"The Mediterranean is a thousand things at once. Not one landscape, but countless landscapes. Not one sea, but a succession of seas. Not one civilizatioǹ, but it is a series of civilizations̀ stacked on top of each other, in short, a very ancient crossroads. For millennia everything has flowed into it, complicating and enriching its history: beasts of burden, cars, goods, ships, ideas, religions, ways of life" (F.Braudel).
The Mediterranean is "a beautiful sea that has become a tomb for men, women and children," as Pope Francis recalled in Lesbos. From the heart of the great religions and civilizations that face it, diversity and the ability to be plural can become a secret of coexistence and human development for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the world.

War has again, powerfully entered the Western world in the 21st century. Every war promises to be short and decisive, but all wars are self-perpetuating, open to scenarios unthinkable before they began, unpredictable. They depend on the decisions of a few but involve everyone. The food crisis, social and political instability now affect not only the populations of warring countries, neighboring countries, but the rest of the world, other continents, dialogue and the world's geo-political rifts.  We need to rediscover the ways of dialogue and multilateralism to patch up the world's wounds and reopen to the taste of peace.

Covid-19 touched the whole world, without exception. In the West it seemed a distant thing: but it was not an epidemic, it was not an isolated event, it was and is a pandemic. Global. With its load of victims. The world, in the spring of 2021 stood still, found itself united, silently. So did every country, standing around its victims. The pandemic does consider borders, it does not respects frontiers, language differences. But it disproportionately affects, more than others, in every society, the weakest. The pandemic is a great temptation and a great opportunity: to think only of oneself, or to regain a feeling of common belonging.

Globalization has in recent decades unified markets and brought populations closer together. Unfinished globalization has found itself in a distress, contradictory to the free movement of goods, but not of people and nations. Globalization broke down, after a rise in tensions, with the war in Ukraine and its aftermath. The globalization of spirit and solidarity has never been there, it has not grown on par with the wealth produced, while inequalities have grown exponentially. Religions have before them the responsibility to help everyone to think of themselves together with the other and not against the other, across personal and national, ethnic, religious, social boundaries. For a new globalization.