Your Excellencies, Distinguished Representatives of the Romanian State,
Revered leaders of faith communities,
Your Excellencies, Representatives of the Diplomatic Corps,
Distinguished professors, researchers, and guests,
I would like to begin by thanking you all for your support in organizing this prestigious conference in Romania, and not least my colleague, Dr. Cătălin Ștefan Popa, Director General of the Levant Institute of Advanced Studies for the Culture of Peace, who over the past year has made sustained efforts to safeguard this conference’s academic standards and to resolve organizational challenges. We jointly arrived at the idea of treating the opening session as a conversation about the present and future of the world in which we live.
Nearly a century has passed before this scientific event, organized by two venerable international associations, was elected to take place in Eastern Europe – a region so close to the Syriac Church and Arab Christianity.
Just as he did during my introduction, Dr. Popa will attempt, in his capacity as moderator, to link the presentations of the following speakers to a historical event representative of our older or more recent history.
As for me, I will discuss the history of the place where we are gathered: the Palace of Parliament, a gigantic structure commissioned by the dictator Ceaușescu to immortalize his glory, whose construction consumed not only enormous material resources but also human lives. On this site once stood a 16th-century monastery, founded by the great Christian voivode who first united the lands inhabited by Romanians. Ceaușescu ordered the demolition of many churches in Bucharest; however, the one here was spared, merely being moved and hidden away among the new apartment blocks so that it would no longer be seen.
The communists in Romania, like those in Russia, were staunch atheists. They destroyed not only church buildings, but also their clergy and parishioners.
His Beatitude, Patriarch Teoctist of the Romanian Orthodox Church, blessed the publication of a volume dedicated to the sufferings of Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Greek Catholics, Protestants, Neo-Protestants, as well as Jews and Muslims, who were arrested, tortured, or killed for refusing to renounce their faiths.
One year ago, in the new Cathedral of the Salvation of the Nation, His Beatitude, Patriarch Daniel, presided over a service honoring the martyred priests and monks who have been canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church. For its part, the Catholic Church has also canonized its martyrs from the period of the communist dictatorship.
For me, this was, in a way, a liberation from the curse of Communism’s crimes, through the grace of God.
Eighty-seven years ago, I was baptized at the Noul Neamț Monastery in Bessarabia. It was 1939, the year when World War II broke out. Father Țepordei, who was officiating his first baptism, was soon arrested after the Soviet army occupied Romania, and sent to a camp in Siberia. My godfather, Professor Constantin Tomescu, Dean of the Faculty of Theology in Chișinău – a learned theologian who, in addition to the modern languages of German and French, read the ancient languages of Latin, Greek, Church Slavonic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Farsi – was arrested after 1944, convicted, and tortured in Communist prisons, along with many other representatives of the country’s interwar intellectual elite.
From childhood through adolescence, I experienced displacement, bombings by both American and German air forces, the Soviet occupation, postwar mass starvation, the persecution of family members, separation from relatives abroad, and isolation in a country that was like a giant prison.
I had the opportunity to participate in the peaceful anti-communist revolution of December 1989 and in the bloody crackdown ordered by the dictator Ceaușescu, and I was a direct witness to the crimes against humanity committed between December 22nd–25th, 1989, and June 13th–15th, 1990, by a Presidential Administration of a neocommunist orientation; crimes which, having been declared as not subject to any statute of limitations, are currently the object of several ongoing trials in the justice system. I evoke these events because, under the moral authority of former political prisoners from the period of Stalinist terror and former dissidents from the Ceaușescu era, God helped me, during my presidential term – as the first president of the democratic opposition elected by the votes of seven million citizens – to achieve a national reconciliation between the victims of oppression and their oppressors. This reconciliation, achieved despite the presence of representatives of the old regime in both Parliament and the administration, was an indispensable condition for the Euro-Atlantic integration of the former communist states of Eastern Europe, Romania among them.
However, in Romania this was the most difficult to achieve, because the crimes of the Stalinist period were compounded by the thousands of people who had been killed, wounded, arrested, and tortured between 1989 and 1990.
The reconciliation that was being proposed by the victims to their aggressors had moral significance, and was accompanied by the investiture of truth as a preliminary form of justice, in expectation of the time when the truth as confirmed by judicial courts would, in turn, constitute itself into a historical memory that would integrate into the national consciousness.
I chose to recall these events at this Congress because the historical reconciliation that took place in the years 1989–1990 in Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the most criminal regime in world history, that was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people, as a result of peaceful protests, was based on a “Pedagogy of Suffering.”
During a difficult period for Romania, I discussed overcoming suffering through reconciliation with Mary McAleese, President of Ireland from 1997 to 2001. I met her in Dublin in December 1996, a few weeks after my election as president, when I was invited to attend the European Council in Dublin. At the time, Mary McAleese was a Professor of Law at Trinity College Dublin, having previously served as Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University in Belfast. We shared a legal background, and had pursued similar academic careers. Mary McAleese, born in Belfast, had firsthand experience of the bloody conflicts between Irish Catholics and Protestants and of those between the Irish and the English. She was interested in how Romanians achieved reconciliation, as they had managed to free themselves from communism through a revolution that, in just a few days in 1989, resulted in thousands of deaths, thousands of wounded, and thousands of tortured. Moreover, she was also deeply interested in how we were simultaneously able to achieve reconciliation with the Hungarians living both within Romania and in neighboring Hungary after centuries of bloody confrontations.
In 1997, she sent me her book “Reconciled Being. Love in Chaos”, which seeks an answer to the question: “Can we be friends with God if we are not friends with one another?”
We are living through a historical period where, against the backdrop of an unexpectedly long-lasting world peace that has now become fragile, wars between states are being replaced by civil, ethnic, racial, and religious wars – profitable for arms manufacturers – or by terrorist acts carried out by anonymous groups that glorify the religion of violence. Violence begets violence, and the psychology of fear is being manipulated into a political weapon in today’s world. Visionary leaders are being replaced by managers seeking quick profits who act under the tyranny of the ballot box. In the new democracies of freedom without responsibility, human rights, once a shield against dictatorships, have become a religion from which human duties have been eliminated.
Is the transformation of the fruits of technological, cultural, and civilizational progress into attacks on the human soul, perhaps, inevitable? Could a return to Christian values, adapted to the realities of contemporary society, be a path to salvation?
I believe that, at this time, we require the absolute of faith in order to understand the relative nature of politics, morality, and all realities that are not divine – realities that must be neither denied nor exalted, but simply placed in their proper context. Putting things in their proper place means respecting both God and the human person. A Christian cannot accept an atheistic politics in which God is denied; this would mean the expulsion of God. At the same time, a Christian cannot accept any totalitarian politics that seeks to turn the individual into a mere cog in the hands of an omnipresent and omnipotent state, because that would mean the humiliation of the individual. What a Christian-democratic policy can instead aim for is the creation of a climate of harmony and collaboration among people. For it was written: “Whoever does not love his brother, whom he sees, how can he love God, whom he does not see?”
For reconciliation after wars and conflicts to be possible, leaders must be able to find a new way of looking at situations considered hopeless, and a new language to persuade. Reconciliation on a broader level also involves as many people as possible embracing change for their own peace of mind and soul.
The question that arises is: where do we each begin this inner journey that focuses our attention on love rather than hate, on understanding rather than division – this spiritual orientation that can bind together the difficult fragments of our lives, transforming us into beings at peace with ourselves? The answer is: let us begin right where we are. Each of us is called to understand the meaning of our own life and, above all, to understand what place we give to God in our soul. Where people are deeply estranged from one another, they are also estranged from God. Lasting change is that which begins within each of us.
The Culture of Peace must begin with the suppression of the human instinct for violence. Every time we give in to the impulse to respond to evil with evil, the God within us is defeated and is reborn only when we choose love instead of hatred and revenge. It takes a long journey of understanding to come to know that the most difficult struggle is not with those around us, but with ourselves. In the case of war, this is no longer merely a matter of individual decisions, but the implication of the freedoms, lives, and above all the deaths of ever-increasing numbers of human souls, as has been seen time and again throughout the history of the world.
Following the traditions of secular thought, most international organizations and foundations dedicated to promoting peace and understanding in the world, including UNESCO and the United Nations, seek to find the lowest common denominator on which we can all agree. My conviction is that we must aim much higher. If we want to achieve true peace and understanding among people, we must identify not the lowest common denominator, but rather relate to the highest common denominator, to the God Who inspires us all, regardless of the name we give Him in our language or faith.
Our shared responsibility in edifying a culture of peace in our communities, with global implications, is not merely an option – but an urgent duty to ensure that peace no longer only means a respite achieved in the absence of war.
In today’s society, where differences are used as pretexts for division, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue – together with accurate and clear information disseminated by the academic milieu – represent two complementary pillars we require in order to remind ourselves of the true meaning of humanity. Dialogue is no longer a theological or academic luxury, but a shield for all of civil society against radicalization and division. Violence and hatred invoked in the name of God are, in fact, the greatest denial of His Divine Grace.
No one can deny the Churches’ millennia-long culpability for inter- and intra-denominational wars, so-called “holy wars,” the crimes of the Inquisition, or the persecution of non-Christians. But since the end of the 20th century, that era has definitively come to a close. Over the past 30 years, I have been in direct contact with the leaders of nearly all the world’s major religions, and I can testify that from among them I have encountered no denial of the role that religions must play in defending peace and promoting a culture of peace.
I believe that the academic community we represent has a direct responsibility toward the Christian communities of the East to disseminate and popularize knowledge of their secular and religious traditions and cultures among today’s Western society, which is far too absorbed by its own self-importance. The academic world provides us with the tools of reason and objective analysis to dismantle historical prejudices and better understand the context of the “Other.” We must rediscover the moral values of the Christian communities of the East: compassion, solidarity, and the sacred call to love one’s neighbor, which can help us translate the historical and contemporary reality of Eastern Christianity into terms that are intelligible to the public.
Those of us who know the Middle East intimately also know that we must engage in this dialogue with our own communities continuously, in order to help them understand the moral foundation of peace by drawing on the history, manuscripts, traditions, liturgical worship, and ecclesiastic life of Eastern Christian communities through the lens of our own civilizational background, thereby fostering a true spiritual communion that transcends unfounded prejudices.
A strong and well-understood spiritual identity never fears dialogue. Those who have a deep understanding of their own culture and faith do not view those of other denominations as a threat, but as partners in jointly facing the great challenges of the world we share.
The academic environment is a space where religious leaders and researchers can collaborate to analyze the ethical issues facing today’s society. Faith communities can offer young people the opportunity to put humanistic values into practice. The synergy between theory and practice can transform mindsets.
Ladies and gentlemens,
Today, passive tolerance is no longer sufficient to ensure the stability of global society in the medium or long term. Humanity needs active and committed cooperation, in which your role as academic and spiritual guides and mentors will prove essential. As we open this event, I would like to remind you of the shared calling of those of us gathered here for the coming days of fruitful discussions – that is, to demonstrate, through the arguments of reason and the power of example, that the world’s religions need not necessarily be separated by insurmountable dogmatic divides, but can happily work together in major efforts toward peace, understanding, and social cohesion, undertaken at the level of human society as a whole.
We can transform our gathering into a long-term commitment to promote the importance of peace in our classrooms and to evangelize it within our communities. I invite you, at the conclusion of these five days of discussions, to join me in launching a Declaration for the Protection of Christian Heritage in the Middle East as an immediate and concrete expression of the academic, ecumenical, communal and human aspirations and hopes expressed during the proceedings of the World Congress of Syriac Studies and the International Conference on Christian Arabic Studies.
I wish you every success in your discussions, and thank you for your attention.
