(from our correspondent in Camaldoli) “A ghost is haunting Europe: Euro-defeatism. After Euroscepticism and Euro-illusionism, we have entered a phase of negative conformism”. This was said by Card. Matteo Zuppi, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), in a video message addressed to the participants at the conference “Christianity – the Conscience of Europe” which began this afternoon at the Camaldoli Monastery in the Italian region of Arezzo. The conference is jointly organised by the magazine “Il Regno” (“The Kingdom”), the Community of Camaldoli, and COMECE. “After the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, on the ruins of the last philosophy of history which is communism, the reduction of the political sphere, the failure to propose a geopolitical project aimed at strengthening international law and institutions, and the failure to build a shared multipolar order guided by the major powers have left us not only with a future empty of promises, but also with a past of real tragedies. This is a political and cultural regression”, Card. Zuppi said. “The two new wars – the one in Ukraine at the heart of Europe and the one in the Middle East, in the Mediterranean – are the expression of unresolved ideological issues, political and economic interests, and religious drifts. Powers that once lived in the shadows can always reappear: from cultural and religious fundamentalism to denialism and radical forms of terrorism. Even the wrong words, words that are either distorted in their historical meaning, or not kept, or overburdened with illusory expectations, play a negative role”, the President of the Italian Bishops stressed. “They have a negative retroactive effect on collective sentiments and political interests. Devoid of perspective, accounts of reality regress to primitive languages. Not only do we fail to overcome the past in a positive way, but so to speak, we plunge back into it”. In this context, “Europe, not just the European Union, is the main resource that we still have. It is precisely by virtue of its unresolved stories, its partial results that were difficult to achieve, its incompleteness, that Europe has the knowledge and history to respond, on the ethical, cultural, economic and political levels, to the challenges that the new world brings”. He then noted that Europe “lacks adequate common institutions, because it lacks the power and will of the individual nations that make it up. This is the political challenge that only nations can respond to in the first place”.