An interview with the sociologist Mauro Magatti, one of the speakers at the conference on the intergenerational alliance sponsored by the Dicastery
Among the speakers at the Conference “I have received, I have transmitted: the crisis of the alliance between the generations”, hosted in recent days by the Pontifical Council for the Family, was the sociologist and economist Mauro Magatti, Professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Director of the Centre for the Anthropology of Religion and Cultural Change (ARC), and father of five children. His book "La grande contrazione. I fallimenti della libertà e il suo riscatto" (“The great contraction. The failures of freedom and its redemption”) was recently published, and the essay he wrote with his wife Chiara Giaccardi, "Generativi di tutto il mondo unitevi" (“Generative of the whole world, be unite”) will soon be in the bookstores. Emanuela Bambara interviewed him for the Pontifical Council for the Family.
What does it mean to be Christian today, to be witnesses of an authentic culture of freedom?
The idea of freedom that has imposed itself in contemporary culture is delirious in its desire for power: it has a problem in its rapport with reality. The individual feels free in the discovery of his own liberty and is content to live, to follow his emotions, experiencing freedom as enjoyment and as something to be consumed for the pleasure it gives. This is the idea of freedom of eternal adolescence. Being a Christian today does not mean being against modernity, against technology or against freedom. It means being constructive and proposing another idea, a mature idea of freedom as deponency, that is, the ability to set aside a part of one’s power in order to generate life, with responsibility for one’s actions. Christians have a part and are protagonists in the history of freedom. The problem is not whether to be free or not, but how to be free. Christians are called to witness and promote this generative freedom.
How, in the relationship between parents and children, can people be formed, in accordance with this mature concept of freedom, to set aside on one hand a portion of their power for love’s sake, and so to share their freedom with others?
Parents can no longer refer to a constituted authority or established values because everything is fluid and changing, but they can be witnesses, although not impeccable, of what they believe, and, consequently, attest that life does not lived by losing oneself in an infinity of possibilities, but by using one’s freedom for what is worthwhile and gives dignity to our lives. Our children have an enormous need for this example.
In order to educate their children, parents must first educate themselves. How can this self-education of adults be accomplished, when people discover that they too are culturally adolescents, with an immature conception of freedom as power?
That’s the big problem. The adolescent model has become dominant, so we have adults who consider themselves adolescents and behave as such. It’s clear that, in these terms, there is no solution. The only thing that can be said is that formation needs to be given in order to try to help these adults to understand that this eternal adolescence is like being trapped in a role and that they don’t have access to a full life.
Even in the absence of supportive legislation, some schools or public entities try to introduce the replacement of terms, for example “parent 1” and “parent 2” instead of “father” and “mother.” Does this change in the terminology, which aims to produce not only a cultural revolution but also means eliminating the differences and the roles, do harm?
We live in an age where the first things that are lost and unfastened are the meanings. Binding meanings to words is the only way to bind relationships and the sense of life to meanings in order to bear witness to them. This substitution—which is not only linguistic—proclaims the dissolution of our society. We don’t realize that saying “parent 1” and “parent 2” means erasing a difference, and curiously this is done by those who proclaim themselves the defenders of differences. People, with their value and the value of their difference, are reduced to numbers, and this is in blatant contradiction with the stated intentions. Children are denied the value of the difference of being a father and a mother. We must counter this culture by being fathers and mothers with maturity and with serenity, with the certainty that the natural model is much stronger and deeply rooted, and will continue to assert itself in spite of these new models of contemporary dissolution.
