The real question runs deeper: can Europe hold on to its founding values once it has largely forgotten their religious and metaphysical roots?

Here, too, the well-known insight from German professor Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde remains as relevant as ever: "A liberal, secularized state lives by prerequisites which it cannot guarantee itself."

A state governed by the rule of law can write and enforce statutes, but no statute can manufacture the attitudes on which democratic life depends: trust, truthfulness, a readiness to take responsibility, the capacity for self-restraint, solidarity and respect for others. These are not legislated into being. They are cultivated in families, in cultural traditions, in religions, in schools, in associations and in the wider fabric of a living civil society.

The question of Christianity in Europe, then, is not a wistful longing for the era when Christians formed the majority. It is a question about where a free society draws its spiritual strength.

Faith and the Enlightenment: Critical Partners

The idea that Christianity and modernity demand a choice between them is likewise a myth. A telling illustration came in January 2004, when the future Pope Benedict XVI, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, sat down with the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The two men came from opposing intellectual worlds, yet they arrived at a shared conclusion: neither religious faith nor secular reason is immune to its own excesses.

Religion needs reason, because left unchecked it can curdle into fanaticism, lend its blessing to power, justify violence and crush the very people it claims to serve. Christianity's own history supplies no shortage of such warnings.

But reason needs self-criticism just as urgently. A purely functional rationality can calculate with ever-finer precision what is possible, yet it falls silent the moment it is asked what is permissible. Artificial intelligence, genetics, reproductive medicine, prenatal diagnosis, assisted suicide and the biotechnological enhancement of human beings have all lent that silence a new and pressing weight.

What is a human being? Is the body merely raw material, to be shaped and used at will? Does human self-determination have limits, or none at all? Should everything that is technically possible, and desired by someone, simply be done? The natural sciences can inform the search for answers, but they cannot supply the answers themselves.

This is exactly where Christianity's public calling lies, provided it does not simply assert its vision of the human person, but argues for it, persuasively and in the open. Europe's future, then, belongs neither to a Christianity locked in opposition to the Enlightenment nor to an Enlightenment blind to its own limits, but to a confident Christianity standing at the heart of a self-critical modernity.

Human Dignity Is Inalienable

It is on the question of human dignity, more than any other, that the true measure of the "Christian image of man" is taken: whether it carries real weight, or whether it is merely political rhetoric dressed in sacred language.

Christian anthropology admits no exceptions. The dignity of an unborn child cannot be weighed against the dignity of a refugee. The dignity of an elderly person losing themselves to dementia cannot be set apart from the dignity of a person with a disability, nor the dignity of a Jew from that of a Muslim, a Christian or an atheist. The successful and the struggling, the productive and those who can no longer produce anything at all, stand on exactly the same ground.

The reason for this runs far deeper than any political consensus could reach. In Christian belief, a person's dignity does not depend on being capable, rational, autonomous or useful to society. It precedes all of that. A human being is a creature, made in the image of God, and that dignity cannot be granted selectively any more than it can be taken away. The Christian image of humanity is not a weapon to be pointed at anyone. It is a boundary line that no one is permitted to cross, protecting every person from being treated as a means to someone else's end.

Seen this way, even the political capture of Christianity as the identity badge of the West becomes, from a theological standpoint, a kind of betrayal. The cross was never a tribal emblem of Europe, and Christ offers no religious guarantee of Western superiority. An Arab Christian belongs to the same Church as a German Christian, without remainder. And a Muslim, whatever criticism his beliefs may attract, remains no less a human being, and no less entitled to dignity.

The line that matters, then, does not run between Christians and everyone else. It runs between those who recognize that every human being carries equal dignity, and those who would relativize it.

When Christian Concepts Lose Their Source

A secular society is not condemned to immorality. People can defend human dignity, solidarity and freedom on entirely philosophical, humanistic or other religious grounds. And yet it is not a small thing when the deep religious soil in which Central Europe’s concepts have been rooted for centuries begins to wash away.

A society can go on speaking of human dignity while growing steadily less sure why a dependent, seriously ill or supposedly "unproductive" life deserves protection without condition. It can champion freedom, yet mistake it for the unrestricted right to do as one pleases. It can call for tolerance, yet lose the very capacity to argue rationally about truth. It can invoke solidarity, yet struggle to say convincingly why a stranger's fate should matter to anyone at all. And it can mistake hope for the mere assumption that prosperity and security will simply go on forever.

None of this proves that a secular society is doomed. But it does raise a harder question: can such a society keep justifying its own moral premises, again and again, on its own terms? This is exactly where Christianity still has something to offer, not as a bid for authority, but as a standing reminder that no human being may be treated as disposable.

Seen in this light, the question the Church should be asking is not "How do we stay relevant?" It is "What can we say that no one else can?"

Political parties, labor unions and civic associations can all fight for social justice. Schools and political foundations can educate citizens for democracy. Environmental groups can defend the planet, and community associations can knit neighborhoods together. The Church is called to stand alongside all of this, but none of it is the reason the Church exists.

What belongs to the Church alone runs deeper still. It rests on the conviction that a person is neither the sum of their achievements nor the master of their own fate. That dignity owes nothing to health, origin, politics or usefulness. That guilt can be forgiven. That love can outlast violence. That death does not get the final word. And that in Jesus Christ, God opens a future for every person that no person could ever have given themselves.

Should this core fade, the Church could well go on functioning as an institution for a long time yet. Its preschools, schools, hospitals, hospices, counseling centers and charitable works might continue to command wide respect.

And here lies both the opportunity and the danger: the Church's usefulness to society could easily outlive the faith that first gave rise to it. It would remain a trusted custodian of values, even as it grew steadily less clear why society needed it, specifically, as a Church at all.

A Church That Dares to Ask Again

The Church, then, must learn to be missionary again. Mission does not mean proselytism, actively winning people over to a particular faith or religious belief through pressure or persuasion, nor does it mean religious aggression or a campaign to reclaim some lost majority. Above all, it means being able to say plainly what Christians believe, and why that belief might actually touch a life.

Often this means starting again from the beginning: explaining what creation means, who Jesus Christ is, why Christians pray and gather at the Eucharist, what they mean by forgiveness and the Resurrection, why every person carries inalienable dignity, and why any of this should still sound true to a modern ear.

But mission rarely starts with answers. It starts with questions that never really die, not even in the most secular of societies. What gives my life meaning? Who am I, once I can no longer achieve anything at all? Can guilt ever truly be forgiven? What is love, really? How do I live, knowing I will die? What am I still allowed to hope for?

A missionary Church should give people permission to ask these questions again, out loud, and it should have the courage to say that the Christian answer is not a moral teaching in disguise. It has a name: Jesus Christ.

This article was originally published on DoKostola.sk.