A few months ago, the Crossroads Cultural Center in New York asked Rémi Brague to commemorate Monsignor Albacete by speaking about one of Monsignor’s favorite topics: the relationship between faith and culture in light of Benedict XVI’s speech to the College des Bernadins in 2008. Soon after, Brague sent us a rather surprising title: “Culture as a By-Product”. The presentation was held Octobe 22 at the Sheen Center (the cultural institute of the Archdiocese of New York) in front of a large audience of more than 200 people.

It was a beautiful lecture, a true tour-de-force of erudition, and at the same time a real testimony of the intelligence of faith, of how faith opens up all aspects of reality. Professor Brague threw at us an apparently provocative thesis: Christian culture does not exist, because Christianity is not tied to a particular language or ethnicity, or to particular customs. On the contrary, Christianity gives value to every culture because it loves the human in all its manifestations. As Father Giussani often did, Brague quoted Saint Paul: “Panta dokimazete to kalon katechete”, test everything and retain what is good. This is possible because, from the Christian point of view, what gives value to everything is Christ; thus, every investigation is a looking for Christ.

Therefore, culture is a “by-product”. The Medieval monks were not moved by a project to rebuild society, but by faith, by love for Christ. And paradoxically, for this very reason they gave birth to an immense flowering of cultural. By a beautiful coincidence, Brague’s conclusion was exactly what we are reading in these weeks in School of Community: "the problem of culture is the problem of faith.” (The Form of Witness, p. VII)