Multipolar Dialogue in Europe was born out of the realization of increasing polarization and fragmentation in Europe when the epochal challenges of humanity call for greater collaboration and cooperation at different levels.
Our initiative takes inspiration from Chiara Lubich’s charism which aims at the realization of a united world by dialoguing with everyone at 360 degrees and from Pope Francis’ magisterium which promotes the idea of universal brotherhood. Multipolar Dialogue in Europe is a radical commitment to go beyond divisions and antagonisms and create bridges of mutual knowledge and understanding to make collaboration possible.
Pope Francis
ADDRESS TO THE COUNCIL OF EUROPE
Strasbourg, 25 November 2014
… today, we can legitimately speak of a “multipolar” Europe. Its tensions – whether constructive or divisive – are situated between multiple cultural, religious, and political poles. Europe today confronts the challenge of “globalizing”, but in a creative way, this multipolarity. Nor are cultures necessarily identified with individual countries: some countries have a variety of cultures and some cultures are expressed in a variety of countries. The same holds true for political, religious, and social aggregations.
Creatively globalizing multipolarity, and I wish to stress this creativity, calls for striving to create a constructive harmony, one free of those pretensions to power which, while appearing from a pragmatic standpoint to make things easier, end up destroying the cultural and religious distinctiveness of peoples.
To speak of European multipolarity is to speak of peoples which are born, grow and look to the future. The task of globalizing Europe’s multipolarity cannot be conceived by appealing to the image of a sphere – in which all is equal and ordered but proves reductive inasmuch as every point is equidistant from the center – but rather, by the image of a polyhedron, in which the harmonic unity of the whole preserves the particularity of each of the parts. Today Europe is multipolar in its relationships and its intentions; it is impossible to imagine or to build Europe without fully taking into account this multipolar reality.
Chiara Lubich
Question: What vision do you have for the new millennium?
Chiara: I don’t have a vision for the next millennium. I cannot have it because I am not a prophet. But I have in my heart many great hopes.
I dream of that rising in the consciousness of millions of people of a fraternity lived, ever-widening on earth, becoming tomorrow, with the years of the year 2000, a general reality, universal.
I dream with this a retreat from wars, struggles, hunger, and the thousand evils of the world.
I dream of an ever-increasing dialogue of love among the Churches so as to see now close to the composition of the one Church.
I dream of the deepening of a lively and active dialogue among people of the most diverse religions linked together by love, the “golden rule” present in all their sacred books.
I dream of a rapprochement and mutual enrichment among the various cultures in the world so that they give originate a world culture that brings to the fore those values that have always been the true richness of individual peoples and that these impose themselves as global wisdom.
I dream of relationships based on the Gospel not only among individuals but among groups, Movements, Religious and secular; among peoples, among States, so that one finds it logical to love another’s homeland as one’s own. And logical is the striving for a universal communion of goods: at least as a point of arrival.
I dream of a world united in the variety of peoples with one alternating authority.
I dream therefore already a foretaste of new heavens and new lands as is possible here on earth. I dream much, but we have a millennium to see it realized.