1. Cultural Insertion

1. As the world is becoming more and more globalized, each cultural and civilizational group is asserting its individuality and distinctiveness with redoubled determination. “As economic borders come down,” said Doug Ivestor, the Chief Executive Officer of Coca Cola, “cultural barriers go up, presenting new challenges and opportunities”: challenges like our inability to go beyond fatwas and suicide bombs to solve our problems on the one hand; and on the other, imposing unequal trade laws and invoking ‘human rights’ in order to interfere in the destinies of weaker nations. We have opportunities too, like new openings to other cultures and ethnic groups, fresh chances to study humanity in its varied lived-contexts, further occasions for dialogue, and unexpected widening of horizon to the inherited wisdom and experience of other peoples and civilizations.

2. Increasingly, in different parts of the world, we are beginning to live more and more inter-culturally. It will be leaders who can handle cultural differences with skill that will thrive in the new millennium. As Peter Drucker warns, “Tomorrow’s business challenges are less technical than they are cultural”.  This dictum is equally true with regard to our evangelical and educative services too.

3. International religious congregations like ours have much experience in inter-cultural and inter-civilizational living: “..laboratorio di interculturalita’ “ (SL 88; also 52). It has been an enrichment. What is new today is that our understanding of cultures has radically changed. There is no more consensus on the view that there is a perfect and universally valid culture, e.g., the so-called ‘Modern Culture’, to which all societies must necessarily accommodate and towards which the less developed ones are unmistakably tending. Today we recognize that all cultures hold authentic values that have significance for the rest of humanity, and are adequate for the society within which it has taken shape. However, every culture, including the modern one, is imperfect, containing evil and exploitative elements within it, and needs to be reformed and healed.

4. Such an understanding of cultures presumes a measure of equality among them, even of those societies whose technology or economy is considered undeveloped. In fact, even a society that clings tenaciously to outmoded equipment and antediluvian economic processes, may very well excel others in manifesting humanity in family relationships or social transactions: “I poveri, spesso, sono I nostri maestri” (SL 115; also 116). It may have developed devices to obtain justice without violence, win social accommodation without compulsion, ensure economic equality without regimentation, express dissent without hostility, elicit cooperation of youth without harshness. It may have an admirable sense of the sacred, an amazing openness to the truth and to the transcendent, an enviable sensitivity to things beautiful. That is why the study of cultures, customs and collective wisdom of people expressed in proverbs, song, story and philosophical utterances, and through frequent inter-actions with poets and thinkers, is always educative. You speak of “promuovendo interazioni di reciprocita’ (SL 113); and again “un atteggiamento di accoglienza e apprezzamento delle culture locali” (SL 42).