Encyclical on fraternity: a reading guide

Abstract

We are before a social encyclical, but we must understand this expression in a somewhat different way: because we are not facing a merely teaching document, but the reader is set before a continuous invitation so that he may feel himself questioned by the reality, and invited to implicate himself on it, as a good Samaritan. For this reason, an axis to understand this encyclical is the parable of the good Samaritan. To be “a good Samaritan” is the key to the fraternity that is so much needed in a world wounded by individualism, which seems to have renounced to the process of progressive integration, which was initiated at the middle of the Twentieth Century. But all of this is based on a determined understanding of the human person (an anthropology), which is the fundamental contribution of the text. And this anthropology is translated into an ethics and a theology, all of it with consequences for the politics and for the economy. Francisco, besides, offers it as a synthesis of his main preoccupations.