The fraternity is a category that crosses the whole encyclical
Caritas in Veritate.The fraternity is seen as the key to true
development, the integral one: for all men and for all dimensions of the
person.
The wounds of modernity, in fact, are mainly related to the
relationship, inability to meet in the reciprocity; in the postmodernity
this "spiritual and relational" wound shows increasing its dramatic
quality: the paradox of happiness in opulent societies, where today we
experience a growing boredom and loneliness, does not say maybe this
poverty in relationship?
What are the questions that today, our time, puts the economy and
society? There are more immediate questions, in the media, in politics:
they speak to us of the financial crisis, unemployment, increase in
consumption out of it, poverty and wealth, impoverished by war and wrong
liberalism, but also of the impoverished by a consumerism that increases
aspirations and then more and more impoverishes. In fact, I am convinced
that there are now other deeper questioning, less expressed, but
extremely urgent.
Ethical and moral crisis
The crisis we are experiencing for several decades (and not a few years
ago) is an ethical and moral crisis, which has to do with the category
of the fraternity: the market economy has achieved extraordinary results
in terms of rights and freedoms (equality), but lost out to the
fraternity.
The biggest challenge today comes from the economy and the global
society is a question of fraternity, relational goods, new social
connections, true meeting, intrinsic motivation. And this is the
fraternity of which the encyclical speaks. It is always placed in
relation to gratuity. "This fraternity, men can never achieve it alone?
As society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbors but does
not make us brothers. The reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the
equality between men and of giving stability to a civic coexistence
between them, but it can not establish fraternity. This originates in a
transcendent vocation from God the Father, Who loved us first, teaching
us through the Son what is fraternal charity" (CV 19). Hence, free and
unpaid love, which Christ brought to earth, can give us the keys to
genuine fraternity.
To understand how true it is that reason can grasp equality, but not
fraternity, just think of what he wrote Adam Smith, widely considered
the founding father of modern economics: "The gratuitousness is less
essential than justice to the existence of society. The society can
exist without gratuity." And again: "Civil society can exist between
different people [...] based on the consideration of the individual
utility, without any form of love or mutual affection."
The effects of this way of understanding the social life are daily
before our eyes. And that's why the encyclical presents the challenge:
"The biggest challenge we have in front of us [...] is to show, in terms
of both thought that behavior, not only that traditional principles of
social ethics, like transparency, honesty and responsibility can not be
ignored or attenuated, but also that in commercial relationships the
principle of gratuitousness and the logic of gift as an expression of
fraternity can and must find their place within normal economic activity
[...]. It is a demand both of charity and of truth "(CV 36).
The encyclical so sees the gratuitousness as an expression of
fraternity as the only prospect of recovery from the crisis and then a
new humanism.
What message to the consecrated life?
As religious we feel challenged by this call to fraternity that shoutes
Caritas in Veritate: our fraternal life should be, in fact, an
expression of that fraternal charity mentioned by the encyclical. And at
a time when the request/demand of fraternity is pressing, our
communities can and should be the place of peace and refreshment, where
you can enjoy how beautiful it is to live together and take care of each
other, and especially the most needy. As a sign of the urgency of
appropriate responses to the question of fraternity, considering that
multiply the answers offered by the market to this need for
relationships and reciprocity. In some countries, for example, there are
many who pay for an hour of listening. They are also a lot of people
using a site, which is depopulated in the United States, but now it is
spreading all over the world (www.rentafriend.com).
The offered service is very simple: you need a person to accompany you
to a party? Do you want to go for a walk and you have not whom to go
with? Rent a friend! On the site you will find a list of people divided
by country and city that become available to be 'rented' for a few
hours. We understand that the term "friend" is loud and out of place in
this case. We also understand that if such a phenomenon is spreading,
the need for relationships is really great. And the answers to this
emergency can not be pseudo-solutions in the market, simply because the
primary relational goods does not pass through the market and the
selflessness at the base of each fraternal relationship simply can not
buy. You can only grow.
There is not good life, in private as in public sphere, without
gratuity. And there is no gratuitousness without free gifts, charisms.
This is the reason why the poverty of a society such as ours is
especially poverty of gratuity, shortage of a human touch that is an end
in itself, a scarcity of people who meet us and brings us closer because
are interested about us as people.
And it is enough. They are interesed in us even when we are not
"stakeholders", or customers, or suppliers, neither wholesome nor
unborn, perhaps terminally ill; even if we are not worthy. People,
animated by charisms, which are interested because we are human beings,
and that's it. A "just" that the society of pursuit of profit,
efficiency and merit, no longer knows.
The invitation of Caritas in Veritate then is addressed also to
us: because the fraternity becomes a civil category, you have to go to
school about gratuitousness. Our work must be therefore first of all,
and before that in terms of works, the testimony that the fraternity,
expression of gratuitousness, it is possible in human cohabitation.
And the faith?
At this point one might ask, what does faith in this discourse. After
the first encyclical of Benedict XVI on charity, and the second on hope,
we all expected a third encyclical on faith. And in the end so it was,
because the Caritas in Veritate, in proposing the concept of
fraternity asks to broaden the horizons of our faith.
In fact, only a vision of man, an anthropology, that believes that the
person made in the image of God communion, embossed with the Triune God
in his being, can pick up the call to gratuitousness in this
world, in this society, in this economy. On this anthropological bet
resides the hope that the announced fraternity will not be an utopia
(not a place), but a eutopia (a good place), the place of the human.
The encyclical invites us to mobilize in this direction: "The urgency is
inscribed not only in things, it is not derived solely from the rapid
succession of events and problems, but from the same is at stake,
offerring something as a prize: the establishment of authentic
fraternity". He continues: "The importance of this goal is such as to
demand our openness to understand it in depth and to mobilize ourselves
at the" heart ", to evolve the current economic and social processes
towards fully human outcomes" (CV 20).
Therefore mobilize in concrete and by heart because the fraternity does
not remain in the background, but, thanks to the life of our
communities, may become the key to a new development, a new humanism.
Alessandra Smerilli fma
Professor of Political Economy at the Auxilium
Piazza S.
Maria Ausiliatrice, 60
00181 Roma