1. Our generations have been marked by a new awareness of European unity. After one of the blackest centuries in our history, after the conflicts and the fascisms, the night and fog of the nazi extermination, the scourge of communism - for the first time our continent can imagine a shared future, in a democratic prospect of freedom, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights. Thus the 20th century saw the birth of great hopes. It was the time when democracies took root, when the economy boomed as never before, when the first ecumenical gains were made, when the thought of the founding fathers of the united Europe was shaped and there was a pastoral and religious renaissance launched by the Vatican II Council.
2. Our wounded memory and the awareness of our history cry out for a culture, an education and a political organisation in which life and human dignity will be guaranteed as fundamental and unshakeable.
3. It is today - on the threshold of a community that goes beyond the old division of the Iron Curtain - when we must take a fresh look at the projects of the founding fathers. Their vision of Europe has a principle: freedom, a method: solidarity, and a purpose: peace.
4. Europe - our place of intellectual, spiritual, social and cultural fulfilment - must rediscover its deep meaning which is anchored in an affirmation of human dignity. Recognition of that dignity, respect for individual freedom and the causal connection between the inviolability of fundamental freedoms and the flowering of society are the most European of acquisitions. They spring from European thought, from the ancient philosophers, from the fathers of the church, from the Judaeo-Christian religious tradition, from the great university scholars of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from the humanist vision and modern and contemporary thought.
5. The unity of Europe can only flourish in a mutual acknowledgement of the cultural, religious and philosophical diversity which has been the strength of the European experience. Yet that acknowledgement must be subject to the imperative not only of rights but also of the duties and responsibilities borne by each person and each human group.
6. Cultural and intellectual Europe must rediscover the transcendent meaning of freedom. It must recognise an ethical purpose in every scientific investigation and artistic creation, aiming at the flowering of men and of societies. A reading of the works of the European Convention leads us to advocate a much more fundamental place for the issues of culture, education and training that arise today as the most stable foundations of the unity and development of Europe.
7. Religious Europe has a great need for brotherly understanding emerging from a fundamental anthropocentric dialogue between the great religious systems. Christianity - indivisible from the European experience - must now take the step towards ecumenicalism, going beyond the human threshold of particularisms, in a common faith, a shared hope and a mutual love between the traditions that go to make it up. In the whole of Europe, we must search ceaselessly for a deep agreement between the religious and spiritual dimension of human beings on the one hand, and their social and political dimension on the other, in the conviction that it is from the standpoint of conscience that we rediscover the necessary criteria to apply to social, cultural and political values.
8. Economic Europe cannot be understood in terms of purpose without solidarity in the production and distribution of goods, both within our societies and all over the world. History has placed us at the centre of the new globalising networks and movements. Today we must promote the globalisation of responsibilities. A commitment to fighting poverty and exclusion will remain a criterion for judgement in the united Europe and among Europeans.
9. Political Europe - in a perpetually dynamic process - must rediscover subsidiarity as an imperative paradigm. It is in the relation between politics and the citizens that we can find the answers to the problem of the lack of interest in public affairs that we perceive in our societies.
10. Europe must seek a way to be present in the world, based on the same values that move it within itself. It is those values - and not domination or competition - which will bring it close to its true aims, which are the peace and well-being of societies.
11. We, Christians, members of different intellectual and professional organisations, living in different European regions, engaged in different political, social, spiritual and professional fields, met in Luxembourg for the European Conference of the International Catholic Intellectuals Movement Pax Romana, in a constant effort to reread the signs of our times, confirm our Christian responsibility and commitment in the face of these European challenges.
Luxembourg, 6 September 2003