Living with violence?” “

Now in its 77th year, the French Social Week drew some 1,800 people to Paris from 15 to 17 November. The theme they explored together was: “Violence, how to live with it?”. Youth. “We must explore the roots of violence, seek their causes, whether they are in ourselves or are of an economic, social or institutional nature. Only then will we be able, perhaps, to quell violence wherever it many manifest itself, in the heart of the human condition”. So said Michel Camdessus, president of the Social Weeks, in his opening address to the meeting. The Social Weeks, now a French institution, were created by two laymen in Lyons in 1904, to spread knowledge of the Church’s social teaching. Right from the start, youth were placed in the forefront: “don’t lose time in dealing with youth, otherwise it won’t be long before they deal with you”, said Father Jean-Marie Petitclerc, Salesian priest, specialized educator, in charge of missions for problems of prevention, at Yvelines, on the outskirts of Paris. “Juvenile delinquency – he added – has doubled over the last ten years, turning kids into the leading protagonists of this phenomenon, but also its first victims: 80% of acts of delinquency are in fact committed against young people themselves”. To overcome this situation, there is only one solution: “breaking the relation between dominator and dominated, and overcoming the role of victim in which young people are so often imprisoned. This can be achieved through dialogue and counselling: the adolescent, restored to his freedom, will be grateful”. The poor and families. Poverty is one of the main causes of social exclusion, in which “violent forms of conduct are fomented”. The point was stressed by Pierre Levené, general secretary of Caritas-France: “it’s among the most vulnerable persons that fragility, precariousness, poverty and the lack of recognition are disseminated: ills that affect over 4 million people in France and over 60 million in Europe”. Another factor of violence – noted Charles Rojzman, expert in social therapy – should be sought in the “crisis of authority within families and within institutions”. And the psychologist Michèle Cauletin added: “violence exists inside each one of us”. “It’s too easy to denounce the absence of family life, the inadequacy of justice, and place ourselves outside the problem, hoping that things will improve and that a kind of restoration of the social stability of the past will take place. It’s not by the nostalgic contemplation of a distant past that we prepare for the future”. The writer Jean-Claude Guillebaud continued: “the question is how to convert the forces that fuel our violence and rechannel them not into a restoration of the past but into a genuine reform of our way of being and living together. This must undoubtedly be done at the personal, social and world level”. The Church. In a message sent to the participants in the name of John Paul II, Cardinal Angelo Sodano declared that “recent events and the conflicts taking place in our planet are the sign of a fragile humanity, trying to come to terms with a violence that takes many forms”. The Holy See’s Secretary of State then invoked the role of the family and the school because – he said – “a real education in peace begins from our earliest childhood. In these original places of education, it’s important that the desire for peace in the young, indispensable for their growth and maturation, be sustained by parents, teachers and educators”. “The educational abdication of adults – writes Cardinal Sodano – abandon youngsters to themselves and open the way to every kind of behaviour”. The world. Msgr. Michel Sabbah, Latin patriarch of Jerusalem, and Gilles Nicolas, episcopal vicar of Algiers, also participated in the Social Weeks, a sign of the attention with which the French Church regards the tensions in the world. During his homily, Archbishop Jean-Pierre Ricard of Bordeaux, president of the French Episcopal Conference, stressed the dimension of fear: “the person who lets himself be vanquished by fear may pass to feelings of violence. The worst things then become possible and the doors are open to intolerance”.