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The economical thought at Caritas in veritate
with Luigino Bruni
FROM THE INDULGENCE TO THE GRATUITOUSNESS
What is the origin of the philanthropy?
Because the philanthropy is not bad,
that means, the philanthropists,
who make the University, who make the hospitals,
are positive thins, because the love
is the philia for the man not the philanthropy!
Where is the problem? Because the philanthropy,
the philanthropic model, is a typically North-American model,
typically Calvinist, which is born by a wound,
we should always remember it.
What is it? The sales the Catholic Church
made of the grace, of the indulgence.
How is the protestant ethic born?
It’s born saying: “look, there we are”
Like reaction to a European culture,
Latin, which had totally mixed market
and gratuitousness, to sell even the grace,
has said “no” here it’s necessary to distinguish,
one thing is the market,
and one thing is the gratuitousness.
So, business is business and the gratuitousness
begins afterwards.
So, the one we keep in two times:
the market produces and, after,
we make gifts, we do not mix
gratuitousness and market,
because we are born by a big wound,
which was there. The sale of the indulgence.
So, if we don’t understand the history,
how has this ethic arrived of the philanthropy,
we don’t understand how we may bypass it.
So, not simply turning back, but saying,
afterwards, we must regain a new synthesis,
where we may rediscover a market
which is opened in it’s interior
to the gratuitousness, but without
making the mistakes of the past,
where they mixed to much, because,
the idea of the humanism,
of the philanthropy is very simple.
To don't make confusion, we distinguish,
market and donation, private, public.
To be honest the humanity,
if we can call it Catholic, but not archetype,
not like story or religious confession,
more, if we want, more Latin,
more Mediterranean,
has instead tried to unify more,
it’s more mestizo, more Community,
but this humanism has also
produced big pathologies, several mafias,
the morale familism,
where they putted together exactly
the relations with donation, with market,
so what is the challenge?
Go ahead, imagining a new way,
where the market may re-open it
self to the donation, but saving
the laity of the donation, and imagining
new relations of fraternity,
which are not the moral familism,
of south-Italy, where the relations sometimes
are ways for a pathology of the economy,
but which we may rediscover the heat
of human relations inside the economy.
I dream about an economy where
we may really live the market,
where we may make right contracts,
equal, efficient, but where we may feel
the heat of human relations again,
where we may really live the donation
while we change, and not simply
during the after dinner, where we may
really re-humanize the market, without the risk,
nowadays we hope for always implored,
of this wounds produced by mistakes,
by one side and by the other.