«The true name of peace is development»
President of the Compagnia delle Opere,
A series of factors, not necessarily connected with each other, but concomitant, has brought us to a situation of crisis. Terrorism all over the world, economic recession, stress on the environment that places the planet’s health in danger, local wars in the Third World, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the current stalemate in important matters of international cooperation like the fight against hunger, and the negotiations on the rules of trade and investment between the developed and developing areas of the world, all mark an era characterized by grave instability, insecurity, and violence.
Bringing these topics to everybody’s attention is always a positive thing, and this is the merit of the antiglobalization demonstrations. Nonetheless, any change has to be thought out by starting from existent reality and seeking to value the positive contributions offered by tradition and the progress mankind has made and is making. The risk and the limitation of antiglobalization demonstrations, even more than the danger of violence breaking out, is that of forgetting many aspects of reality. Marxism, the various confused populist and Third-World ideologies lying behind “the movement” have historically been shown to be inadequate as a response to the numerous problems assailing us. As a consequence, mass crimes against Christians (and believers) in the world are ignored; the new achievements in technology and science are not evaluated objectively; the advantages that the Third World can attain from investment, local industrial establishments, and the opening up of markets are ignored; and protest is made against the West but never against the Third World dictators. Then too, there are points where the antiglobalization ideas are identical to the liberal, hedonistic, bourgeois ideas of the West; for instance, the question of forced birth control, in which both sides seem ignorant of the fact that a declining birth rate is a consequence, not a premise, of balanced development. To be sure, even the Western countries seem in large part to be acting against the chances for balanced development when they swing back and forth between a free trade policy without social responsibility and protectionism, both of which are deleterious to the Third World; when they ignore environmental compatibility; when they do not accept responsibility in the face of the myriad bloody local wars in the developing countries, which in some cases are stirred up by them; and when they pass off as the fight against terrorism their policies of hegemony pursued by military means. The most original voice, in this panorama, seems to be the papal Magisterium. And this is no coincidence, because the Christian proposal has the individual as its referent, not theories or the balance of old or new power.
It is founded on the apparently ingenuous, but in fact realistic, appeal to the desire for happiness and freedom shared by all men, on perception of the uniqueness of each person who is loved individually by God, and on the experience of new humanity generated by the encounter with Jesus Christ present in history. This teaching thus posits as the criterion for judging actions their positivity for the individual, without ignoring the fact that limitations and sins are in each of us, not just our enemies. It is inclined to make realistic compromises with different positions, but these too tending towards good; it pursues the good step by step, without Utopian flights forward. Therefore, against every form of barbarity, it bets first and foremost on the education of the person. It promotes a use of scientific and technological progress that does not impair the sacredness of human life. It teaches people to distinguish between countries, above all on the basis of the criterion of respect for every freedom, the promotion of every individual’s well-being, and the valuing of works and aggregations that arise from society itself. It thus values everything that is positive in the attempts at progress enacted within the democratic forms of liberalism and reformist, humanitarian socialism in many parts of the world. It emphasizes the importance of international agencies as the place to negotiate the possible and inevitable compromise needed for peaceful development.
In this witness, necessary so that all cultures may develop the best part of themselves, lies the irreplaceable role of Christians. Besides the Pope, many missionaries, entrepreneurs, and workers are already examples of this. Unfortunately, today, as opposed to what happened at the beginning of the progress of European integration, it is rare to find Christian politicians capable of working together with all reasonable men in accordance with the still valid slogan of Populorum Progressio: “The true name of peace is development.”
