Acta Ioannis Pauli Pp. II 577

leadership laïque qui ne tiennent pas suffisamment compte de la nature transcendantale et sacramentelle de l'Eglise, ainsi que de son rôle dans le monde. Ces deux attitudes sont nocives. A l'inverse, ce dont l'Eglise a be- soin, c'est d'un sens de la complémentarité entre la vocation du prêtre et celle des laïcs qui soit plus profond et plus créatif. Sans cela, nous ne pou- vons pas espérer être fidèles aux enseignements du Concile ni sortir des dif- ficultés habituelles concernant l'identité du prêtre, la confiance en lui et l'appel au sacerdoce.

3. Yet we must also look far beyond the bounds of the Church, for the Council was essentially concerned to foster new énergies for her mission to the world. You are well aware that an essential part of her evangelizing mission is the inculturation of the Gospel, and I know that there has been much attention in your région to the need to develop Caribbean forms of Catholic worship and life. In the Encyclical Fides et ratio, I stressed that "the Gospel is not opposed to any culture, as if in engaging a culture the Gospel would seek to strip it of its native riches and force it to adopt forms which are alien to it".8 I went on to point out that cultures are not only not diminished by the encounter with the Gospel, but are "prompted to open themselves to the newness of the Gospel's truth and to be stirred by this truth to develop in new ways".9

To this end, it is important to keep in mind the three criteria for dis- cerning whether or not our attempts to inculturate the Gospel are soundly based. The first of these is the universality of the human spirit, whose ba- sic needs are no différent even in vastly différent cultures. Therefore, no culture can ever be made absolute in a way that dénies that the human spirit is, at the deepest level, the same in every time, place and culture. The second criterion is that, in engaging ne wer cultures, the Church cannot abandon the precious héritage drawn from her initial engagement with Gre- co-Latin culture, for to do this would be "to deny the providential pian of God who guides his Church down the paths of time and history".10 It is not a question, then, of rejecting the Greco-Latin héritage in order to allow the Gospel to take new flesh in Caribbean culture. The challenge rather is to bring the cultural héritage of the Church into deep and mutually enriching dialogue with Caribbean culture. The third criterion is that a culture must

8 No. 71. 9 Ibid.; cf. Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Ecclesia in America, 70.

10 Fides et ratio, 72.

39-AAS.