Because I praise the encyclical Fratelli Tutti
(Extract from an article published on laciviltacattolica.it)
Eight years after his election, Pope Francis writes a new Encyclical, which represents the confluence of a large part of his magisterium (cf. Brothers all , 5). Brotherhood was the first theme to which Francis referred to when he began his pontificate, when he bowed his head in front of the people gathered in St. Peter's Square. There he defined the bishop-people relationship as a "path of brotherhood", and expressed this desire: "We always pray for ourselves, one for the other. Let us pray for the whole world, for there to be a great brotherhood ”.
The title is a direct quote from the Admonitions of St. Francis: All Brothers. And it indicates a brotherhood that extends not only to human beings, but immediately also to the earth, in full harmony with the other Encyclical of the Pope, Laudato si '.
Brotherhood and social friendship
Brothers all together decline brotherhood and social friendship. This is the core of the text and its meaning. The realism that runs through the pages dilutes any empty romanticism, always lurking when it comes to brotherhood. Brotherhood is not only an emotion or a feeling or an idea – however noble – for Francis, but a fact which then also implies the exit, the action (and the freedom): "Who I do brother?".
Fraternity understood in this way overturns the logic of the apocalypse that prevails today; a logic that fights against the world because it believes that this is the opposite of God, that is, an idol, and therefore to be destroyed as soon as possible to speed up the end of time. Faced with the abyss of the apocalypse, there are no longer brothers: only apostates or "martyrs" in a race "against" time. We are not militants or apostates, but all brothers.
Brotherhood does not burn time or blind eyes and souls. Instead it takes time, it takes time. That of quarrel and that of reconciliation. Brotherhood "wastes" time. The apocalypse burns it. Brotherhood requires the time of boredom. Hate is pure excitement. Brotherhood is what allows equals to be different people. Hatred eliminates the different. Fraternity saves the time of politics, mediation, encounters, the construction of civil society, care. Fundamentalism cancels it out in a video game.
This is why on February 4, 2019 in Abu Dhabi, Francis, the Pope, and Aḥmad al-Tayyeb, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar, signed a historic document on brotherhood. The two leaders recognized themselves as brothers and tried to take a look at today's world together. And what did they understand? That the only real alternative that challenges and stems the apocalyptic solution is brotherhood.
It is necessary to rediscover this powerful evangelical word, taken up in the motto of the French Revolution, but which the post-revolutionary order then abandoned until its cancellation from the political-economic lexicon. And we have replaced it with the weaker one of "solidarity", which in any case recurs 22 times in Fratelli tutti (against 44 of "fraternity"). Francis wrote in one of his messages: "While solidarity is the principle of social planning that allows unequal people to become equals, fraternity is what allows equals to be different people".
The recognition of brotherhood changes the perspective, turns it upside down and becomes a strong message with a political value: we are all brothers, and therefore we are all citizens with equal rights and duties, under whose shadow all enjoy justice.
Brotherhood is then the solid basis for living "social friendship". Pope Francis in 2015, speaking in Havana, recalled that he had once visited a very poor area of Buenos Aires. The parish priest of the neighborhood had introduced him to a group of young people who were building some premises: «This is the architect, he is Jewish; this is a communist, this is a practicing Catholic, this is… ». The pope commented: "They were all different, but they were all working together for the common good." Francis calls this attitude "social friendship", which knows how to combine rights with responsibility for the common good, diversity with the recognition of a radical brotherhood.
A brotherhood without borders
Brothers all opens with the evocation of an open fraternity, which allows each person to be recognized, valued and loved beyond physical proximity, beyond the place in the universe where they were born or where they live. Fidelity to the Lord is always proportional to love for the brothers. And this proportion is a fundamental criterion of this Encyclical: one cannot say that one loves God if one does not love one's brother. "For whoever does not love his brother who sees cannot love God who does not see" (1 Jn 4:20).
From the very beginning, it is highlighted how Francis of Assisi extended fraternity not only to human beings – and in particular to the abandoned, the sick, the waste, the least, going beyond the distances of origin, nationality, color or religion – but also in the sun, the sea and the wind (cf. nn. 1-3). The gaze is therefore global, universal. And so is the breath of the pages of Pope Francis.
This Encyclical could not remain extraneous to the Covid-19 pandemic that broke out unexpectedly. Beyond the various answers given by the different countries – the Pope writes -, the inability to act jointly has emerged, despite the fact that we can boast of being hyper-connected. Francis writes: «Heaven grant that in the end there will no longer be 'the others', but only a 'we'» (n. 35).
The schism between the individual and the community
The first step that Francis takes is to compile a phenomenology of the trends of the present world that are unfavorable to the development of universal brotherhood. The starting point of Bergoglio's analyzes is often – if not always – what he learned from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola, who invited us to pray by imagining how God sees the world.
The Pontiff observes the world and has the general impression that a true and proper schism is developing between the individual and the human community (cf. n. 30). A world that has learned nothing from the tragedies of the twentieth century, without the sense of history (cf. no. 13). There seems to be a regression: conflicts, nationalisms, the lost social sense (cf. n. 11), and the common good seems to be the least common of goods. In this globalized world we are alone and the individual prevails over the community dimension of existence (cf. n. 12). People play the role of consumers or spectators, and the strongest are favored.
And so Francesco assembles the pieces of the puzzle that illustrates the dramas of our time.
The first step concerns politics. In this dramatic context, the great words such as democracy, freedom, justice, unity lose their full meaning, and historical consciousness, critical thought, the struggle for justice and the ways of integration are liquefied (cf. n.14 and 110). And the judgment on politics is very hard as it is sometimes reduced today: "Politics in this way is no longer a healthy discussion on long-term projects for the development of all and the common good, but only ephemeral marketing recipes that find in the destruction of 'other the most effective resource' (n. 15).
The second piece is the throwaway culture. The reduced marketing policy favors the global and cultural gap from which it is the result (cf. n. 19-20).
The framework continues with the inclusion of a reflection on human rights, respect for which is a prerequisite for the social and economic development of a country (cf. n. 22).
The fourth step is the important paragraph dedicated to migration. If the right not to emigrate must be reaffirmed, it is also true that a xenophobic mentality forgets that migrants must be protagonists of their own rescue. And he forcefully affirms: "It is unacceptable that Christians share this mentality" (n. 39).
Then there is the fifth piece: the risks that communication itself poses today. With the digital connection, distances are shortened, but attitudes of closure and intolerance develop, which feed the "spectacle" staged by the movements of hatred. Instead, we need "physical gestures, facial expressions, silences, body language, and even perfume, hand shaking, redness, sweat, because all of this speaks and is part of human communication" (n. 42).
The Pontiff, however, does not limit himself to providing an aseptic description of the reality and drama of our time. His is a reading immersed in a spirit of participation and faith. The Pope's vision, if attentive to the socio-political and cultural dimension, is however radically theological. The reduction to individualism that emerges here is the fruit of sin.
Populism and liberalism
Francis continues his speech with a chapter dedicated to the best policy, that placed at the service of the true common good (cf. no. 154). And here he confronts head-on the question of the confrontation between populism and liberalism, which can use the weak, the "people", in a demagogic way. Francis intends to immediately clear up a misunderstanding by using a broad quotation from the interview he granted us for the publication of his writings as archbishop of Buenos Aires. We report it in full because it is central to the discourse.
“'People' is not a logical category, nor is it a mystical category, if we understand it in the sense that everything the people do is good or in the sense that the people are an angelic category. But no! It is a mythical category […]. When you explain what a people is, you use logical categories because you have to explain it: it certainly takes. But don't explain the sense of belonging to the people in this way. The word "people" has something more that cannot be explained logically. Being part of the people is being part of a common identity made up of social and cultural ties. And this is not something automatic, on the contrary: it is a slow, difficult process… towards a common project ”(n. 158).
Consequently, this mythical category can indicate a leadership capable of attuning to the people, with their cultural dynamics and the great tendencies of a society for a service to the common good; or it can indicate a degeneration when it changes in the ability to attract consensus for electoral success and to ideologically exploit the culture of the people, at the service of one's personal project (cf. no. 159).
However, we must not even emphasize the mythical category of people as if it were a romantic expression and therefore, as such, rejected in favor of more concrete, institutional discourses linked to social organization, science and the institutions of civil society.
What unites both dimensions, the mythical and the institutional, is charity, which implies a path of transformation of history that incorporates everything: institutions, law, technology, experience, professional contributions, scientific analysis, administrative procedures. Love of neighbor is in fact realistic. Therefore, it is necessary to make both the spirituality of the fraternity and the more efficient organization grow, in order to solve the problems: the two things are not opposed at all. And this without imagining that there is an economic recipe that can be applied equally for everyone: even the most rigorous science can propose different paths and solutions (cf. n. 164-165).
(Extract from an article published on laciviltacattolica.it)
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/perche-lodo-enciclica-fratelli-tutti/ on Mon, 05 Oct 2020 05:40:39 +0000.