Draft Report “Family and relational poverty
by Pierangelo Sequeri
I want to greet and thank, on behalf of the John Paul II Institute, all the participants in this seminar for the presentation of the Draft Report 2020. Our interest towards the Family International Monitor is direct and specific. We have offered our institutional support to this research network and we participate with conviction in its programme. Therefore, first of all, I want to express my satisfaction for the quality of the commitment of the Direction and of the scientific partnership that guarantees the functioning and the development of its project.
Family, the fundamental network of human society, is not, first of all, a duty of civil society, but it rather is the foundation of the affective quality of the bonds of coexistence and the basis of the ethical disposition towards the work of care. These are two essential qualities for the well-being of the community and for the humanism of politics.
The quality of the family condition, therefore, is an indicator of the utmost importance for the monitoring of the health condition of a civil society and for the assessment of the entire political and cultural system. Family is a strength of the production of the common good and of the circulation of the relational goods, which shape the social environment in which the persons are formed and develop themselves. If family itself is considered as a secondary dimension of the construction of the civil system, which essentially treats society as a group of individuals, the quality of its contribution to the common good is not really recognised. This recognition defect is destined to create an increasingly great – and dangerous – divide between the person and the community.
The Draft Report 2020 accounts for the observation of the detailed analysis of the forms and the conditions of the impoverishment of the family. One of the original traits of this research is the commitment with the assessment of the factors of deprivation of the family reality in a multidimensional perspective: that is, as broad and differentiated as possible. This will allow the researchers to make a substantial progress in the perfecting of the social, ethical and also theological considerations that must guide the motivations and the practices of a responsible subsidiarity. Thank you.
