In view of the forthcoming G8 summit, scheduled to be held in Genoa from 20 al 22 July, not only Catholic movement and associations, but also episcopates and groups of Catholic intellectuals throughout Europe have taken a stance on the issue of globalization and have mobilized themselves. Let’s try to explore their reasons The Catholic laity is growing, and is called to increasingly grow, precisely by virtue of its fidelity to the Gospel and its membership of the Church. Too often in the past Catholic lay people have only been the passive spokespersons of the Church’s teaching; they were subordinated to directives that were not limited to indicating to them – as is right – the great goals, but ended up by regimenting their energies and curbing their creativity, denying any independence to their commitment. I will leave to the historians the task of explaining this phenomenon, probably justifiable by the conditions of society in the course of the millennium that has just ended. What matters, for the present and the future, is that Vatican Council II solemnly sanctioned the relative autonomy of temporal realities and of the laity, and recognized the laity’s specific competence in the temporal order. Documents such as Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes forcibly emphasized that the layperson, when it is a question of cultural, political, economic and social issues, must be capable of conducting himself as an adult and deciding for himself, letting himself be guided – in the light of the Gospel and in fidelity to the doctrine of the Church – by his own discernment of the particular situations with which he is faced. Now, there is no doubt that globalization is one of these situations that require the believer to apply the principles that inspire the Christian tradition to a new and extremely complex reality. All we can do is ask the Lord increasingly to encourage this autonomy of thought and action of lay Christians, and so enrich his Church with a multiplicity of voices that may make her really capable of responding to the challenge of the future. We must not be afraid of diversity, provided it does not make us forget that the things that unite us are far more numerous and fundamental than those that may in some way divide us. The essential thing, as the Council says, is to keep open the sincere dialogue, in a spirit of reciprocal respect and charity, on the ground of common evangelical inspiration. If this takes place, the challenge of the G8 will be, for the Christian community, an opportunity for growth and service. Unfortunately, however, the large majority of persons, both outside and inside the Church, are entirely ignorant of her social teaching and even of the fact that she has one. So, many still persist in considering Catholicism as wholly neutral with regard to the economic, political, social and cultural phenomena of this world and as a faith that should be exclusively cultivated inside churches. With the result that, as soon as the ecclesiastical hierarchy takes a stance on socio-political issues, they immediately brand it as an undue interference in matters beyond its competence, undoubtedly linked – they assume – to some hidden project of supremacy. Their surprise at any such stance is augmented by the fact that they think of the Church as a fundamentally conservative institution. To discover that the Church says things that put her, in some sense, on the side of the opponents of the “system”, confounds the right-thinking – Catholics and non-Catholics alike – , who continue, as they have done for the last century and a half, to regard any form of reservation about capitalism as a sure sign of communism, without acknowledging the fact that the Gospel is a great deal more revolutionary than Marxism. The question that is posed at this point is this: how has such a misunderstanding been possible and, more especially, how has it been perpetuated, after an uninterrupted series of documents of the Church has spelt out her social teaching? The answer to this question is, unfortunately, very simple: very few people are familiar with these documents. Even in Catholic environments, they are not incorporated into a systematic process of formation, and the upshot is that, in the eyes of many, the sole questions worthy of attention are those regarding sexual ethics, abortion and euthanasia. These admittedly are problems of major significance, but they need to be situated in a wider perspective, in which life is considered not only in its conception and extinction, but throughout its duration. This is the point of view of the social teaching of the Church, which is aimed at the common good, i.e. the sum of the necessary conditions to ensure that the human person can realize himself fully. And now that the problem of the common good is posed in planetary terms, it is only right that the Christian community should pronounce itself also on the issue of globalization. Giuseppe Savagnone
