Michel Roy
Secretary General of Caritas Internationalis
“Our world is under strain”. This is what the former Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon wrote in Jeffrey Sachs book The age of sustainable development: “Poverty continues to plague communities and families. Climate change threatens livelihoods. Conflicts are raging. Inequalities are deepening. These crises will only worsen unless we change course”. This message, today, is more pressing than ever. Pope Francis expressed the same message in the Laudato Si’ with other words.
In a global society that every day is more advanced and interconnected, where technologies, institutions and culture have reached very high goals and where capitals, goods, ideas and persons, not migrants nor asylum seekers, cross the borders with an unprecedented speed and intensity, how is it possible that we can’t eradicate poverty? It must be a main question in our today’s reflection on family.
In order to give a positive answer, the global leaders committed themselves to create a new development Agenda that allows to reach, during the next years, a series of specific global goals for sustainable development. We, as Caritas, participate in the annual meeting of the High Level Political Forum (HLPF) of the United Nations in NY which monitors the progress that has been made, based on a contribution of a group of states and on the evaluation of the implementation of some Sustainable Development Goals. We do understand that we are not progressing as we should, and there is no more time to lose.
The world is indeed under strain, suspended between opportunities and new risks. We can consider, for example, the effects of climate change, due to an unbridled exploitation of the resources of Mother Earth and to a wrong development model.
But if the world is under strain, so is family, caught up in an economic, social and spiritual crisis from which it tries to free itself. When the crisis hit hard and the banks and businesses went bankrupt in the Western world, leaving a lot of people unemployed and without savings, families functioned mostly everywhere as a buffer, avoiding the worst for those who, father mother or son, were hit by the recession. They have been like a “field hospital”, to use an expression that Pope Francis likes. A space where the wounds produced by the crisis are relieved, as well as the cultural and relational ones. But the families didn’t get away unscathed from the pressure exerted on them. Because as we know, economic poverty and social exclusion increase the existential malaise and put a strain on relations; they make the persons vulnerable and they create a spiral that ends up affecting all personal and social life. When the family crumbles and the family network breaks, poverty increases and it becomes even more dramatic with the presence of children. When the social policies support and protect the rights and the duties of the family, and the networks of mutual aid and voluntary work function, the families are able to face the change. But if these elements lack or are weak, the family unit breaks and it destabilises an entire society.
