“From God's Rights to Human Rights – Papal Diplomacy Today” was the topic of the public lecture by Monsignor Justo Mullor Garcia, President of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, delivered in Sofia on November 16, 2005 at a forum organized by the Diplomatic Institute with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Bulgaria and the Holy See.

Monsignor Garcia started his lecture with quotations from addresses by Pope Paul IV, also a pupil of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy, who said the diplomacy of the representatives of the Holy See is above all “love for the peoples”, and the school that trains them is a “higher school of mercy”. What is characteristic of the diplomacy of the Holy See is that it assigns its representatives to different countries not only to defend the rights of the church but to defend and be in service to the rights of the nation they are assigned to.

On the basis of his forty-year-long experience in the diplomatic service, the President of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy dwelled on the issues of today concerning the globalizing world, which has as its inheritance ideologies, the experiments of which brought forth, on the one hand, concentration camps, the Holocaust and ethnic cleansings, and on the other, the solid reality of democracy, and the universal and regional structures such as the UN and the European Union, as well as religious spaces of communities that found expression in cathedrals and monasteries, synagogues, mosques and places for prayer, universities and libraries, conveying eternal thoughts and values.

Monsignor Garcia shared with the audience his excitement at his first contact with the international community in Geneva. His experience in the Council of Europe and in several nunciatures convinced him of the importance of personal meetings and efforts for dialogue, characteristic of bilateral diplomacy. The lecturer dwelled on papal diplomacy as an antithesis of Machiavellism and the uncompromising emphasis on material strength. “Fortunately,” he added, “ideals often are stronger than arms and economic power…” Pope Pius XII could not stop the war, but Hitler and Stalin did not succeed in imposing their ideas on the world, and present-day Bulgaria within the bounds of Europe is an example of this.

After the victory of conscience over crude materialism in 1945, the world had to experience another spell of Machiavelli in the Cold War and its “iron curtain”, which divided humankind into two opposing blocs. In those unhappy days, papal diplomacy, Monsignor Garcia underlined, achieved significant successes. One, for which the Venerable Pope John XXIII had a contribution, was the timely realization that it was better the warships loaded with arms to return to their ports of origin. The other one was the formation of the Holy See's Eastern policy, whose chief architect was Cardinal Agostino Casaroli (who studied and then taught at the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy and is author of the book The Martyrdom of Patience).

Exponent of this policy was also Pope John Paul II, who without military divisions or arms had to act in a world having the most powerful concentration of forces in human history. With his visits to the Baltic countries, the Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan and Armenia, and Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, etc. in Eastern Europe, he demonstrated that at the end of the day, after all trials, the project “lighted up by reason and faith” got the upper hand of all dictatorships.

The new challenges in the world showed that even after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ensuing hopes, the spirit of Machiavelli of Florence continues to urge towards confrontation and destruction, to non-dialogue and use of brute force. The world still cannot find an answer how it was possible that the Black Tuesday three years ago, 9/11 and subsequent acts of terror in Madrid, London and elsewhere happened. How is the world to come out of this state is the other crucial question, which many people ask themselves in Iraq, in Afghanistan, on the one hand, and in Palestine and Israel, on the other.

Despite the crisis we went through, we are not in a vicious circle, Monsignor Garcia says, but at a crossroads of civilization. Depending on the road we will go in future, we will achieve progress or come to another disorder. It also depends if humankind will continue to believe that the end justifies the means or it will recognize the top priority of conscience, which presupposes exactly the opposite, that “it is impossible to achieve real good by incorrect and double-faced means, without the support of the universal moral values”.

Towards the end of his lecture, the President of the Pontifical Ecclesiastical Academy called to reflection those who opposed the proposition the preamble of the Constitution, which would be guiding the European Union, not to contain the phrase “Christian roots”, because “the proposition of the Church was not to create some kind of new Christianity” but a desire the new political identity emerging on the Old Continent to be a Europe with the consciousness “of the welfare not only of its citizens, but open to the world without any claims to controlling it or subordinating it to its material interests”.

After reflecting on his work as papal diplomat and his conduct as an European, Monsignor Garcia, who is the author of the books New Christianity, God Believes in Man, and God, Church, Man, winded up his lecture, which was received with great interest by the Bulgarian audience, with a quotation by Pope Benedict XVI, who in The Salt of the Earth (2005) called upon us to be vigilant in the face of changes so that the new age, which comes to take the place of what was until recently considered a new age, would be really “an age of man and an age of God”.