A NEW SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROJECT

Giancarlo Zizola

Journalist and writer

It is worth noting the importance of the work of John Paul II in making the Jubilee an historic occasion to redefine the sense of time, actually, help tear away the critical joint of society, in particular in the West, where the ephemeral of goods in the great market of consumption, reproduced by the mass media, risks pulling with it the ephemeral of life and the dissipation of its fundamental values, including the symbolic ones. The danger is real, in this phase of "end of the century," in which the symbolism of the time fades away because of the effect of the commercialization of vital time, and the material dimension of the times. This leveling of the present and of the virtual renders precarious the experience of death itself, especially in young people, because it is seen mostly as a show and repeatedly shown on television.

From here the interest in a recovery of linear time, typical of the Church, which uses it in periods of the celebrated mystery in the liturgy and in the divine office, is compared to cyclical time of the paleochristian cultures. It is but one of the conditions that the Jubilee, as in its Jewish origins, should relaunch itself as an institution politically incisive. If we would only think about what the jubilee means as an egalitarian and emancipated institution, for the pardoning of debts, the liberation of slaves, the saving of the earth from economic exploitation every 50 years, we would better know how to deduce an analogous lesson, which would easily transform the culture of information. If in its origins the Jubilee was the institution that allowed society to start a project of significant social and economic innovations, a dynamic and equivalent push could liberate itself thanks to the Jubilee 2,000, provided that it is not altered and squandered by the black myths of the apocalyptic millennium, through processions of flagellations and anxieties for the end of the world: all the materials caught between disincarnated spiritualism and distorted metaphysics, which are already prevalent and abusively accepted as "mysteries" of "religious information," while it is easy to sell religion as an irrational evacuation of the reasons of the populations.

In a climate of social uncertainty, it would seem almost for appearance sake, the invitation of the Pope to moral discipline and of the methodology of thought, towards a sort of righteousness of reason, through which even information, with its critical obligation on the horizon of the globilizing world, reaches the cosmopolitic ethos necessary for the salvation of the earth, helping and not exasperating the distance between atrophy of ends and hypertrophy of the means. With regards to the liberating innovations, it must be worked on so that the Jubilee can inspire the media to no longer censure, in the epoch of world vision, the other side of the earth, where millions of men and women have a need for the forgiveness of debts, the liberation from the chains of exploitation. To me it seems almost mournful, the lack of visionaries, in a society that expects much from visions (from the embryo to the cosmo of the conscience), since there are many "visions" rather than a vision of the future, since at the end of it all everything is brought to light and we are on the threshold, we can ascertain that at least in this end of the century that a reason for a new culture inspired by the Judeo-Christian line can be brought forth as a means to correct the mercenary distortions of the mass media and be used as an instrument of reawakening of the closed consciences of the gold cult: «I will sing and make melody! Awake, my soul! Awake, O harp and lyre! I will awake he dawn» (Psalm 57). From the reawakening of the sleeping conscience, and from "our harps," from manipulations, it once again depends on our history, the reawakening of creation.

It does not deal with literally reproducing the model of conciliary information, whose success was the fruit of a story of patience, but bold experimentation. Instead it deals with taking on that furrow of live substance of that model of faith in journalists, the universal opening, the offering of occasions of religious culture open to the plural scene of dialogue between the great world religions, the respect and acceptance of differences, etc. I would say that the success of this venture does not only lie in the efficiency, but especially in the culture. It is also in the offering of moments of silence for the breath of the spirit and for the depth of the look of the journalists "inside things." One of the dogmas of the media today is: «that which is not seen in television does not exist». The challenge is to make it possible, with more culture and contemplation, for journalists to rediscover the ways of an acute vision of the meanings of things, of the symbolic value of reality, also in that which is not immediately visible. And since the domination of goods is the decisive structural problem, - a kind of homologated totalitarian tendency - this could also be the way to assure the necessary liberty to the operators, until they are the subjects and the courtiers, in the necessary pluralism. It is obvious, that also within itself, the Catholic Church is put to the test of that prudence, that presumes that boldness, in the development of dialogue between differences and the respect of pluralism. In this way, it imposes, with more credibility evidence that religion today comes to belong to the conditions of survival of free culture in the world.