Solidarity in practice

“Truth, love and justice, as indicated by ‘Mater et magistra’, together with the principles of the universal destination of goods, as fundamental criteria for overcoming social and cultural imbalances, remain the mainstays to interpret and begin to solve the internal imbalances within globalization today”, said Benedict XVI, on receiving in audience in the Vatican on 16 May the participants in the international conference “Justice and globalization: from ‘Mater et Magistra’ to ‘Caritas in veritate'”. Promoted in Rome (16 – 18 May) by the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, the conference was held to mark the 50th anniversary of John XXIII’s Encyclical “Mater et Magistra” .Common good and quality of relations. The conference underlined the central role of the laity and the education of the young. “To apply the message of ‘Mater et Magistra’ – warns Jérôme Vignon, chairman of the Semaines sociales de France – , we as Europeans must in the first place re-centre the most important pillars of the social market economy so that they serve the vocation of men and women” to participate “in the common good”. According to Vignon, today the major concern within the EU, instead, is to “prepare the young generations for change” and equate them with “skills clearly identifiable with and linked to their person”. Education from “the earliest age on the task of participating in and cooperating with the common good” is – he said – “too often ignored”. He addressed a warning to the EU itself which, in the promotion of skills, “ought to attribute greater importance to the recognition of relational qualities”. Various “experiments” carried out in Italy, France and Spain were described on the last day of the conference, dedicated to “good practices” in the various continents.Italy: Project Policoro and Project Third World. Mgr. Angelo Casile, head of the Office for Social Problems and Labour of the Italian Bishops’ Conference (CEI), described Project Policoro, “established in 1995 on an intuition of the then director, Mgr. Mario Operti, and promoted by the CEI, the Office itself, the Office for Youth Ministry and Italian Caritas to give concrete responses to youth unemployment in Italy, especially in the South”. “Begun in Basilicata, Calabria and Apulia, it now involves all the regions of southern and central Italy”, and “has realized hundreds of cooperatives, consortia and small businesses based on micro-credit”. The charitable interventions on behalf of the Third World made between 1990 and 2011 by a special CEI Committee were described in turn by Marta Rocca: “Approximately 1,250 million euro distributed to 11,500 projects approved by the Committee, of which 4,150 in Africa, 3,700 in Latin America, 2,800 in Asia, 500 in the Middle East, 100 in Oceania and 250 in more than one continent or nation”. Schooling, construction work, healthcare, natural disasters, wars/conflicts, promotion of the rights of women and minors, protection of minorities: these were the fields in which the interventions were made.France: Parcours Zachée. Unifying the person: That’s how Pierre-Yves Gomez, professor of economics at the Université de Lyon and contributor to the daily “Le Monde”, sums up the objective of the Parcours Zachée, which he launched in France five years ago. Gomez calls himself “a layman who lives in the world and who has drawn up a code of conduct for businesses”. He explains it like this: “The essence of the spiritual life of a layperson is realized in his participation in earthly affairs”. Hence the need to “testify that professional life cannot be divorced from or opposed to the spiritual dimension of existence” because “it is precisely this schism that makes so many people unhappy”. Today, maintains Gomez, “the world hungers for interior unity and the Parcours Zachée says that, just as he did with the tax collector Zacchaeus, Christ invites himself to dwell in our life as laypersons”. First launched in 2005, today there are 50 spontaneously created Parcours Zachée: eight months of reflection/sharing/verification in parishes on the Church’s social doctrine applied to the participants’ own life in the perspective of service to the common good and the option for the poor.Spain: reparative justice. Becoming aware of one’s responsibilities, making reparation, and re-insertion in the community: according to Father José Segovia Bernabé the spirit and aim of reparative justice are epitomized in these three principles. Reparative justice, together with penal and penitentiary mediation, form the content of a pilot project that the Department for Penitentiary Pastoral Care is developing with the support of the Spanish Bishops’ Conference. The point of departure is the “need for those who have committed a crime to assume responsibility for the harm they have caused in order to ‘repair’ it”. The essential presupposition is “the conviction that the human being, even if he has committed a very grave offence, can change and regain control over his own life” by making reparation. Since 2005, says Father Bernabé, “a synergy with the institutions of civil society” has been created, because “the penitentiary system has a need for this type of justice. We are awaiting a law which would regulate its aspects, and to the drafting of which we have contributed. So far 75% of the mediations begun have had a positive outcome”. So Father Bernabé hopes to “introduce this practice in all prisons”.