Since ancient times, sacred and religious places have been the pivot on which the ideas and cultures of human societies have evolved, playing a mediating role between the human and divine dimensions which included a pre-juridical function in those prescriptions aimed at regulating and controlling violence.
The modern process of secularization and separation, gradual but never clear-cut, between the political sphere of the state and the religious sphere of society or of the individual, and the related legal norms, on the one hand, and moral and ethical norms, on the other, have placed the state as solely responsible for the law, with its monopoly on the use of force, and therefore as regulator and controller of violence. However, religions and their spaces have not lost their value: believers and non-believers of all communities recognize them as a strong symbolic value around which the common sense of identity feeds both national and social cohesion. By guaranteeing the safety of all its citizens, the state can therefore only provide particular attention to the protection of places of worship, precisely because of the strategic role they play in keeping the community it governs united and saved.
This aspect poses places of worship, together with palaces of political power, as targets to be hit, conquered and sometimes destroyed by internal or external enemies. The cases of the destruction of archaeological sites in Afghanistan by the Taliban and in Syria by ISIS are just two of the most striking examples that recent history has presented to us demonstrating the impact and the deep wounds that such attacks cause to the historical and cultural identity of a people.
The European Shield project already from its name implies its purpose: to put the “shield” at the center and in favor of places of worship. The underlying European policies and this project arise precisely from the concern to intervene preventively in the face of the attacks that these places have suffered in recent years by various forms of violent extremism. The analysis of these attacks was in fact the first undertaking of the project. The development of strategies and tools to mitigate risks and improve safety and security strategies of such places is what Shield is developing, involving a wide range of stakeholders. Among the latter, the representatives of the three main monotheistic religions played an important role in the first seminar organized by the project partnership which took place in Rome in December 2022.
The three representatives who attended – the imam of the Great Mosque of Rome, Nader Akkad, Rabbi Scialom Bahbout, president of the International Center for Systemic Research, and Msgr. Jean-Marie Gervais, Coadjutor Prefect of the Chapter of the Papal Basilica of St. Peter in the Vatican and president of the Tota Pulchra Association – have launched a message of common respect and mutual brotherhood which has its central fulcrum in the inter-religious dialogue to always be kept open and above all the conflicts that are now increasingly internationally interconnected.
See on the Shield Project web-site more info and articles on the workshop, here https://shieldproject.eu/news/
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