An Education for Rebuilding

The situation of “urban guerrilla war” that France is facing is just as disastrous as the manifest absence of judgment on the part of the people with various responsibilities. In order to explain the complex situation all they do is to evoke the socio-economic problems in which the “banlieue” has been living for decades; as if men’s dignity can in the end be measured in function of the place where he lives and be reduced to the purely economic dimension.
The demonstrations of extreme violence, which the power rightly wants to put an end to, reveal a malaise that is not only material. There is a cry that brings up a question: what does it all mean?
The answers offered by modern society to the desire for justice, for truth and for freedom that is rooted in man’s heart, every man’s heart (vandals and victims alike) do not fathom its depth and cannot fail to recall to mind Teilhard de Chardin’s prophetic words: “The greatest danger mankind can fear today is not an external catastrophe, a cosmic catastrophe; it is neither famine nor plague, on the contrary it is this spiritual sickness–the most terrible because the most directly human of all calamities—the loss of the taste for living” (The Phenomenon of Man, part 3).
Without denying the importance of social problems like unemployment, above all amongst the youth, we believe that the causes are much deeper than those indicated by the analysts.
The loss of the “taste for living,” or the lack of a meaning in life afflicts every man who lives in our society, whether in the suburbs, in the city or in the countryside. Before the injustices and failures of every kind, we are see men who are unable to act but only react, who succumb to reactivity, and no longer believe in dialogue or communication, because these two dimensions imply a true human experience, made of memory and intelligence.
The consequences are tragically before everyone’s eyes: a lack of communication, in the sense that dialogue between persons seems no longer possible; social apathy deriving from our incapacity to be aware of what lies at the origin of the humanity we share, and therefore a solitude and an incapacity to understand the values and the meaning of living together and of the common good.
Some years ago Fr. Giussani reminded us that “the real drama of present day mankind… is the fact that no one has an education equal to the greatness and the depth of the struggle between men.”
Education, not repression, for us means acknowledging that in reality there is something and someone who gives every person, in every moment, the opportunity to rediscover this “taste for life.” We have discovered this in Jesus Christ, the Truth that became flesh and for which every man is searching, and which we go on living through a human companionship called the Church.
Our responsibility as Christians and as citizens, along with all men of good will, is to witness and support the true hope of man to live together so as to rebuild what has been destroyed.

Communion and Liberation, France