Good morning everybody and welcome to this Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.
As you know already, this is a special Plenary Session addressing the issue of the family as a relational good.
Let me express the gratitude of the Academy to Professor Pierpaolo Donati, member of the Academy’s Council, for the energy and passion spent on the preparation of our Symposium.
Let me also thank in a strong way our Chancellor, Monsignor Sánchez Sorondo, and the Secretariat for their organizational effort.
We are gathering in a very tragic moment of our history. War is organized human violence that has an enormous cost to life, freedom and prosperity. It is not sufficient merely to call for peace and to denounce war. It is necessary to consider which political and economic institutions foster peace and discourage war and to investigate the social and cultural conditions of peace.
If the heart is to be engaged on behalf of peace, it should be engaged through the mind. “Si vis pacem, para civitatem”: this could be the motto that should be applied if we want to make peace not a utopian fantasy.
The understanding of the family as a relational good is blurred today by the spreading of libertarian individualism as a culture characterizing the present epoch. Proclaiming the family as a community of life based on gift, reciprocity, generativity and sexuality implies superseding both the individualistic and the patriarchal models of the family.
Indeed, if the former model fails to make room for the logic of gift as gratuitousness, the latter model does not recognize the concerns of conjugal love, since it subjugates love to values deemed of a higher order, such as the value of generation dependency.
In this conference we attempt to identify emerging insights from a variety of disciplines and expertise in order to provide plausible answers to the basic question, “why the family, and what for?” and it is written in the concept note that this session intends to answer questions such as, what are the roots of the family as a natural society and to what extent can culture change them. Again, what reasons support the necessity and the goodness of the family beyond the changes of its social function.
In the Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia, Pope Francis wisely underlines the theological dimension of the family. Indeed, that of the family is the only sacrament of social order as such. The strong invitation coming from the Pope is to find new ways to make everybody conscious of this fact in order to move ahead towards a new good society.
To conclude: in his apology of Socrates, Plato writes that Socrates told his accusers that he knew he was right, but he did realize he had not succeeded in convincing them because he and they had not lived together, which is to say that, in order to convince – a word which literally means winning together – it is necessary to live together and this is exactly what ultimately characterizes family life.
So thank you again for your participation in the Symposium that we are going to start now and for the important – I’m sure – contributions that you will certainly offer.
Now I am happy to give the floor to the Chancellor, Monsignor Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, for his word of welcome. Thank you very much.