith and reason. Mr Blair, as Representative of the Quartet tackling the complex issues surrounding the Middle East Peace Process, and Mr Van Rompuy, at the heart of the Eurozone political and economic crisis, have plenty of immediate issues on their plates. But they chose to take time out of their frenetic agendas to reflect on this question precisely because, I suspect, both understand that the long term view must not be lost in the day to day churn of events.
Tony Blair told his university audience that: “There will be no peace in our world without an understanding of the position of faith within it”. He had no difficulty in producing examples, which led him to the conclusion that political and religious leaders needed to understand each other better, and work together, to achieve “religion-friendly democracy and democracy-friendly religion”, particularly in a part of the world, like the Middle East, where recent events provide the opportunity for new beginnings. For his part, Van Rompuy reminded his audience of the original reasons for the creation of a European Union, which was nothing if not based on the concept of “solidarity” – between countries, between individuals, between the sexes, between the faiths. In other words, a “union of values”, underpinned by shared but not exclusive understandings of culture, religion and civilisation, that emerged from the ruins of the totalitarian ideologies of the mid-twentieth century.
It is one of the contributions of the Holy See to international relations that it can remind us of the need to maintain a wider sense of proportion and perspective when facing the “white noise” of daily events. There is, after all, a limit to what politics alone can offer at moments of crisis.