The return of the common good

During the meeting of the social commission of COMECE, held in Berlin on 22 May, the bishops and experts of the thirteen participating bishops’ conferences were able to directly exchange views on the priorities of the European episcopates in relation to the social doctrine of the Church. That’s a good thing; it’s a value in itself; it permits analogies and new ideas to be discovered. However, this was not the essential part of the meeting. Under the chairmanship of Msgr. Reinhard Marx, Bishop of Trier and German delegate to COMECE, the bishops participated in two important debates, which are worth recalling.The first took place with German Vice-Chancellor Franz Müntefering, member of the Social Democratic Party. It concerned the European social model. Though re-affirming the importance of giving greater visibility to the social dimension of European construction today, Müntefering recognized that Europe seems to have problems with the values towards which the public authorities are in practice impotent. The Churches, on the other hand, he suggested, have a mission and their own responsibility towards them. States ought, he said, to seek justice, also in its social dimension, and also by sharing their own resources within the European Union. Nonetheless, our societies also depend on a sense of life and of living together that has permitted people also to accept sacrifices. The Minister therefore said nothing that has not already been affirmed by Benedict XVI in his first encyclical. He spoke of the centrality of the common good without using that term.The second debate took place with Roger Liddle, author of a document of the European Commission on the “Social Reality of Europe”. This document is an invitation to reflect on the forms and content of future social policy. The approach is original. It is wider in perspective and introduces a qualitative dimension within the political debate. Starting out from studies on prosperity in Europe, this document distances itself from the usual identification of social progress with the growth of mere wealth.How can we imagine a new social policy of prosperity that would take into account the main factors of social change today? Globalization, the transformation of our economies into economies of knowledge and service, the positive and negative consequences of the welfare state, demographic changes and changes to the family, the material well-being of the masses and the individualization of values – it is the sum of these factors that influences the social life of Europeans. According to Liddle, the diversity of the situations in Europe remains striking, and he perceives their strength. Nonetheless, the member states of the Union have to share some crucial challenges: education and training in a knowledge-based economy, the generational disparities due to demographic changes, the urgent need for a better integration of immigrants, indispensable for the sound functioning of our economies, and the risk of social polarization.The Church can certainly contribute to responding to these challenges, but in Berlin the bishops observed with great interest the fact that, apart from these specific aspects, the question of content, the question of prosperity, has returned to political debate. One of them recalled that for Christians there is “more joy in giving than in receiving”. Bishop Arrigo Miglio, who represented Italy at the Berlin meeting, spoke of the need to revise the concept of common good. The theme of the Centenary of the Social Weeks, which will be celebrated in Italy in October, could not have been better chosen: “The common good today” also has a European echo.