"Hospes fui et suscepistis me". Il sogno del Papa e il progetto di un padre dell'Europa

Pope Francis, receiving the International Charlemagne Prize, in the Sala regia at the Vatican, urged leaders to remember the ideals of the European Union’s founders, calling for an “update” of the idea of Europe at a time of mass migrations, economic downturn and threats of terrorism. According to pope Bergoglio, the past can serve as an inspiration for a Europe capable of giving birth to a new humanism based on three capacities: the capacity to integrate, the capacity for dialogue and the capacity to generate. The essay draw the “project” of Charlemagne, called already the “Father of Europe” by his contemporaries, with particular attention to the administration of justice care for the poor and other weak social subjects. In Charlemagne’s time, there was no concept of European integration in its modern sense. But some of his Capitularia do indeed seem surprisingly modern in that they aimed at the creation of uniform standards for an empire in which many different peoples coexisted, with different languages, different laws, and different social forms and traditions. In this sense, the attempt of Charlemagne represents a significant step in the European integration process.