How to reread the experience of the epidemic in the light of Laudato Si’?

To keep together health, culture, society, economy; to enhance connections between different areas in view of a “transversal” understanding, able to keep the pieces together: this is Integral Ecology. Certainly not an issue to be reduced to the theme of the environment.

"We still have a very twentieth-century mentality, with knowledge organized in closed sectors," said Fr. Mauro Bossi, who spoke in Trento last July 31 at Villa Sant'Ignazio. "The 2030 agenda has changed the paradigm, thinking about development in an integrated way. What the '900 has done with ideas, it has also realized with things: a hospital, as a container of care, a school, as a container of education, an  office, as a work container. The epidemic  has made us understand that containers can no longer function independently but must function as communicating vessels. It has also made some tensions evident:

Center-periphery: the regions most affected by Covid19 are the centers of an unbalanced country system, where productive activities, services, institutions are disproportionately concentrated. Living at the center of an unbalanced system is no one's interest. The center needs to be related to the peripheries.

Medicine-territory: the hospital cannot cope without an efficient territorial medicine. The healthcare assisted residences where we put the elderly to protect them, have become a place where they have died.

Work-private life: all the opportunities and inconveniences of smart working have emerged, however, allowing to relativize the office container, no longer as the only way to work, and questioning the heavy dichotomy between work and private life for which one in three women in Italy abandons work, after maternity. We have a great opportunity: to rethink times and spaces of work.

School-didactics at a distance: dramatic social distances have emerged but also possibilities. The “classroom container” is not the only possible way to learn.

This is the form of contemporary thought: to understand connections between things, the intelligence of connections, as exposed in chapter 4 of Laudato Si’. The invitation is to look at our private life for the missing ones that open new possibilities of thought and planning.

And, in the light of connections, to re-understand solidarity. The invitation to globalize it comes from Pope Francis, and to rethink it in an integral way. During the lockdown, we understood that solidarity can also pass through social distancing. It requires to protect public institutions. To understand this type of solidarity requires a cultural shift, an ascesis for each organization to go beyond immediacy, with respect to what it does. It is also a great challenge for the Church. In order to make the oratory and the center for the poor work,  a dialogue with institutions and professional expertise are necessary. It’s an important kairos to get rid of the illusion that things are right because we do them. It’s time for a conversion of mentality: not even the Church is a leak-proof container. There is a framework of social relations without which it can no longer conceive itself.

Integral ecology is a method for reading reality (chapter 4), but also an experiential and spiritual process (chapter 6), both personal and communitarian: as the two lungs of Laudato Si’.

Which spirituality is best suited for us to experience this process? A proposal in 3 stages follows:

A spirituality capable of contemplation. The term  recurs 27 times in the document, and relates to the concrete world, the whole world, as a beauty wounded by unjust systems. To contemplate means to look profoundly at reality, letting ourselves be touched by it as it is and becoming aware of how the world resounds in us, in view of a personal transformation, in the sign of compassion. It means to renounce the overall control, to renounce having  a ready explanation for everything. To accept to let oneself be surprised and challenged.

A spirituality capable of inhabiting complexity, where some, once important, categories are now outdated: profit/no profit, technology and nature, economy and ethics, market and gratuity, work time and free time. “Pillars of the past” that today fade into grey areas. How to understand what is authentic from what is not? Go deeper, discern. In some Catholics there is a need to draw boundaries to protect their identity. With Laudato Si’ we have entered into this conversation, let us continue with humility, willing to learn, without raising fences.

A spirituality capable of making beautiful choices: to do good things (ethics), to make them beautiful (aesthetics), to know how to tell them (narrative). Often these levels are separated. Today marketing, the online world, are the places where the criteria of beauty are formed, just as the narratives that become meaningful for people. Even these worlds must be listened to without fear and prejudice to grasp what they have to tell us.

Today the ethics of the environment must know how to use a language that also involves the body, gives pleasure, mobilizes imagination, and is challenging not only at the level of thought but also in the depths. Laudato Si’ asks for ecological conversion. There is a word in the New Testament, metanoia, which means: to change mentality. Today being ecological is not adding a new content to the many duties we have, but rather a transformation process that will be all the more effective the more it involves all the dimensions of our person.