Inspired by the common good

May the Social Week in Reggio Calabria give rise to “a constructive wisdom that is the result of cultural and ethical discernment, an essential condition for political and economic decisions. On this depends the revival of civil activism, for a future that shall be – for everyone – inspired by the common good”. That’s the hope with which Benedict XVI ends the Message he sent to Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, to mark the 46th Social Week of Italian Catholics “Catholics in Italy today. An agenda of hope for the future of the country” which opened at Reggio Calabria on 14 October (until 17 October). The Pope also renewed the appeal he had already made in Cagliari in 2008 “for the rise of a new generation of Catholics who are inwardly renewed and devote themselves to political activity without any inferiority complex”. In response to the current crisis, which is “especially cultural”, Benedict XVI urges Catholics “actively and energetically to recognise and support the irreplaceable social role of the family”, enlarge “the concept of reason” and individually assume their own responsibility to tackle the problems of our time by protecting “human life from conception to its natural end, defending the dignity of the person, safeguarding the environment and promoting peace”. Non-negotiable values. “In Europe it’s not Christianity that hampers progress, democracy and peace. Rather, it is the grave incompatibilities with faith that give rise to the distortions that apparently promote every kind of freedom, but that in reality do not ensure” the “right to live” in a society aimed at the “true well-being of its citizens”, urged the President of the Italian Bishops’ Conference, Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, in his opening address at the Social Week. Recalling what the Pope has called “non-negotiable values” since “they are in the DNA of human nature and are the living and vital stock from which all other values spring”, Cardinal Bagnasco described these values as “the very foundation of the person and of every other right and value”, and recalled the recent Statement of the Council of European Bishops’ Conferences (CCEE), issued at the end of the plenary assembly in Zagreb (29 September/3 October). In their document, in fact, the Presidents had reaffirmed “the fundamental values of life, of marriage between one man and one woman, of family and of freedom of religion and education: these are the values upon which every other value rests, and finds a social and political dimension”. Terrain of unity for Catholics. From these fundamental values, said Cardinal Bagnasco, “every other value essential for the well being of the person and of society – such as work, housing, health, social inclusion, security, welfare, peace and the environment… – spring and gain strength”. They are values, moreover, that “do not divide, but unify; this is precisely the terrain of political unity for Catholics. This is their peculiarity. And it is to this specific legacy that Catholics are indebted in their vocation to be salt and leaven, but also light and ‘a city set on a hill’ (Mt 5:14), wherever they live. In this endeavour the very boundary of what is human is at stake”. The cardinal also reflected on the meaning of ‘laicity’ “which might seem to some inherently incompatible with every appeal of religious type”. And yet “the distinction, or even the separation, between the two spheres, and the claim to confine religion to the individual and private sphere, belong neither to the Christian nor to the religious view of things, nor even to reason”. He lastly warned against “the individualistic stamp that contemporary culture propagates. Man is now conceived not as a person, but as an individual so much centred on his own absolute autonomy that he seems to have become a prisoner of himself, a monad who lives alongside other monads, but not together with them to form a community, a people, a home”.A “European dimension”. The “European dimension” of the Social Weeks was underlined in turn by Mgr. Arrigo Miglio, chairman of the Committee for Social Weeks, recalling that the first Italian Social Week in 1907 had already been preceded by the first French Semaine Sociale in 1904 and by the equivalent Spanish week in 1906. The “European dimension” of such events – said Mgr. Miglio – “has not only been preserved but is actually growing”. The project of a Social Week of Europe is now being studied; and “at the same time last year – he recalled – the first European Social Days, organized by COMECE, the Commission of the Episcopates of the European Union, were held in Gdansk”. “No European country – pointed out Luca Diotallevi, vice-chairman of the same Committee – experiences within itself territorial differentials (economic and not just economic) comparable to ours. The economic dynamics, social morphologies and institutional structures proceed [in Italy] with different speeds and also in increasingly separated directions”. Recalling also the “widening gap between other dynamics”, Diotallevi warned against their “passive acceptance” and insisted on the importance of a serious and shared commitment to promoting the “common good”.