Prof. Giovanni Patriarca, recipient of the Acton Institute’s 2012 Novak Award given recently in Rome at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, was interviewed by RomeReports Television News Agency in a video released Friday.
Articulating the main points of his lecture “Against Apathy: Reconstruction of a Cultural Identity,” Patriarca told RomeReports that Western democratic society is abandoning its traditional values and, therefore, its very culture of responsible freedom and creativity. He placed part of the blame of the West’s moral decline and widespread apathy on an ever-increasing “fast-paced, digitalized and materialistic lifestyle.”
Patriarca told RomeReports the problem of apathy in Western culture is really centered on the “fundamental role religion plays” in restoring man’s civic responsibilities and altruistic desire to freely choose creative magnanimous action in the service of God and society—the Judeo-Christian moral and vocational platform on which a free and enterprising Western culture is founded. Therefore Patriarca also warned that the Western culture’s “openness of religion,” its so-called “spiritualism a la carte” which has led to a relativistic, hashed religious culture that is fundamentally unmotivated and too radically self-centered to sacrifice altruistically to overcome the immense challenges of the world’s current economic crisis.
In religion, he says, “we regain lost hope and rebuild from [it] a sense of charity, respect, reconciliation, and forgiveness … to find solutions to problems that will be difficult, but will be positive and creative … to stimulate our growth together.”
