50 years after the Encyclical Populorum Progressio

by Angelo Forti

«The Church is not a company. The Pope is not an economist or even a politician, which is why he fully understands what the development of peoples and the integral growth of people mean. The Church is a "mother and teacher" who cares about the harmonious progress of her children. 

50 years have passed since Paul VI launched the invitation to the world to invest political, social and economic perspectives on the dignity of the person with his rights and on the need for States to ensure that progress is always at the service of the person and not makes man a slave to the economy.

In the great social encyclical Paul VI, which for the first time extended the social teaching of the Church to a global level, recalled the Christian concept of the person, which always implies relationship and inclusion and not individualism and exclusions, denouncing the ideologies which hide the desire to dominate and crush the weakest.

In front of the representatives of the episcopal conferences of the world, of their social and "Justice and Peace" commissions, of the representatives of Catholic charitable organizations at an international level, and in front of the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Francis recalled that today it is It is more urgent than ever to promote the harmonious development of society and that progress cannot rely solely on the economic aspect.

The idea of ​​integral human development seems to be even more relevant today than in the time of Paul VI, because the unprecedented emphasis of today's culture on the dignity of the person, on his rights and on the need to protect them absolutely, corresponds a serious uncertainty regarding a criterion that allows us to establish with greater determination what is in conformity with human dignity and what compromises the Christian vision of man. 

Pope Francis wished to commemorate before the universal Church this important pontifical document, and Pope Montini's intuitions on the development of peoples in the light of the message of Christ. 

In his speech, Pope Francis underlined the essential points of the encyclical, indicating the urgencies of our time in cultivating a culture of solidarity. As a first commitment, Francis recalled: «The duty of solidarity and integration obliges us to seek the right ways of sharing, so that there is not that dramatic inequality between those who have too much and those who have nothing, between those who discard and those who are discarded» .

He called for offering “workable models of social integration.” «Everyone has a contribution to make both as individuals and as groups, if we want to create a human coexistence open to all».

The obligatory path is the integration «into development of all those elements that truly make it so. The different systems: the economy, finance, work, culture, family life, religion are, each in its own specific way, an indispensable moment of this growth. None of them can be made absolute and none of them can be excluded from a concept of integral human development."

A further step in integration is to harmonize "the individual and community dimensions". The weak point of our Western culture – the Pope underlined – «is the exaltation of the individual to the point of making him like an island, almost as if one could be happy alone. On the other hand, there is no shortage of ideological visions and political powers that have crushed the person, have standardized him and deprived him of that freedom without which man no longer feels like a man." This massification has its origins in the interests of the economic powers which, instead of encouraging greater sharing between men, impose "a global market of which they themselves dictate the rules and derive the profits". 

The Holy Father indicated another emphasis in another very important integration between "the soul and the body", in fact, "development does not consist in having more and more goods available, for merely material well-being ». In Jesus there is man perfectly realized, even in humanity, and reflecting ourselves in him we know God. "God became man to make human life, both personal and social, a concrete way of salvation". 

He did it with his gestures of healing, liberation, reconciliation which today we are called to propose to the many injured on the side of the road, the modality of service that the Church intends to offer to the world. Only in the light of Jesus' teaching can we understand "what an 'integral' development means, which does no injustice to either God or man, because it takes on all the consistency of both. In this sense, the concept of person, born and matured in Christianity, helps to pursue fully human development. Because person always says relationship, not individualism, it affirms inclusion and not exclusion, unique and inviolable dignity and not exploitation, freedom and not constraint."

This is the path of the Church, which as a caring mother will never tire of offering this wisdom and her work to the world, "in the awareness that integral development is the path of good that the human family is called to follow".