What new democracy?” “

Giving “dignity” to the commitment of Catholics within the institutions, as essential today as commitment in the social and civil field; “re-evaluating” political commitment as “the capacity to assume public responsibility”; bringing out into the open from “the closed circle of experts” the debate among Catholics on such themes as finance, the economy and the institutions, these are some of the objectives of the 44th Social Week of Italian Catholics, due to take place in Bologna from 7 to 10 October. The theme of the encounter is: “Democracy: new scenarios, new powers”. In the words of Msg. LORENZO CHIARINELLI , bishop of Viterbo and president of the scientific organising committee, the Italian Social Week is “a coming together of ideas, in which the Catholic laity plays the major role”, in order to “take up current cultural challenges” and react against “the temptation to aphasia”. More than 1,000 people have signed up for the Week which will celebrate its centenary in 2007. Among the participants will be 33 bishops, 30 volunteers and 40 speakers, both from Italy and other countries. DEMOCRACY “AT RISK”. In a society such as our own, says the preparatory document for the Social Week, “marked by a profound ethical vacuum” and by the “absence of shared values”, democracy runs the risk of suffering a form of “cultural asphyxia” that renders it “soulless” and, as such, “destined to regression”. Indeed, the logic of the “strongest” can “assume different names” (“ideology, economic power, inhuman political systems, scientific technocracy, invasion of the mass media”), but in all these cases the risk is that “social democracy is reduced” in favour of a model of “competitive democracy” characterised by the “concentration of power in the hands of the few”. Not to mention “ideological non-commitment” and “pragmatism”, due to the “profound crisis of parties” and to the “selection of the political class through forms of co-operation linked to specific interests”, as well as “disaffection with politics on the part of the people”, also because of “frequent scandals”. “STRONG POWERS” AND “POPULISM”. “The major difficulty in the development of democratic life”, today “is the presence of strong powers that either substitute political power or tend to subordinate that power to themselves, making it dependent upon them” and threatening “the free decisions of citizens”. This takes place through “the activities of ever more expert and unscrupulous pressure groups”, that “represent a threat to democracy if the way they move within society is not transparent and if they subtract themselves from the political debate”. In such cases, respect for the “principle of the majority” and for “the centrality of politics” is at risk, “both because of the pressure exercised by economic interests and of the replacement of traditional channels of mediation by the media, with a consequent tendency to make public life a mere spectacle and to promote a populist tendency”. Not to mention the “influence exercised by technology in all fields of life” where, from being a “positive factor”, it can become “a source of danger to democracy”, both because of the possibility of “manipulating public opinion”, and of the tendency to remove decisions from “the control of citizens”. A “SHARED ETHOS”. The premise behind the Bologna Social Week is, then, that without “rebuilding a shared ethos” politics “cannot but be reduced to mere pragmatism, shot through with the temptation to authoritarianism”. The active participation of citizens in political life through “decentralised forms of power” that guarantee “pluralism”; the creation of “specific forms of regulation for strong powers, especially economic ones that risk conditioning the development of community life so heavily”; the identification of an “institutional context to administer the global market and to give rise to a ‘governance’ of the global economy”, these are some of the priorities highlighted by the document which also mentions certain “dysfunctions” in the world of finance and expresses hope in “a decisive turnaround to restore credibility to the system and increase the confidence of savers, creating effective control measures and broadening spaces for democratic participation”.