Fighting for Freedom Anew
At the 47th Andechs Europe Day, which took place on 18/19 March 2017, Paneuropa-Deutschland posed the question of personal freedom and totalitarian oppression.
Posselt and Buttiglione warned against new totalitarianism.
Bishops Voderholzer (Regensburg) and Radkovský (Pilsen) signalled the need for Christian renewal.
In view of the political upheavals and threats in the USA, Russia, the Arab world and in Europe itself, the German Pan-European President and long-standing MEP Bernd Posselt spoke of the ‘end of all security’. The ‘most precious things we have inherited from our parents and grandparents’, namely European unification, peace, freedom and constitutional democracy, had to be worked for and fought for again generation after generation. Therefore, the rampant consumer attitude towards the state and politics must be overcome and replaced by self-confident civic engagement.
The 160 guests from 14 nations, who had come to Bavaria's Holy Mountain from different parts of Europe, were impressed by the signs of Christian unity set by Bishops Rudolf Voderholzer and František Radkovský from the two neighbouring partner dioceses of Regensburg and Pilsen, especially as Prof. Voderholzer, who comes from a family of expellees, has Sudeten German roots in the latter.
The Czech historian and diplomat Jan Šícha outlined the emergence of the freedom and human rights movement ‘Charter 77’ as a result of the CSCE Conference in Helsinki and the life's work of the main initiator of this resistance group, Jan Patočka.
The German historian Prof Manfred Kittel pointed out that Munich was an ‘early hotbed of communism’ as early as 1919.
The Andechs Europe Day began with a reading of the classic ‘Total Man - Total State’, written in the 1930s by Paneuropa founder Richard Graf Coudenhove-Kalergi.
The Christian philosopher Prof. Rocco Buttiglione, Vice-President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies, reported during the stage discussion in the monastery inn how he had travelled to Poland long before the fall of communism and had learned the local language there in order to write a book on the philosophical work of the young Karol Wojtyla.
The concluding panel discussion on ‘Manipulation, fear, tyranny - how do we remain free?’ was chaired by constitutional law expert and international Pan-Europa Vice-President Dirk H. Voß.
- Programm (DE) (PDF)
- Press release (DE) (PDF)