Charity Builds Forever
“What remains outside the machine may be what most reveals the human: freedom, need, and the person’s longing for fullness.”
Julián Carrón and Fausto Bertinotti explore charity, solidarity, and the irreducible person before history, power, and human need. (*)
On May 30, a meeting was held at the San Salvatore in Lauro Monumental Complex in Rome between Fausto Bertinotti, President Emeritus of the Chamber of Deputies, and Julián Carrón, former professor of theology at the Catholic University of Milan, moderated by journalist Elisa Calessi.
Moderator
Thank you for this brief introduction and for taking us straight to the heart of this gathering. Every time I listen to her, I am truly left speechless.
I would also like to thank, first of all, Piero and the friends of the Banco di Solidarietà for inviting me here again, together with two giants, as Piero rightly called them, in the field we will be discussing today. I am sincerely grateful to him, because for me this is always an unforgettable occasion.
I would like to begin this way. In preparing for this meeting, I was reading, or rather I had begun reading, since I have not finished it yet, the Pope’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas, which is magnificent. One phrase struck me as a fitting starting point for the hour we will spend together. The Pope writes: “Solidarity is the concrete recognition that the destiny of each person is bound up with the destiny of all. Truly, no one is saved alone. We are not simply close to one another; we are entrusted to one another, so that each person may take responsibility, as far as he or she is able, for the life and wounds of his or her brother and sister.”
I wanted to share these two sentences with you because they struck me. And now I will let our two guests speak. For my questions, I will draw heavily, not from my own ideas, but above all from a beautiful address that Piero gave me, the one he reminded me of: the talk Fr. Luigi Giussani gave in Friuli in 1986.
That address began from an encounter with a priest, Fr. Antonio Villa. You probably already know the story, but for those who do not: Fr. Villa, a priest from Milan, went to Friuli immediately after the earthquake, in the days that followed, to lend a hand, especially to the young people and children. From that gesture a school was born, and he stayed in Friuli. So I will use that talk as my main guide, because it speaks precisely about charity and solidarity.
I will begin with Fausto Bertinotti, whom I have met many times in other settings and in other roles. I am especially glad to meet him here, because I have always recognized in him, as you will see as soon as he begins to speak, not only great political intelligence but also immense human curiosity and great honesty, if I may put it that way, about what it means to be human. So I am very curious to hear what he will tell us.
Bertinotti, you became involved very young, even before politics, in the labor union. Looking at your biography, I believe you were already twenty-four, if I am not mistaken, when you took on your first role in the CGIL. As I was preparing for this meeting, I was thinking that the work of a union organizer is, in a sense, the work of someone whose task eventually becomes caring for those in need, for those who are vulnerable, for the vulnerable side of a company or a workplace. So I ask you: where did the desire to help the most vulnerable come from in your life? Why does someone become a union organizer? I imagine it is because of this desire. Where does it come from?
Bertinotti
Good evening, and thank you for the invitation.
Now you will have to forget what was just said about me, because one cannot speak ill of those present. I will enjoy that luxury, at least, but let us go on.
What I am being asked is very complicated, because it has to do with something that no one could explain to you much better than I can. You might call it a vocation, but you might also call it chance. In other words, it is an event that happens and can only be understood afterward. You can attribute many causes to it, but beforehand you did not know any of them.
From Julián I learned to use the category of the unexpected. I hope I have grasped it reasonably well, but for me it is absolutely certain. Of course, there were the circumstances around me: a family deeply involved in political and social questions and, on the other hand, a father who was a great teacher, perhaps one of the finest men I have ever known. The political calling was always present in my childhood through my father.
In 1945, just after the Liberation, I was taken to hear Pietro Nenni speak in Piazza del Duomo. I still remember it; I was five years old. So politics was a path, but not at all a predetermined one. During my school years, and well beyond them, not out of opposition to my father, because there was never any opposition, but also, in a certain sense, to create some distance from that force, from that authority, I tried to engage with many things other than politics, from cinema to literature.
Then, suddenly, something happened. And it was a fact. It was 1960. I was twenty years old and was not involved in politics, as I have tried to explain, though I always kept my father in mind and tried not to do anything that would dishonor him.
It happened that in Italy, imagine how distant that world was from ours, the congress of the Italian Social Movement was allowed to take place in Genoa. Today someone might say, “So what?” Back then, it was a scandal. Sandro Pertini, who would later become President of the Republic, called on the people of Genoa from Piazza De Ferrari to rise up and prevent the Social Movement’s congress from taking place by any means necessary, because he considered it an offense against Genoa, the city awarded the Gold Medal of the Resistance.
There were violent clashes. The congress did not take place; it was prevented. But something else happened: an entire generation discovered politics. It was the generation sociologists would later call the “striped-shirt generation,” because we discovered the streets, and through the streets we discovered people we had only known from a distance: the unions, the parties, and above all the workers.
A lifelong passion began: a passion for these women and men whom we called workers and who seemed to us to be the bearers of every demand for justice. In this sense, if I may say so, it was not an attitude toward “the least” as such. No. It was an attitude toward the least who were destined to become the first. They were not merely the expression of an injustice; they were the bearers of a demand for justice. They were the chosen protagonists of this new scene.
On this basis, some of us, some of our generation, though in truth only some, even left our studies and dreamed of joining the unions and the political parties. I was one of them. I went to the Labor Chamber in Novara and began working as a union organizer.
So the reason behind my choice is what I have described: a truly life-defining event, a genesis, a family, and especially a father who was a sower. But the seeds he sowed did not necessarily grow into something good. Still, there is a connection, as you can see, though not a direct one. It is not true that there was a predetermined path. No. There are elements that, at a certain point, through the course and complexity of life, come together. At that point I arrived there.
I might have become a priest. No, not as well as I became a union organizer. But there was no predetermination. It seemed to me the most suitable place to carry forward, as best I could, the cause of those workers I had come to know well in the squares and on the streets.
And of course, I do not say this to boast. It was also clear from the fact that I was leaving the university, so your mother looked at you as if to say, “Oh my God, what is going to happen now?” I went to the union, which back then, unlike today, did not even provide what were called insurance benefits. Because you were young, first, it did not give you an employment contract, and second, it certainly did not put you on a path toward retirement. My salary, compared with what would soon be my wife’s salary, we have been together for more than sixty years, was half of hers.
And my wife was simply a civil servant, so it is not as if she were making a fortune. I was earning half of what she earned, when I was paid at all, because sometimes there was no pay. Is there anything to boast about in that, or anything to take for granted? No.
Here, instead, I would like to say something that has not yet been said, indeed, something in some way contradicted by the beautiful message we heard. I mean the idea that one must build something beyond emotion. I must tell you that, for me, emotion is an irreducible element in the formation of a decision. It is not a minor factor. Emotion brings to light feelings you did not know you had, or did not know you had to that extent. They rise to the surface and, through that emotion, can become a lasting passion. Without that emotion, they would become neither passion nor, still less, a lasting one.
And so it became a choice, a choice for life. It also formed hierarchies of value. Of course, we will return to this later, but for this reason I was telling my dear friend during our meeting that, for me, charity came last. That is why.
Why? Because it seemed to me like a handout, whereas the point was to win a right and a power, if you will. And this, it seems to me, concerns not only me more broadly, but also the curious fact that both secular and religious faith are almost always founded on a trinity.
It is a curious thing: faith, hope, and charity, yes, but also liberté, égalité, fraternité. I would point out that the last two, charity and fraternity, resemble each other, and both are harder to put into practice than the first two, at least for me.
In the labor movement, as you know, fraternity was unfortunately crushed in the name of liberty and equality, with consequences we can now measure in history and in life. Precisely for that reason, I considered charity, for me the younger sister of fraternity, something that would come later, after the priorities had been achieved: liberty and equality.
Therefore, that commitment to workers and to the union was not an expression of charity or brotherhood, but rather the identification of a protagonist of history. We would later learn that this protagonist of history is always made up of women and men, and I had already learned that back then, working as a trade unionist.
There was a factory representative in those days, a worker from Novara who had come from the countryside. As you know, in those settings women are very important. They are important everywhere, of course, but especially in those stories, because families there tended toward matriarchy. So much so that these women were called, in dialect, and I will give you the Italian translation rather than the dialect word, reggitrici: the ones who govern, the ones who hold things together.
These women came from the countryside, came to work in the factory, and came to the labor office where we young union activists were. They would bring us, I remember this very well, a sandwich with an omelet from home. That was already an expression of fraternity. Only we, or at least I, were not yet able to see it that way. Thank you.
Moderator
Well, then, I will start from the same point: where does this drive to respond to the needs of those before us come from? And what is the difference between solidarity and charity?
Carrón
Good evening, and thank you all for the invitation.
Where does it come from? It comes, as Fausto said earlier, partly from a vocation. As a child, I felt my life being taken hold of, though I did not yet know the specifics, and with the emotions he was describing. This hold within me made me sense, though I can say it now only with hindsight, the gesture that had given rise to it: a gesture, let us say, of another’s charity toward me.
I was a farmer’s son, and my destiny could have been to help my parents. Since they lacked the financial means to send me to school, I might have ended up working alongside them, without knowing what life would hold. But as a child I felt this urgency, which carried within it, with all the nuances proper to that age, the intuition that life is meant to be given. Not out of voluntarism, but as a response to the call of another.
At the beginning, I was fortunate enough to receive a scholarship right away. Having ruled out every other possibility, that allowed me first to follow the intuition of my vocation to the priesthood. So I was not forced to make that decision for reasons other than the nature of the vocation. In fact, when I decided, after receiving the scholarship, to enter the seminary, my scholarship was cut in half, because that path was considered less appealing than the other fields of study chosen by my classmates who had won the scholarship. But this did not affect me or make me change course.
Little by little, this came to embrace the totality of my life, and I became increasingly aware that the greatest gift I could give others was to respond to this call, to this vocation. And this vocation coincided, in a certain sense, I can say it now, with the awareness of the self; it had to do with the destiny of humanity and therefore with the response to this human need for fulfillment.
So much so that, in my ordination motto, I chose a text from St. Paul to express this. It said that I had received this grace, a kind of special favor from Christ toward me, so that I might bring it to others. In other words, I did not perceive it as an advantage for me alone, but as the purpose of being able to bring to others the fullness I had perceived from the very beginning of my life.
Along the way, the full awareness of the link between that act of charity with which I felt invested and the possibility of responding to human need, beginning with my own human need, became increasingly clear. I have said many times that what saved me was seriousness, loyalty to my humanity, to my human need. And because of this I understood even more the scope of other people’s human existence. Without responding to my own human need, I would not even have had the courage to offer something to others, because I would not have verified it within myself.
More and more, then, I saw that the only way to build something and not remain merely at the level, as Fausto said, of an emotional flow that had already taken hold from the beginning, was to keep receiving what I could then offer to others. It could not be something born only from my generosity, because I have always sensed that generosity, in some way, sends the bill at the end. It is not truly generous if you still need to receive something in return.
But when there is preference at the beginning, what you do is simply free, gratuitous, because you do not need any compensation in return. Everything you might receive in return is too little compared with the abundance you are experiencing. And so I understood more and more that the only way to build is to keep receiving what allows me to live and then to keep sharing it with those I find myself with.
It is like the capacity to look at every human need, to be in solidarity to the very end with every need, in order to see how this fullness I had seen in myself might also triumph in others. I was very struck, for example, by that passage recorded in the Gospel. Jesus begins his whole life with the desire to offer something: “I have not come for the healthy, but for those in need.” So the first thing is to respond to the initial need. I think of the multiplication of the loaves. But this impulse to respond to the need he sees in others is, at a certain point, recognized by everyone.
It always amazes me that the people who had received this gift were not ungrateful or indifferent. They wanted to make him king. But what has always amazed me is Jesus’ passion for those people. Looking at them, he cannot hold back all that passion and says: “Man does not live by bread alone. If what truly answers your need is the need for fullness, then this initial solidarity is not enough. Something more is needed. You must be willing to accept that your humanity can be answered only by a free act that I will perform for you, that is, by an act of charity. Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life.”
That is what endures, what builds over time, because only this can provide the answer. It struck me that, if Jesus had not raised the bar at that point, he would not be credible to me. If he, who posed the question of human existence with such clarity of judgment, “What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, if he then loses himself?”, had not answered at the level of the question he had posed, he would not be credible.
So he was not naive enough to say that the bread he had multiplied would be enough. He had to raise the bar, even at the risk of being left alone, in order to challenge them: “Look, if you want a life that is adequate, that meets your needs, you must accept a charity that surpasses you in every way.” Only that can endure: a life that endures, that responds, and therefore that builds.
Moderator
I will quote Don Giussani’s famous address, the one I mentioned earlier. At one point he says: “Every person, faced with pain or need, immediately springs into action, showing himself capable of generosity.” But he continues by saying that the attempt to respond always carries a shadow of sadness, because, in essence, the person realizes that, in trying to lend a hand to someone in need, he will never fully resolve that need.
So I ask you: have you ever had this experience, this underlying sadness once the action is finished? You have concluded who knows how many union agreements, signed contracts, helped pass laws. Have you ever experienced this sadness?
Bertinotti
I will not be coming back next time. I was about to say something, but since I know very well that it is blasphemous, I will keep it to myself. But if I could say it, let us say, with a penitential attitude...
Moderator
Among friends…
Bertinotti
Among friends. Well, as you know, I am not a believer. But I think that if, after listening to Don Julián, one does not become a believer, then there is no salvation, truly. There is nothing to be done; one must simply resign oneself.
So, naturally, I have many reasons for sadness. For one thing, as I have grown older, I think I have learned to distinguish the personal from the political. I know that my feminist friends have taught us that the personal is political, and that is true too. Still, in my view, a distinction is necessary.
Sadness is a personal feeling, one I have felt a thousand times, one I do feel. But it cannot be transferred to politics; that makes no sense. Not even defeat can produce sadness in that sense. Sadness is a personal feeling.
I would like to return to this for a moment, because I have asked myself many times why, in the labor movement, brotherhood, which should have been the guiding star of the labor movement’s rise, was always so neglected, even vilified, even massacred, as happened in the many crimes committed in post-revolutionary societies. Why?
The element that does not justify it, of course, but in some way helps us understand it, is the primacy of the “we” over the individual. Politics is necessarily the primacy of the “we.” Therefore, freedom and equality are paramount, because they lie within the reach of the “we.” Fraternity does not lie within the reach of the “we”; it lies within the reach of the self.
It is like happiness. Constitutions that state, as the American one does, that they aim at happiness betray politics, because happiness is not within politics’ reach. In Milan they say, “Let it do its job,” that is, let politics do politics. It has plenty to do, but it must not dream the impossible.
Happiness is not within your reach. Yet, on the basis of this awareness, we somewhat deprived ourselves of the person. Deep down, what we expected, we expected from the whole: the people, the class. And mind you, it was not only us. I belong to the generation that truly changed its perspective on the world because of Vatican II. It truly changed it. I looked at faith and Catholicism one way before, and another way after, precisely because of the rediscovery of fraternity.
And yet even that Second Vatican Council speaks to people of good will, and to the people of God it introduces this very powerful element: the people. We are not speaking only about ourselves. To the people we added the class, because we could never make do with only the people. The people are the people of the Constitution. Since that was not enough, we added the class as well. To do what? To redeem humanity from injustice. That is the point: from injustice. Both concepts move in this direction.
Fraternity and charity bring you back to the person. It is not that the other two dimensions disappear. You mentioned the encyclical earlier. I will not quote it because I do not want to leave behind only my own trace of admiration and nothing more. But I am thinking of Populorum Progressio, which leads, in my view, all the way to the great encyclical of Pope Francis.
In short, there is the question of the people, for you and for us, if we may put it that way. There is the question of the people. For us, as I said, there is also the question of the class.
But that is not enough. It is not enough. And so the person comes back into view, although in our eagerness to make the world better, we lost the person a bit along the way. We lost the person along the way. Why? Because the goal was so high that, well, whatever fell by the wayside, so be it.
And this “so be it,” I insist, even led to crimes, because there was always a higher goal, was there not? A terrible episode always comes to mind, from the history of revolutionaries. One of the greatest revolutionaries of the Soviet Union was Bukharin. He was so important that he was called “the son of the Revolution.” He was considered a guiding star.
He was tried by the Stalinists and sentenced to death. The charge was treason. Since Bukharin was Bukharin, one of the major figures, he obviously addressed Stalin informally. He asked to speak with Stalin and negotiated. He told him: “Look, I may have made many mistakes. If you have decided on the firing squad in the name of the cause, so be it. But the one thing you must drop is the charge of treason. Treason, you must drop. I fully accept the verdict that will lead to my execution, but not treason. Otherwise we will have a public showdown.”
And Stalin said, “Honor is saved. I will drop ‘treason.’” Bukharin was tried and sentenced to death. Before the death sentence, he dictated a political testament to his wife, who would die in Italy at a very advanced age. Why did he dictate it to his wife? Because, obviously, if he had written it down, they would have found it. He did not write it. He dictated it. His wife memorized this extraordinary testament and later read it publicly when she was nearly ninety. In one of its final sentences, he says: “When the red flags return to fly cleanly in history, remind our children that in that red there is also a drop of their father’s blood.”
This statement fully captures the relationship among the individual, the class, and the people. The revolution demands total dedication, truly perinde ac cadaver. There is no debate if that is the cause. “I count for nothing. Yes, I ask to be re-evaluated, but later, because history must run its course.”
Now, I think that this vision of history and revolution, to which I was attached for so many years, is wrong. And I think that, in the denunciation and critique of Stalinism, there is also a shared responsibility on the part of those like me, who came later and from afar, because we shared this Weltanschauung: the belief that, in order to achieve justice for all, it was possible to sacrifice someone.
This, so to speak, eroded the idea of revolution. For this reason, I was late in embracing the primacy of brotherhood, or sisterhood, and I was even late, excuse the “even,” in embracing charity. It helped me only once I realized that charity was not a handout, not merely a gift.
I pass by a poor person. There are also images that have been propagated, images that horrify me, of the good bourgeois person giving a handout to someone he struggles to consider a person, even in the way he speaks of him, because perhaps the person is a drug addict, broken, physically devastated on a street corner. If we can get rid of him by cleaning things up a bit, all the better, right? Then perhaps you even leave him a handout. But that is not charity. That is a petty way, in a sense, of soothing your guilt.
Assuming you have any. In any case, I understand now that charity is meeting the gaze of the other person and, in meeting that gaze, trying to understand who I am as well. It is like a play of mirrors, this charity that comes toward me. It has no reason, not as compensation, not as payment, not as exchange, but as relationship, as an enrichment of the relationship.
And this, in my opinion, for those who follow my path, is a hard-won achievement, because one must accept that the primacy of the person is not a betrayal of the revolution. Come to think of it, we should have understood this in time, because our fathers, and I speak for myself, were truly, as St. Bernard said, dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants. We had the giants, those who wrote the Constitution. Giants.
And they knew it, because it is written in the Constitution. The primacy of the person is written there, even in the most significant social article, Article Three. As you know, the second paragraph explicitly states the task of the Republic. Mind you, there is no mistake here. The task of the Republic is not to provide happiness, and let me clarify, it is not even to build socialism. No. It is to remove the obstacles that prevent the full development of the human person.
The centrality of this is evident. We should simply have read it and learned it. Instead, let us be clear, we allowed ourselves to be led astray by a beautiful dream, even though at times it turned into tragedy. Thank you.
Moderator
I had prepared another question, but I cannot let Bertinotti’s point pass, because it seems too beautiful and too important. Bertinotti says, if I understood correctly, that we believed in the revolution, but the mistake was that, in that struggle, the primacy of the person was denied.
In my view, this also has to do with a problem of freedom. Perhaps, in the drive toward justice, equality, and the building of a more just world, we had forgotten what freedom was. So I would like to ask Carrón: what do you think about this? Perhaps this is the great difference, is it not, between solidarity, or the desire to build a more just and equal world, and charity?
Carrón
It is wonderful to hear a witness to this endeavor we were speaking about at the beginning, is it not? And you can understand all the sadness in someone who has dedicated his life to this undertaking. We must give him credit for this loyalty to his own experience.
What has President Bertinotti done with us this evening? This is not a given. On the contrary, it is the least obvious thing. Even though history has proven it, it is the hardest thing to uproot from human consciousness. So today we may shift our focus to artificial intelligence, tomorrow to something else, but ultimately it is because we have not grasped the ultimate root of this sadness.
You asked yourself: why? Because the origin of this sadness is that we and our attempts are insufficient. Even if we had managed to respond as Jesus does, who has the power to satisfy hunger, deep down this is still too little, “a drop in the ocean of the soul,” as Leopardi would say.
What is missing is an awareness of the nature of the person. The nature of the person is the experience of being made for something else, something that cannot be resolved by our own efforts, not even by all our efforts put together.
I will read you a quote from Don Giussani, which has struck me ever since I first read it: “The more we discover our needs, the more we realize that we cannot resolve them on our own, nor can other people like us.”
A sense of powerlessness accompanies every serious experience of humanity. It is this sense of powerlessness that generates loneliness and sadness. I have realized that we are not capable, neither together nor alone. And this is what is astonishing: if one does not realize the nature of one’s own person, one will make attempts that are always destined to fail, and one will become increasingly sad.
Why? Because those attempts are insufficient. Unless sadness becomes the resource by which one realizes that he desires much more than what his own attempts, or everyone’s attempts together, can provide.
For me, this was the great resource of sadness. As soon as I became a priest, I found myself facing situations that overwhelmed me from every side. People came to me with problems far greater than anything I could resolve, and so this inadequacy, this sense of powerlessness before those problems, always surfaced. But over time it made me realize that my sadness was the greatest resource I had for recognizing true greatness, theirs and mine.
For this reason, we must not discard anything in human experience. Sadness is the sign, as St. Thomas says, of an absent good, which must be discovered. If one makes use of this sadness, takes it seriously, and does not merely endure it or suffer it as an illness, it becomes the greatest sign of one’s greatness.
That is what most drives a person to recognize the nature of his person. This is why, when I come across certain phrases of St. Augustine, I am truly astounded by the insight of someone like Augustine, who traversed the whole path of life, trying one thing after another: “You, O Mystery, show so clearly, not in thought, not in feeling, but so clearly, the greatness you wished to bestow upon the rational creature, which has its own peace, its blessed happiness.”
Nothing is enough, so that anything less than You is sadness, with a capital “You.” This sadness bears the stamp of the One who made us, who made us for Himself, who made us for happiness, for fullness. This was the first act of charity of the Mystery, who could have shared only crumbs with us.
How does Being share itself? Through the beauty of the mountains, or the stars in the night sky: that too is a sharing. But with man, He wanted to share everything. The point is that, if one does not understand this, one does not understand the nature of one’s being. Because of this, our attempts will always fail.
Why did He create all this? Because, unable to generate another God, because that was impossible, since one does not generate another God, He generated a human being with such a boundless, infinite need that He could fill him with a presence, and only this presence could respond to all his expectation.
So listen: this sadness finds no answer elsewhere. But this sadness is the sign, the clearest indicator, of who we are. “Do you not miss Me? Do you not realize that all this is not your weakness, not your illness? It is not that you are flawed. It is that you are made for something beyond your measure, beyond your efforts, something you can only receive as an act of charity. Are you willing to accept this act of charity I am doing for you, one in which I did not even spare My own Son, to show you how far this charity reaches?”
This is the drama of humanity before this challenge. Without this, everything else is a diminished form of charity, because it will never measure up to the plan for which we find ourselves in this unease, this sadness, this longing for more.
For this reason, a situation like the one the President described has documented historically what each of us documents personally. He did so on a historical level. And for this reason, if we set out again from this awareness of who we are, we cannot help but find, in so many new ways, the path toward the fullness for which we are made.
Moderator
Still in the address by Don Giussani that I mentioned earlier, at one point he says: “The awareness of belonging to something gives every single contribution a positive, not vain, meaning.”
You have belonged, in short, to collective movements and communities: the union community, the political community. So I ask you this as well: have you experienced this, that belonging to a community makes that drive positive? Is that true, or not?
Bertinotti
Now I have to be more careful, because if you call me “President,” something must be wrong. Otherwise you would call me “Fausto.” It means I must have put my foot in it. Well, I will try to figure out where.
No, but it is not just about the honor. There is something that sooner or later you will have to help me understand. Maybe not in front of a large crowd, but you know. You know what they say.
What is the reason I feel the way I do about what he has just said? As you can imagine, I do not agree with it, and yet I feel compelled to applaud him warmly and to have, not toward the person, that goes without saying, but toward the argument itself, an attitude of fascination. What is the reason? Let us leave it there. I will stop there.
But it is true. It is absolutely true. Now, though, we must not overdo it, because soon he will have us loving even sadness and pain. Slowly, slowly. Perhaps slowly.
There is something here. As you can see, I am always looking for parallels, because, unable to enter fully into that argument, I tend to stay very close to it, as close as I can. And it occurred to me that what he said, which he explained at length, and on this point I fully agree, namely that sadness can be a resource if one knows how to use it, is paralleled by something else that is usually banished to the realm of negativity, just as sadness is in everyday life.
I am speaking of something mechanical, from the world of machines: the residue, what is left out. In mechanics, does anyone still remember what lathes were like? The workers operating the lathe, in order to produce the desired object, had to remove pieces of material. Those pieces were discarded. They were precisely the residue. In the mechanical world, the residue belongs, let us say, to the realm of negativity.
An economist whom I consider one of the greatest we have had, a man of faith, a Catholic believer, who died receiving the sacraments after a difficult period, was Claudio Napoleoni. In my opinion, he wrote some of the most interesting texts of the Italian postwar period. At one point, he wrote a “hymn to the residue.”
As an economist, he tried to defend a thesis I share: in a world that tends, in a capitalist manner, to integrate everything, let us say, as the ultimate goal proposed to artificial intelligence; I am putting this a bit crudely, but since I am not the Pope, I can afford to be crude, there is no need to be too cautious.
So what does artificial intelligence tend to do? This artificial intelligence, the kind dominated by these powers, tends to engulf everything, including the human. It tends to subsume the human within itself. It steals everything from the human: knowledge, wisdom, and it tends to steal even emotions. It steals everything. It is the old scientistic dream of the golem, or of the machine that becomes an automaton. That is where it dominates, and it is this that dominates, or would like to dominate, humanity.
What remains outside? The residue. That is, what the machine, no matter how much it wants to subsume everything within itself, cannot subsume, either because it has no use for it or because it produces no value. It remains outside. Like sadness, at a certain point, it can become a resource, if one knows how to use it.
The residue, what remains outside the machine’s version of the human, is the resource to be used. Of course, it is a residue, so the machine and the system that governs machines can consider it something miserable. But then the relationships and hierarchies are reversed.
What is considered valuable is miserable: power and wealth. Enough. Even democracy, as you can see, is being mowed down. This power, having rid itself of its historical adversary, the labor movement, now tends, as we can see in many millenarian tendencies, to rid itself of religions as well.
If I may make a brief digression: in my view, there is nothing accidental about Trump’s attack on the Pope. It is systematically constructed, because one of the points of resistance to this world that is being built is precisely the religious fact, and specifically the Christian and Catholic world, because of the residue it contains, that core of humanity it considers inalienable.
No one can take it away. “But,” my friend Julián would say, “that is because it comes from there.” But even for me, who comes from here, it is the same. To me, it is just as inalienable. This remnant, what remains outside, is humanity’s hope.
You see, something that seemed like a reject. Here too Pope Francis uses the term “scrap” beautifully, to describe the throwaway society. He hit the nail on the head, because the tendency is this: what remains outside the machine is scrap. Well, this scrap is the repository of our salvation. Thank you.
Moderator
To Julián, I ask: could it be that this scrap is freedom? Or not?
Carrón
I would not call freedom “scrap.” At least right now, I cannot find a clear way to think of freedom as scrap.
Moderator
It remains outside.
Carrón
It is scrap, a waste only in the sense that, for power, freedom is something the machinery of power cannot control. In this sense, and only in this sense, you can use the word “scrap.” But this is the greatest sign of the greatness of the human.
It would have cost the Mystery nothing to make the machine function perfectly, without the complication of freedom, without the complication of evil. It would have been enough to remove a tiny piece of the design, freedom, and everything would apparently have functioned harmoniously. But the risk is that this, as Fausto says, removes the human, removes the true resource of the human.
Moderator
Since we have only a few minutes left, I also wanted to press the other point I asked Bertinotti about earlier: in what sense does belonging overcome sadness? Because this is what Don Giussani says at one point.
Carrón
Belonging overcomes sadness if it introduces one to that level of fullness. That is, if I belong to something that, by meeting all my needs, overcomes sadness.
If this is not the case, it is because there are many forms of belonging that do not remove sadness but increase it, because they are insufficient. One can belong to something that does not measure up to man’s need for fullness.
If this is so, then belonging, if its purpose is not clear, can deceive us. It can be, in some way, fallacious, because many forms of belonging have proven insufficient throughout history, as he said. The question is not merely whether history documents belonging, the belonging of many people to an ideal. He himself is a representative of that. But this belonging, in and of itself, did not address the true nature of the matter, which is the person.
That is why I say: we can speak of belonging, but if we are not speaking of a belonging that contains within itself, as an attempted proposal, an answer, then it will be insufficient. For this reason, it can be a deception. It cannot respond to sadness in and of itself.
So often it is like the belonging of Pascoli’s two orphans: they are together, they belong to one another, they find comfort in each other’s warmth, and yet it does not take away their sadness.
There is a mode of belonging about which we cannot be ambiguous, because we are risking our very lives, we are risking the fullness of the person. From this point of view, I agree, provided that within the concept of belonging there is a possible answer equal to the question. Without this, it will be difficult for sadness, in the end, to be overcome. Thank you.
Moderator
Thank you very much. Thank you. Our time is up. I would gladly stay here longer to ask questions and listen to you, but understandably Don Julián has to catch his train.
So I thank Fausto Bertinotti very much. I thank him, as always, for his attentiveness. I thank Don Carrón. I thank Piero and the friends of the Banco di Solidarietà. And I thank all of you for coming here on this hot afternoon to listen to them. Thank you.
(*) Julián Carrón: A Spanish priest and theologian, he succeeded Luigi Giussani in leading Communion and Liberation, shaping its witness in a secular age.
Fausto Bertinotti: An Italian labor leader and politician, he served as President of Italy’s Chamber of Deputies (Speaker of the House).
Editorial note: The following text was transcribed and translated into English from the YouTube video above by the editorial team of Epochal Change. The notes and editorial framing have not been reviewed or approved by the speakers or authors.
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