The original Schism between the Orthodox Church and Rome was followed by others,
of which the most serious was the breach between the Catholic South and the
Protestant North. The religious wars which ensued caused new wounds to the body
of Europe, and led to its inner division. It is significant that the Western
European was abandoned by the Church, and as a result he turned the blessed love
of one’s own homeland into ideology: nationalism, this deadly enemy of the
peoples of Europe, is an offspring of the Western world, an offspring of a
Christian world which grew up without being taught the ecumenical spirit by the
Church, along with the love of homeland.
It is a valuable lesson for us all, how, in the midst of war, groups of national
resistance, in which Christians participated, set themselves the task not only
of crushing Nazism, but also of surpassing the hatred between the peoples.
Accordingly, while the Resistance was fighting against the Germans, at the same
time they were organising post-war Europe demanding its re-unification, so that
even the German opponents could partake of it on an equal basis. Their demand
was accepted by other personalities of the Resistance and led to the Declaration
of the Resistance Convention of Geneva on May 20, 1944, in which anti-Nazi
Germans participated as well. The courage of those people, their strength to
struggle for freedom with no need for nationalist hatred, is a luminous example
for us all. At this point I shall claim, if I may, in homage to their memory and
in appreciation of their struggle for the freedom and dignity of their own
compatriots and of all Europeans, that those people found themselves at the head
of the quest for the Christian commonwealth.
