Fratelli Tutti 182: Community

Let’s finish political love/charity:

182. This political charity is born of a social awareness that transcends every individualistic mindset: “‘Social charity makes us love the common good’, it makes us effectively seek the good of all people, considered not only as individuals or private persons, but also in the social dimension that unites them” [Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 207]

Because God made us social creatures, we will be incomplete without the tangled, loving, difficult, and bothersome relationships with others. This is why the emphasis on community is important: building, activism, sense of … most all versions of this, even the ones ridiculed by its opponents.

Each of us is fully a person when we are part of a people; at the same time, there are no peoples without respect for the individuality of each person. “People” and “person” are correlative terms. Nonetheless, there are attempts nowadays to reduce persons to isolated individuals easily manipulated by powers pursuing spurious interests. Good politics will seek ways of building communities at every level of social life, in order to recalibrate and reorient globalization and thus avoid its disruptive effects.

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