Dare to make policies that care for the human family

I would like to conclude by stopping on the word DARE.

This is not an era of change; it is a change of era, as Pope Francis said.

A mere season of reforms within the institutions is not enough.

Yes, we need that too, but what definitely needs to be done is:

• to give oneself some new rules;
• to find new tools, not those already pre-established;
• use words and actions that break new ground.

If there is a design, a vocation for every man and every woman, our communities too, our cities and our peoples safeguard and can reveal a history, a vocation.

Our communities are not the simple sum of many individuals; they are not an intertwining of random paths, but they are the composition and recomposition of the human family, a family of families. This is what we need to work for.

The family is a community and therefore by putting the family at the forefront of building civil communities we prevent a united world from becoming a mass of individuals without history and without roots. Placing families in the front line in this endeavour helps design a united world, built by diversities that meet and communicate with each other.

In our cities and in our peoples, we can then glimpse a design that already has a history.

It is a history with deep roots in the past, which draws strength from the present, but which above all wants to express its future potential.

Each community thus highlights its diversity and can become, with the help of “caring” political engagement, a necessary and irreplaceable piece in the composition of the unity of the human family.

However, we need the courage abandon considering the narrow viewpoint from our own locality as being the key to reading [situations] and to political planning in order to recognize and consider the whole human family as a political subject.

In other words, on the level of our daily family life, if every person is my brother or sister, then my brother or sister’s life project is ours.

Their life expectancy is ours. My family’s budget and that of our municipality, like that of our nation, is structured and relativized according to the conditions in which other people are living.

Chiara Lubich, in her last speech on politics, to a group of British Parliamentarians in London, described a type of politics capable of this undertaking:

One day I felt that I understood the meaning of politics as love. If we were to give a colour to every human activity, to economy, health, communications, art, to work; to cultural endeavours and to the administration of justice… politics would not have a colour, it would be the background, it would be the black so as to give prominence to all the other colours. This is why politics should seek to have a constant relationship with every other sphere of life, in order to provide the conditions for society itself, in all its expressions, to fully achieve its design.
Clearly, within this continual attention to dialogue, politics must assume responsibility for certain areas: prioritizing within fair policies; giving preference to those most in need; promoting people’s participation at all times and in every possible way, which means dialogue, mediation, responsibility and concrete action.

The challenge is up to us!