On the sidelines of the first conference-seminar of the series “Dialogues for the Family,” promoted by the Pontifical Council for the Family, which was held on Wednesday, April 17th, on the topic “The Family: the first enterprise,” in collaboration with the Union of Italian Catholic Jurists and in the presence of a large audience, Emanuela Bambara took an interview with the speakers exclusively for our Dicastery.

Johnny Dotti, manager, president of Welfare Italia
 

Question: A full citizenship right implies a State on a “human scale” and therefore “of the family,” in material and spiritual needs, and also emotional and relational ones. With what kind of welfare?

Answer: Welfare that doesn’t live on money and services alone, and remembers that without human relationships and relations of trust money is never enough, services are never sufficient. The family is the place where we learn how to build happy relationships.
 

Question: How then does a healthy welfare conceive goods and services?

Answer: That would be a long line of reasoning. I simplify it in the following way. In the welfare systems, services only make sense if you remember that they are, in fact, at the service of the people. The Western economic system has forgotten this in the course of the last thirty years, and so it tends to multiply services, among other things, more and more significant ones, such as health services, while forgetting that services without people are of no use.