Ten months ago, almost to the day, a carte blanche season with French Christian Radio (RCF) began, at the same time as the start of the school year. Today, it's time to leave. How can we reread this past year together with you in the listeners' homes and stay connected?
I concluded my first carte blanche with these words: “ curiosity plays a key role in learning, we must support and allow the ability to act, to doubt, to make mistakes and to correct ourselves. This also means constantly opening up new possibilities, carrying out experiments ". I had forgotten to specify that sometimes it is the events that occur without our knowledge that are the occasion for the most powerful learning experiences. In this sense, the past year has been full of unforeseen events, of which our carte blanche, over the weeks, have been the echo. The latest unforeseen event to date - colossal - is Covid 19, during the whole of the spring that is now over, with trials of all kinds. We are only just emerging from it, and we are no longer the same. For several years, we have known that we had entered a change of world: "we are not living in a time of changes, but a change of world" wrote Pope Francis in 2017, in the constitution for Catholic Universities. But the advent of a new world could still appear to us as a pale and vague point on the horizon, a distant idea, for the next generations or for others? Today, following Covid-19, we have all suffered such an unprecedented ordeal, in an experience that is more or less painful depending on the person and the situation. Have we learned anything? Have we become a little more committed to serving the protection of our common home?
With the "Laudato Si" year just beginning, I like to reread this passage from Pope Francis' encyclical that has marked our "Cartes Blanches": God created the world by inscribing in it an order and a dynamism that human beings have no right to ignore. [...] I invite all Christians to make explicit this dimension of their conversion, allowing the strength and light of the grace received to also extend to their relationship with other creatures as well as with the world around them, and to arouse that sublime fraternity with all creation, which Saint Francis lived in such a luminous way (Laudato Si, § 221).
Today, the floor is given to the Citizens' Convention and its proposals. A wish for the coming weeks is that the key proposals on the fight against global warming will be realized in our democratic life, through the civic engagement of living women and men collaborating with the Living.
Have a nice summer!
Francois Prouteau
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