The Health of the Social Organism

Co-founder of the Focolare Movement, Igino Giordani was a politician in the Italian parliament in the years following World War II. He was instrumental in the establishment of the "New Humanity" branch of the Focolare which involves those committed to brining the Gospel of Unity into the various "worlds" such as those of work, culture, science, medicine, art, politics and education.

Igino Giordani

Christian civilisation consists in raising justice towards charity through a gradual introduction of the demands of charity into the river-bed of justice...

If love places you and me on the same level, and both of us on the same level as the Lord, demanding from me that I treat you as I would treat Jesus Christ or as Jesus Christ would treat me, it means that our lives always consist in seeing one person alone: Christ.

Ancient society was made up of other principles: the Semite with his racial affinity; the Greek with his sense of measure; the Persian with the virtue of strength; the Roman with the work of Law. These were principles which, at one and the same time, both attracted people together and repelled others. In other words, the attraction operated in closed circles. The Semite race excluded other races; the beautiful discarded the ugly; the strong eliminated the weak; the justice pigeon-holed people into subjects and objects of rights, into free and slaves, into citizens and pilgrims. They were principles which unified by excluding others.

Love is a law which does not distinguish between people. It sees "neither Gentile nor Jew, neither circumcised nor uncircumcised, neither slave nor free, but everything and in everyone Christ".

Through love the Spirit of God lives in society and gives it movement. That is why the Spirit is called the "bond of perfection". Society is bound together to the degree that it loves. And love brings as much divine as human benefit to society. As long as society loves, everything goes well; where it does not love things begin to go badly. Love is like the arterial blood of the body. It is its health. Hatred is its decomposition, its death.

If a sharing of goods were carried out in a spirit of charity, starving people would not be found side by side with the overfed. Everyone would bear each other's suffering, just like Christ bore the sufferings of everyone. If burdens are shared they are lessened. If love were to reign then wealth would not be wasted in arms, and science would not be wasted in making instruments of death. Rather they would be used in research for life. Human society would become like an extended community of Jerusalem where, at the feet of the apostles, food was shared because the community formed "one heart and soul". Since they shared their soul "they held all things in common" and "no one was in need".