Politics seen as love creates and preserves those conditions that allow all the other types of love to flourish: the love of young people who want to get married and who need a house and employment; the love of those who want to study and who need schools and books; the love of those who run their own businesses and who need roads and railways, clear and reliable laws… Thus, politics is the love of all loves, gathering the resources of people and groups into the unity of a common design to provide the means for each one to fulfill in complete freedom his or her specific vocation. But it also encourages peoples to cooperate, bringing together needs and resources, questions and answers, instilling mutual trust among all. Politics can be compared to the stem of a flower, which supports and nourishes the fresh unfolding of the petals of the community.
We all know that today, too, it would appear that for some “the city” does not even exist, citizens for whom the various government institutions struggle to come up with answers to their needs. Some feel excluded from the fabric of society, and separated from the political body because they lack employment, housing, or adequate health care. Every day, such citizens bring these and many other problems before those who govern. The response they get dramatically influences their perception of themselves as full-fledged citizens, and so they feel the need, and discover the actual possibility to participate in the city’s social and political life.
From this point of view, therefore, the town or municipality can be considered the most important institution because it is closest to the people and comes into direct contact with all types of needs. And it is through this relationship with the various expressions of government at the most local level that a citizen develops a sense of gratitude – or resentment – toward political institutions as a whole, including more distant ones, such as the national government.
If we then consider the national dimension of politics and the relationships between the main political currents which take turns in governing our countries, we note that living our political choice as a vocation of love leads us to understand that others, who have made a political choice different from our own, can be motivated by a vocation of love similar to ours. They too – in their own way – are part of the same design, even if they are our political opponents. Brotherhood helps us to recognize their task, to respect it, and to help them to be faithful to it – even through constructive criticism – while we remain faithful to our own.
We should live brotherhood so well that we reach the point of loving the party of the other as we love our own, knowing that neither party was born by chance, but each as the answer to a historical need within the national community. And only by satisfying all the needs, only by harmonizing them in a common design, can politics reach its proper goal. Brotherhood brings out the genuine values of each party and rebuilds the political life of a nation as a whole.
The initiatives of the members of the Movement for Unity in Politics bear witness to this. Seeking to create a spirit of brotherhood between the governing majority and the opposition in Parliament and in the various municipalities, their initiatives have been translated into national laws or into local policies that have brought a greater unity to the cities in which they have been enacted.
Their numerous experiences concerning the welcoming of immigrants also show this. People pour into the more industrialized countries for many reasons, not only economic but also political. A city or nation does not lose when it opens its doors to others; on the contrary, it gains. Its political stature is raised when it offers citizenship and a country to those who have lost their own.
And because we love our own country, we can understand how others feel the same for their own, in which there also exists a plan of love.
Therefore, those who respond to their political vocation by practicing brotherhood enter into a universal dimension that gives them a vision open to all humanity. Since they acknowledge the universal consequences of their choices, they try to discern whether their decisions, even if serving the interests of their nation, might harm others. In this way, each political act, not only that of the national government but also the most local gesture carried out in the smallest municipality of the most distant province, assumes a universal significance, because the politician who implements it is fully human and responsible. Politicians of unity love the country of others as they love their own.
Chiara Lubich
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“A city or nation does not lose when it opens its doors to others; on the contrary, it gains. Its political stature is raised when it offers citizenship and a country to those who have lost their own.” – Chiara Lubich
