Rt. Rev. Giampaolo Crepaldi
Secretary of the pontifical Council of Justice and Peace
The Fears of Our Time and Christian Hope
Conference at Piacenza
5 March 2009
An excerpt from the Encyclical Letter “Spe salvi” of Benedict XVI helps us understand very well what we would be and how we would live if the door of hope had not been opened. “If we cannot hope for more than is effectively attainable at any given time, or more than is promised by political or economic authorities, our lives will soon be without hope”[1]. We take a look around ourselves and in so doing see “what is promised by political and economic authorities”. But the landscape we see is not that reassuring at all.Thus far the governments of European countries and the United States of Americahave injected a grand total of 370 billion dollars into banks, and far from resolving the crisis as such, that hasn’t even offered a glimpse of some sign of recovery. Added to that is the danger of collapse on the part of banks in eastern Europe, and more than one expert has already started asking why sovereign states themselves might not go bankrupt. [2]
In yet another realm of worries and fears we have had to look on as public authorities proved powerless to save the life of Eluana Englaro. I really didn’t understand what prevented them from taking action. I’m not a constitutional lawyer, just a normal citizen. And as an ordinary citizen I didn’t think saving a life could be unconstitutional, or at least shouldn’t be.
In a third sphere of concern, that being immigration and coexistence among different cultures and religious, we must register the fact that the model of multi-culturalism and laicity understood as neutrality has failed.[3]This heightens our sense of unease. On one hand cultures have just sort of lived side by side in a parallel fashion, with neither mutual respect nor integration. On the other hand governments pretend to grant public space bereft of religious absolutes by imposing laicity or non confessionalism as an absolute. Regarding the recent decision of Spanish courts against religious symbols in classrooms it has been pointed out that the exclusion of God is just as much of an absolute choice as inclusion is, and that the state cannot impose it without failing in its own duty of impartiality.[4]
We feel something more than “what is promised by political and economic authorities” is needed. Indeed, we nourish the idea that many of the fears assailing all of us today, of which I have offered three of the most dramatic examples, are due in the final analysis to the corrosion of hope.And this is perhaps because the recovery cannot come from the top alone. This is why during these moments of crisis and apprehension we feel a thrust, a drive, almost a duty to become mobilized, to assume responsibilities, even if we do not belong to the category of “political and economic authorities”. Hope makes us free.
Granting home-mortgages even though well aware of the probable insolvency of the beneficiaries; selling such mortgages as part of financial products passed on from hand to hand for speculative purposes; packaging these financial products within investment funds quoted on the stock exchange without revealing their ‘toxicity’ . . . . all this might come across as confidence in tomorrow or hope, but it is actually a matter of instrumentalizing hope, a question of somehow wanting to control and exploit it.People have speculated on hope. I think that a bank selling a trust-based relationship with a family (that’s what credit in order to purchase a house is) in the way described above can be considered a speculator on hope. We have a sort of instinctive feeling that corroded in the recent past has been that hope which stems from reality and true human relations, from work and trustfulness, from mutual knowledge and from solidarity lived as vocation. This is what made out hope so solid. Work looked upon as vocation, credit looked upon as the expression of trust and financing in order to render a vocation possible, life looked upon as vocation to be respected and mercifully served also when no longer productive.Otherness personified, our brother, our sister, migrants looked upon as vocation. This is what opened our hearts to hope because it induced us to listen to something born not of ourselves, but which challenged us from outside or, even better, from right in front of us. Something coming towards us, reaching out to us.[5]
Accustomed as they are to granting loans on the basis of credit ratings without ever seeing the face of the person requesting a line of credit, the big banks are now in crisis or are being ‘bailed out’ either directly or indirectly by governments, and being discovered anew are the old local banks, the savings banks and the cooperative credit unions that grant loans to people they know, to people whose families and history they know. Many are the small and medium sized companies in difficulty today, but there are two types of entrepreneurs. You have the unscrupulous yuppies who embody the rationale of indefinite growth, light-hearted indebtment and short term gains, and then you have the old school business men with both common sense and their feet on the ground, who treat their employees as relatives and can count on broad-based solidarity and participation.The former go bankrupt, while the latter carry on, albeit with great toil and effort. Nowadays people are discovering the importance of micro-credit, the importance of social cooperatives that guarantee jobs even in times of difficulty and act as social safety nets, succeeding even in financing public entities in light of the time needed by the latter to respect their economic commitments during these times of scarce liquidity. Many are the examples of trustfulness, collaboration and solidarity that give us hope because they are animated by hope itself. All this makes me think that this moment of crisis is the moment of the ‘little’ players and not just the big ones.
We are now face to face with a crisis especially in the three areas illustrated above: economy and finance, coexistence among cultures and religions in the wake of waves of immigration, and life itself.Fear is generated in all three areas by the lack of hope. Regarding the third area, human life, bear with me if I expand on my thoughts. I am so very worried and even distressed by the eugenic drift in genetic engineering.[6]Benedict XVI was so very right in saying that the threshold of human dignity was breached with artificial insemination.[7]Prenatal and pre-implant diagnoses almost automatically entail the killing of the new being. The lack of hope saps charity, and in the death of Eluana Englaro I saw a wound (vulnus) inflicted upon mercy (pietas) for the suffering and upon that Christian charity which even in a non confessional manner has permeated our civilization.
The lack of hope is an act of arrogance that eats away at charity as well since it places all solutions in our hands alone and makes us convinced that the world can be set aright without being good.Or else that it is possible to be good without really wanting to be, and this by virtue of a sort of biological, economic or political mechanism. In fact, evoked above all in the face of the financial crisis and the problems of bioethics are technical solutions, which cannot be solutions for anything since the problem itself isn’t technical. Managing ‘toxic’ funds is not a technical matter since it is not stipulated by any rule of finance.
The lack of hope then enfeebleswillingness since it prevents willingness from looking beyond its self alone. And hence people demand that desires become rights. The word ‘desire’ can have two meanings. The first meaning is “expectation’, and in this sense the desire is open to hope, is based on hope, and is hope.[8]The second meaning is “impulse” or a drive born within us and expecting to be satisfied, and in this sense opposed to hope, which is openness to what bursts upon us and does not depend on us. When hope is lacking, personal will turns into desire understood in this second sense.
Lastly, the lack of hope weakens reason because reason is no longer able to look beyond its own confines. There is nothing in front of it, nothing calling it, nothing pushing it and nothing opening new doors for it to pass through.
Will needs reason to direct it along the right path, but reason needs hope so it can see beyond itself.[9]The word expressing these bonds is “purification”.[10]
These observations enable me to project some Christian attitudes towards the current crisis and the fears spreading among people.
On the first Thursday of Lent, in response to a priest from Rome who asked him for pastoral guidance in the face of today’s economic and social crisis, Benedict XVI said it was incumbent upon the Church to denounce “this idolatry that stands against the true God and the falsification of the image of God with another god, ‘mammon’”. He went on to add, however, that “we must do so with courage, but also in a concrete way. Because lofty moralism of any kind is of no help if it is not substantiated with a knowledge of reality, which also helps in knowing what can be done concretely to change the situation in a gradual way. And naturally necessary in order to be able do so is knowledge of this truth and the good will of all”. These words embody all the concepts we have dwelt upon so far. The first thing the Church does is not denounce, but announce. In this manner denunciation is always oriented in a positive manner and is rooted in hope. The hope of the announcement, however, is to be made with courage and also in a concrere manner, giving due space to the reasons of reality and to the rationales of economy or finance, just to remain within the realm touched upon by the Holy Father. It is not possible to do good by ‘going against’ economic rationality.[11]Coming into the picture here is reason, which in all fields takes into account reality, takes into account the true criterion of truth. Announcing without being concerned about concrete reality means to engage in moralism. On the contrary, attending to concrete reality without taking announcement into consideration means to espouse pragmatism. Love wants to be reasonable. Then, however, it takes will power in order to be able to do what is seen as the right thing to do; in other words, you have to want to do it. In terms of the ‘bottom line’ this is what causes fear today. First of all the lack of hope and the fact of no longer being able to see ‘announcement’, see vocation in the person as individual, in work, in others. Immediately after this comes the lack of rationality, mistrust in reason and hence in man himself, since hope, even if it were present, would have no roots and would not be embraced in concrete terms because it would just transit above our concrete reality. Today as well aren’t there spurious forms of announcement that practically applaud the crisis because it would enable people to become aware of growth as a radical evil and therefore shift towards forms of “down-growth” of “post-development”?[12]Hope has to be structured, as John Paul II said many years ago during a pastoral visit to Naples, and necessary in order to structure it are reason, discipline, competencies politics, etc. Likewise necessary, however, is the willingness, the free decision of persons, because without just people there will never be any justice.
I have frequently used the word ‘vocation’ in the lines above.[13] I have done so because I think it can help to understand how hope may enlighten the concreteness of life. The narrowing of our reason to empirical truths alone has shriveledup the sense of vocationand thus we struggle to see a ‘calling’ in things, life, others and in our work. They appear to us as nothing more than mute data bereft of any prospects more so than as projects entrusted to us and which appeal to our responsibility. Here lies the foundation of one of the fundamental principles of the Church’s social doctrine, the principle of subsidiarity, which remains unexplainable without hope and without vocation.[14]The request for liberty only has a sense if finalized to the assumption of responsibility: subsidiarity implies a system of responsible liberty. But responsibility is impossible if it is not a response to a vocation. Only after having read a design and a project in reality is it licit to demand spaces of liberty in order to contribute to the implementation of that design, which is not the fruit of desire because we did not create it on our own.
Now, if we take a very close look around, at the root of the many current crises scaring people is the lack of subsidiarity in the sense of the refusal to place oneself at the service of a vocation and expedite a task. Finance should be subsidiary to the real economy, that is to say subsidiary to families and persons, but this has not been the case. Medicine and politics should be subsidiary to life, but in the case of Eluana Englaro this was not the case.Individual cultures are subsidiary to common humankind, but in multi-culturalism this has not been the case. To be grasped at the root of all this is a defect, which is the fruit of an anthropology of desire opposed to an anthropology of vocation.
“God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and has loved us to the end”[15]. The hope of the human face is real hope, reasonable hope, not misleading hope. The hope of the human face is therefore love, which does not deceive and seeks the true good of the person loved.
[1]Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, n. 35.
[2]M. Longo, Così è crollato il castello di carta, “Il Sole 24 Ore”, 1 March 2009, p. 5.
[3]S. Fontana, Il fallimento del multiculturalismo in due opere recenti, “Bulletin of the Social Doctrine of the Church” V (2009) 1, pp. 27-28. Cf.: W. Laqueur, Gli ultimi giorni dell’Europa. Epitaffio per un vecchio continente, Marsilio, Venice 2008; P. Donati, Oltre il multiculturalismo, Laterza, Rome-Bari 2008.
[4]T. González Vila, Simboli religiosi e luoghi educativi pubblici, “Bulletin of the Social Doctrine of the Church” V (2009) 1, pp. 21-23. I delved into the concept of laicity in depth in G. Crepaldi, God or gods. The Social Doctrine of the Church, itineraries, Cantagalli, Siena 2008.
[5] Martin Buber says that any authentic relationship ‘happens’, cannot be planned, and reaches out to us. (Cf. M. Buber ., Il principio dialogico ed altri saggi, San Paolo, Cinisello Balsamo 1993).
[6] This had been foreseen by G. Chesterton,Eugenics And Other Ills, Cantagalli, Siena 2008. Cf. Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Istruzione Dignitatis personae su alcune questioni di bioetica, 8 December 2008. For a synthesis of this document see:
[7]BenedICT XVI,Address to the Plenary Assembly of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, 31 January 2008.
[8] “Man needs God” says Spe Salvi(n. 23). This is the sense of need as “expectation”. Interesting considerations on need as ‘expectation’, albeit within a biography as special as that of Simone Weil, are to be found in S. Weil, Attesa di Dio, Adelphi, Milan 2008. Also see J. Prades Lopez, Nostalgia di Resurrezione, Cantagalli, Siena 2007.
[9]Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, n. 23.
[10]Benedict XVI, Deus caritas est, n. 28.
[11] Cf S. Fontana, L’immateriale nell’economia. Crisi finanziaria e ripensamento di alcune categorie economiche, “Bulletin of the Social Doctrine of the Church” V (2009) 1, pgs. 8-10.
[12]S. Latouche, Come sopravvivere allo sviluppo, Bollati Boringhieri, Turin 2005.
[13]G. Crepaldi, Dio o gli dèi cit,, pp. 11-18: «La persona umana tra vocazione e alienazione. La visione dell’uomo nella Dottrina sociale della Chiesa».
[14]G. Crepaldi, Ivi,, pp. 195-106: «libertà e responsabilità della società civile. La regola della sussidiarietà».
[15]Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi, n. 31.