The EoC and the challenges of the millenium

by Alberto Ferrucci
from "Economy of Communion - a new culture " n.30 - december 2009

In 2000, the United Nations made a list of objectives for the third millenium: fight against hunger and the number of women who die giving birth, fight against AIDS and other pandemias, schools for all the children in the world, that sustainable development become a unbiquitous paradigm, free commerce and non-discriminatory finance systems.

It would seem that only the last two objectives are linked to economy, but in reality all of them depend on the lack of social structures and work – a good part of hopeful trips taken in our times are faced to bring one´s children to countries where food, health and instruction are guaranteed to all.

To be able to extend this guarantee to the whole would is a difficult objective to carry out without the spreading of a new culture. We believe that the culture inherent in the Charism of Unity would help scholars and politicians formulate concrete proposals on how to do so. The challenge is to identify the strategy to make this culture reach the whole of humanity.

However, when concrete proposals are formulated, we cannot deceive ourselves into thinking that they will be easily carried out. The financial crisis has left us as an inheritance an economy with growing purses, thanks to money at zero cost, in which the good proposals for developing an economy and finance that has more respect for man seem to fade.

When the economy truly recovers, the price of petrolium will again skyrocket and with this the cost of money, creating new debtors unable to payback their debt. And so, we´re back where we started. Are the “structures of sin” which John Paul II spoke out against truly unremovable?

History goes ahead. Barrack Obama´s election as President of the United States demonstrates so. Thanks to the social networks of Facebook and Twitter, he was capable of a continuous dialogue with many Americans, a great part of them young voters. And thanks to the slogan, “Yes we can”, he gave them the strength to believe that it would be possible to concretize his fascinating platform, together. Now that his programs for health, the environment, finance and disarmament in the world are struggling to pull through, he could still draw strength from the grassroots, through social networks. Congressmen and senators taken up by local interests would be more convincable if he already has the force of consensus of their voters.

Since Benedict XVI, in his most recent encylical, underlined the economy of communion as one of the ways towards the economy of the future, we cannot consider it as only an activity of the Focolare Movement, but of the Church and of everyone. Ours is the commitment to apply it always more faithfully according to the original announcment, to develop the industrial parks and the EoC businesses, and form one worldwide network capable of connecting them in an always more vital way.

We must put the theoretical elaboration, originating from the life of the project, at the disposition of the Church and the world. That is why it´s right that the profits from EoC businesses dedicated to formation help support the Sophia University Institute in Loppiano, it´s future satelites in Latin America and the spread of this culture through the press and the Internet.

This is why we are investing on our magazine, now with a new layout in color, and in our website. In the world, the examples of opportunities that data communications offers through “social networks” are multiplying. We also live in this millenium and can utilize these means to help the gifts of the Charism reach the world.

What can be invented to help this culture spread? One slogan, “Yes we can”, changed history. Perhaps we can think of others, perhaps something more than a slogan, capable of being applied to concrete problems, proposing solutions that are more appropriate to human nature´s sociality.

The spread of these cultural products could be entrusted to the youth, who are capable of using the new means of communication in a creative way. We can help them elaborate, simply and intuitively, messages and proposals of action capable of “treading water together” to mobilize the consciences throughout the world on specific problems and press their political representatives to humanize the economy.

In this issue, we have reported the reflections that various scholars who collaborate with the EoC shared during the Summer School in Rocca di Papa, the new graduate theses, the developments of our website, now available in five languages thanks to voluntary translators, and the announcement of the new B2B website that is being made available to EoC businesses to bring to life a worldwide network.

Naturally, this commitment on the part of scholars and students, and the strategies of communication that we can invent have meaning and importance if they are continually sustained (as we also report in this issue) by the life lived - sometimes going against the current and often heroically, but always with joy - of entrepreneurs and workers to who deserve the theoretical dignity that describes the new way in which they are living economy.

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