Towards an Economy for All #4

The fourth and final day of the Madrid Theological Seminar was one of synthesis. After a busy day of lectures (May 8) and two days in which the Continental Theological Commissions expounded their reflections (May 9-10), the concluding day required the participants to compare their own context to what they heard from other continental groups. They identified the most urgent challenges, the opportunities to be seized and the resources (cultural and charismatic) that Dehonians can bring into play to accompany a transition to an inclusive, sustainable, and just economy.

After sharing the groups’ reflections, it was time to turn to the text of the Final Message, prepared by a drafting committee and discussed in the assembly, which agreed upon:

• the need to get away from a predatory vision in relation to creation in order to focus on a humane and ecological economy.
• the urgency to imagine, implement and manage good practices in the use of resources.
• the challenge of reversing the tendency to privatization, focusing on the resources that we call “common,” whose management involves the other and the different in a relationship in which they cease to be a stranger and rival and become a brother or sister.
• On the charismatic side, the challenge is to repair the wounds produced by the dominant economic vision and to rethink oblation – which is an empathetic, docile and respectful horizon-as a relational path indicated by the Holy Spirit.

The Message – in which some proposals and working hypotheses are sketched out – will soon be published and delivered to the entire Congregation, so that what was experienced in Madrid will be the beginning of a concrete and lasting commitment to a social issue of epochal significance.