The feast of Pentecost is the gathering of the scattered sons of God, an anti-Babel, the beginning of the last times, the times of the Church. In Babel there had been the confusion of the languages and the attempt to link steadily heaven and earth by building a tower which went up to the sky, but on the day of Pentecost what happens is the miracle of the languages heard and understood by everybody, and it is the Spirit to descend and to put men in touch and communion with God. It is the miracle of an understanding recovered inside a word! Yes, the variety of men’s languages will continue to exist, and this plurality of languages, cultures, history is not cancelled: as a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit creates a variegated unity, a plural unity, exactly as many gifts and limbs form together the body of the Lord, i.e. the Church. Difference must exist without cancelling unity and unity must assert itself without repressing multiplicity.

The miracle of the languages aroused by the Holy Spirit indicates to the Church the task of reconciling the unity of God’s word with the plurality of the ways in which this word has to be lived and announced in the only community of the believers and among all peoples. It is in this way that the Church must not impose its language, but it has to enter men’s languages in order to announce the wonders of God according to their different forms and ways of understanding them.