Brazil: Fraternity in political action, to plan the future

The celebration, on December 7th, which took place in the House of Deputies at the Parliament in Brasilia, was attended by more than 200 federal deputies. This was only a few weeks after the recent inauguration of the new government and legislative body. The President of the Parliamentary Assembly, Hon. Aldo Rebelo sent a message. The news of the solemn session in honour of the Movement for Unity in Politics (MppU) appeared on the official website of the House, within the official working timetable.

“At this special historical moment for Brazil, faced with crucial political choices for its people both at a national and an international level, as for many emerging countries, we lived a truly important day”. That is how Hon. Lucia Crepaz, President of the International Mppu described it, on her return. “During the session I listened to deputies from different parties questioning and taking positions on the subject of universal fraternity, the principal idea behind the MppU. I must say that while in the political arena fraternity is seen as a fragile concept, unsuited to the painstaking process of bringing interests together, there on the contrary it emerged with the ability to plan, to be the content and the method of politics, and a guide for personal daily actions, as well as large scale political transformation.”

The story of the Mppu was traced by Hon Luiza Erundina, who first of all called to mind the message of Chiara Lubich to parliamentarians delivered in 1998 by Ginetta Calliari – one of Chiara Lubich’s first companions and cofounder of the Focolare Movement in Brazil. After that the Movement for Unity in Politics was founded in 2001, followed by an expansion in the different states of Brazil, with a series of political initiatives throughout the country and in the institutional political centres, finally involving also the Parliament in Brasilia.

In the following two days, the MppU Convention welcomed dozens more politicians and administrators, functionaries, interested citizens and students, coming from 25 states of Brazil, who reviewed everything that followed, from 2001 until today. For the occasion, messages of support came from the national centres of the MppU in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, where this experience has been developing in a similar manner for some years.

The Movement for Unity in Politics – Started by Chiara Lubich in 1996, could be described as an international laboratory for political dialogue which brings together politicians from different tendencies working throughout the whole range of social and political situations, who find in the Charism of unity a source of inspiration, and a universal motivation for working together for the common good.