Recognizing that all people are our brothers and sisters, and seeking forms of social friendship that include everyone, is not merely utopian. It demands a decisive commitment to devising effective means to this end. Any effort along these lines becomes a noble exercise of charity. For whereas individuals can help others in need, when they join together in initiating social processes of fraternity and justice for all, they enter the “field of charity at its most vast, namely political charity”. 165PIUS XI, Address to the Italian Catholic Federation of University Students (18 December 1927): L’Osservatore Romano, 23 December 1927, p. 3. This entails working for a social and political order whose soul is social charity. 166Cf. ID., Encyclical Letter Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931): AAS 23 (1931), 206-207. Once more, I appeal for a renewed appreciation of politics as “a lofty vocation and one of the highest forms of charity, inasmuch as it seeks the common good”. 167Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (24 November 2013), 205: AAS 105 (2013), 1106
Every commitment inspired by the Church’s social doctrine is “derived from charity, which according to the teaching of Jesus is the synthesis of the entire Law (cf. Mt 22:36-40)”. 168Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009), 2: AAS 101 (2009), 642. This means acknowledging that “love, overflowing with small gestures of mutual care, is also civic and political, and it makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world”. 169Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ (24 May 2015), 231: AAS 107 (2015), 937. For this reason, charity finds expression not only in close and intimate relationships but also in “macro-relationships: social, economic and political”. 170Benedict XVI, Encyclical Letter Caritas in Veritate (29 June 2009), 2: AAS 101 (2009), 642.
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”. 171Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, 207. 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.