For a good policy
text drafted by the Catholic liberalper consult the social week of Italian Catholics
presented by: Ferdinando Adornato, Roberto Formigoni, Giuseppe Pisanu
and signed by: Valentina Aprea, Claudio Azzolini, James Baiamonte, Raniero Benedict, Maurizio Bernardo, Isabella Bertolini, Laura Bianconi, Mariella Bocciardo, Maria Burani, Cesare Campa, Gabriella Carlucci, Giuseppe Cossiga , Simone Di Cagno Abbrescia, Ida D'Ippolito, Luigi Fedele, Giuseppe Franzoso, Raffaele Lease, Giuseppe Gargani, Enrico La Loggia, Luigi Lazzari, Maurizio Lupi, Salvatore Mazzaracchio, Patrizia Paoletti Tangheroni, Adriano Paroli, Egidio Ponzo, Roberto Rossi, Maurizio Sacconi, Angelo Santoro, Angelo Sanza, Gustavo Selva, Franco Stradella, Antonio Tajani, Roberto Tortoli, Guido Viceconte Hortensius Zecchino.
write these pages and offer to the public debate because we need to open a new era of engagement by Christians and liberals in Italian politics.
After the war, the Christian-liberal was the star, under the pressure of Alcide De Gasperi and Luigi Einaudi, an extraordinary work of building the First Republic. In the name of freedom, social justice and democracy. After fighting fascism, and in contrast to the continuing Communist totalitarianism, he wanted new institutions based on the value of the person and the family, the right to work and to private property, natural foundations of freedom.
We think that even today we need a new extraordinary commitment to reaffirm the context of Western values \u200b\u200bthat have brought decades of human development in peace and freedom. These values \u200b\u200breturned in fact being threatened by two major enemies: Islamic terrorists who want to abolish it, and the ethical relativism which would denature them. Two totally different kind of enemies but they can, each from their point of view, questioning the foundations of our civilization. Therefore it is necessary throughout the West and in Italy it would result in a moral awakening and an extraordinary political commitment of lay Catholics and eager to reassert the values \u200b\u200bthat underpin our society. Moreover, these same values, the two pillars of the West, Europe and America can strengthen their relationships to deal with, with the tools you need and democracy that have to strive for peace, global issues of 'illiberal capitalism and Islamic expansionism of Communist China.
So we want to call the liberal world and the Christian world to a new alliance that on the basis of right reason and in accordance with natural law fosters the life, liberty and dignity of the person to re Italian politics, its institutions, its laws.
II
The Italian company was able to overcome challenges with hard work but always with great vitality; Recently, however, gives signs, more and more obvious and serious unraveling, degradation, displacement and insecurity. It is therefore necessary to roll up our sleeves and fight. Faced with the negative effects of secularism, the lure of the almighty technoscience, the illusions of easy money, the spread of social corporatism, our first efforts will be aimed at protecting human life and the family which is his natural habitat, the freedom of education and, finally, an ecology of media to make them allies of the civil development of moral schools, families and society.
The fact is that we are losing in our society the virtues of honesty, openness, respect for self and others, responsibility and freedom of creativity, in a word it is losing the seed of all genuine freedom. Thus, in the language and intention of the policy will be losing the sense of common good. Conversely it is, in our opinion, the only foundation of every public act, without which the same decade the need for political activity.
Revive and spread the culture of the common good: this is therefore the first core of a plan for the future of Italian society. A program based on a clear ethical and an equally clear social project.
From the ethical standpoint we feel who have a positive conception of the secular state. For us it is sacred, inviolable self-determination of the private morality of each individual. It must be defended constantly by each of the ethical, ideological or religious it is. But it is also considered sacred charter of our universal values \u200b\u200bthat are largely the values \u200b\u200bof Christianity. By the time the Act, any Act, deemed to be overcome and bend him, as happened in the twentieth century, at the same moment, the freedom of man would begin to wane. The dawn of tyranny.
For us, the liberal principle of state secularism has nothing to do with that ideological secularism that seeks to expunge the religious dimension from public life, relegating it to mere private choice. If it is true that no State may take any liberal religious doctrine as the foundation of its jurisdiction, it is equally true that none of the liberal religious values \u200b\u200bcan not be excluded from the construction of its public ethics. Where the candidates withdraw from democracies to establish their social and political agreement on the centrality of the person and the primacy of natural law, they would negate the very basis of their freedom. That's because being secular, as we are in public life, does not in any way mean to be nihilistic or relativistic or unrelated to the absolute and universal values \u200b\u200bof Christianity.
Equally clear is our social project. We hear from time urgency of a new season of Italian modernization. In the last fifteen years, despite the emphasis from across the political spectrum to the need to liberalize the economy, the labor market and the administrative system, little has been able to do, in fact accumulating further delay. So the long Italian transition, instead of promoting a reconciliation between citizens and politics after the collapse of the nineties, is in danger of closing new poisons spreading anti-politics and, ultimately, undemocratic.
has come forward to say, therefore, the reasons for a new policy or, indeed, good policy, looking toward modernizing liberal and supportive of our country.
The current socio-economic dynamics, in addition to not provide the growth needed, spread unease in the country, uncertainty, insecurity. The old welfare state, inefficient and assistance programs, provides growth and lead to the wings does not help, even aggravates the social malaise. In fact, it feeds on the one hand statism and individualism on the other; puts the brakes of all kinds together and produce increasing economic all'intrapresa dissipation of resources devoted to solidarity.
should therefore be a new program for the nation that has centered on the individual and the family and that it rests on three pillars: 1) an efficient social market economy finally liberated from prejudice, strings and wires, and 2) the deployment of a effective solidarity with those who need and 3) the realization of the principle of subsidiarity according to which the smaller body, starting with the family, the right to choose and to act independently and to seek help from larger institutions and bodies, without being coerced .
on these three principles, you can switch the Welfare State welfare society creating a true social market economy as part of a harmonious reorganization of institutions and an effective reduction of the public sphere.
We think that this is the way to strengthen social cohesion and revitalizing civil society. This, in turn. involves the adoption of three priority 1) revitalization of education, research and training 2) the restoration of legality and safety 3) reduction of taxes in order to hold together the economic growth with social cohesion and civil. If you are not reinforcing the links between business and society, if not passed by the Welfare State to Welfare Society, it also threatens national unity.
III
We are not nationalists, we are convinced Europeans, but we live in the nation as a strong and prosperous communities and, not least as a source of historical dignity, feeling and heritage that we receive from our ancestors and we want to leave our children. At the same time feel
Europe as a meeting of peoples and nations, whose cultural and historical peculiarities, economic and social, combining the best in the sign of Christian values, they must do with the wealth of our continent. For this the new Union's institutional framework needs to be regulated by the principle of subsidiarity. So while we give in units of sovereignty to the European homeland, I feel bound to consolidate the unity of the Italian nation. Having been largely undermined by the ideological and political divisions of the Cold War, it is now exposed to the risk of arbitrary contrast between the emerging issue of the North and the historic Southern Issue.
These different problems to be solved together in a spirit of solidarity. The issue of the North is essentially in the right and pressing demand for a more modern and effective state able to respond to the extraordinary capacity for growth that have made Northern Italy one of the most prosperous regions of Europe.
the Southern question instead is the expression of a historic economic divide and social differences between the South and the North of the country, almost one hundred and forty years of national unification, is likely to expand today. Just consider that migration from South to North has returned to the levels of the sixties. The difference is that now no longer migrate laborers and unskilled workers, but graduates, depriving the South of his best human resources and its remaining hopes of development. Paradoxically, while continuing the oppression of the plot bureaucracy-clientele-crime, there is today an unprecedented historic opportunity to undo the knots most tenacious of the Southern question.
fact with the emergence of new Eastern powers like India and China, the Mediterranean regain a privileged position in the game of the great streams of development, offering to our south, natural Mediterranean platform, the ability to intercept increasing flows of energy resources, cargo, capital and persons crossing the "small sea of \u200b\u200bgreat civilizations." But the platform should be equipped and managed with appropriate economic policy decisions and foreign policy interests of the country.
In this perspective, the expected recovery in North and South can bind waiting for redemption, as never before, filling, including economic and social work of the Risorgimento. Moreover, as recently reaffirmed by the Governor of the Bank of Italy, North without the South did not start again.
other hand will never be any way out of fueling the conflict between North and South would be a false and sterile opposition, which would provide an alibi for those who want to leave things as they are making it impossible for any serious political and institutional reform.
We believe that the transition from Welfare State to Welfare Society and the Central institution for full implementation of subsidiarity, it is also the key to the solution of the matter is that of the south and north of their current threat of dualism.
This implies many things, and first two. 1) The process of renewal must be experienced in a spirit of national solidarity and to put an end to a sort based on active cooperation and solidarity between different regions of the country.
2) If the size of European economic and political center of Brussels is decisive for Italy, which is crucial to be chosen for each national context, even the Mediterranean. Italy must take the lead in the Barcelona process and new development initiatives euro-Mediterranean, claiming its geopolitical position, its historical experience and the peculiar vocation of its southern Mediterranean. Even now, the development is the new name for peace.
IV is now clear that the Italian political system has not yet managed to close the transition began in the nineties. This undermines the credibility of the ruling class by making it appear far from the reality of the country and unable to understand the questions from the company, select them, give their order and then decide. We recognize the great merits of the old political system, but we have no nostalgia for that which consociativismo his first inclination toward forms of popular democracy and then eventually crystallize into party politics. But we are absolutely convinced that nothing positive can come from the suggestions of anti-. Indeed, under the illusion that the people in front of the complex problems of contemporary society there may be shortcuts for solutions. But history has shown us that shortcuts are not and anti-politics produces bad policy soon, unskilled personnel, and general disappointment folding illiberal.
However, we must recognize that in the present situation of our country, the daughter of anti-politics is bad politics: namely, the lack of reliability and quality of the political class, the decline in the level of cultural representation, the growing alienation of the common good and general fall of morality that is felt rather than in civil society, among the political leaders, trade union, economic and cultural.
should, therefore, difficult to walk along the road of promoting real reform through democratic selection, a class manager with civil passion and competence, professionalism and technical policy. Freedom, quality and reliability are the three watchwords of good policy should be to Italy.
From this point of view we feel the need to also review the First Part of the Constitution, freeing it from some parts anachronistic, but does not alter the plant built by the founding fathers. Let us think for a Republic that is equipped with: 1) reporting the most advanced of state intervention and private initiative, so that it also commences the horizontal subsidiarity and finally recognize the space due to the creativity of the individual, family and bodies intermediate all fields of activity, 2) a strong institutional and political system but not pervasive, both the center and the periphery, 3) more powers of the executive decision-making at all levels, 4) a more decisive role in steering and monitoring of representative assemblies , 5) a joint federal spending decisions and tax collection; 6) of an electoral system that embodies the sovereignty and democracy of citizens in the selection of governments.
The bipolarity is for us an achievement to which modern Italy can not give up. But if we recognize that currently uses it rude and immature, perhaps by promoting unnatural alliances to win but not suited to govern. Instead, we believe that more can and should reach a mature bipolar son of alliances homogeneous, bound by common values \u200b\u200band ideals. This result can not be achieved only by changing the electoral law. Any election law, even the best, it can be circumvented if it is accompanied by bold political decisions, cultural and even ethical by the parties. Ally with anyone, even far from its values, but to win is not good policy and it is not real politics.
For our part, we work in our area because it comes just one big party of moderates Italians linked to the EPP, a party of freedom, reliability and quality, leading to completion the history of the Italian center-positive and formed groups and the popular and liberal voters also placed differently. By analogy, we welcome the birth of the Democratic Party hope that it will resolve the contradictions of values \u200b\u200band programs that characterize it so far, so that it becomes not only our loyal opponent, but also authoritative partner in the democratic process.
We bring these ideas and resolutions to social week of Italian Catholics in the hope that they can contribute to the commitment of our entire society for the common good.
and signed by: Valentina Aprea, Claudio Azzolini, James Baiamonte, Raniero Benedict, Maurizio Bernardo, Isabella Bertolini, Laura Bianconi, Mariella Bocciardo, Maria Burani, Cesare Campa, Gabriella Carlucci, Giuseppe Cossiga , Simone Di Cagno Abbrescia, Ida D'Ippolito, Luigi Fedele, Giuseppe Franzoso, Raffaele Lease, Giuseppe Gargani, Enrico La Loggia, Luigi Lazzari, Maurizio Lupi, Salvatore Mazzaracchio, Patrizia Paoletti Tangheroni, Adriano Paroli, Egidio Ponzo, Roberto Rossi, Maurizio Sacconi, Angelo Santoro, Angelo Sanza, Gustavo Selva, Franco Stradella, Antonio Tajani, Roberto Tortoli, Guido Viceconte Hortensius Zecchino.
write these pages and offer to the public debate because we need to open a new era of engagement by Christians and liberals in Italian politics.
After the war, the Christian-liberal was the star, under the pressure of Alcide De Gasperi and Luigi Einaudi, an extraordinary work of building the First Republic. In the name of freedom, social justice and democracy. After fighting fascism, and in contrast to the continuing Communist totalitarianism, he wanted new institutions based on the value of the person and the family, the right to work and to private property, natural foundations of freedom.
We think that even today we need a new extraordinary commitment to reaffirm the context of Western values \u200b\u200bthat have brought decades of human development in peace and freedom. These values \u200b\u200breturned in fact being threatened by two major enemies: Islamic terrorists who want to abolish it, and the ethical relativism which would denature them. Two totally different kind of enemies but they can, each from their point of view, questioning the foundations of our civilization. Therefore it is necessary throughout the West and in Italy it would result in a moral awakening and an extraordinary political commitment of lay Catholics and eager to reassert the values \u200b\u200bthat underpin our society. Moreover, these same values, the two pillars of the West, Europe and America can strengthen their relationships to deal with, with the tools you need and democracy that have to strive for peace, global issues of 'illiberal capitalism and Islamic expansionism of Communist China.
So we want to call the liberal world and the Christian world to a new alliance that on the basis of right reason and in accordance with natural law fosters the life, liberty and dignity of the person to re Italian politics, its institutions, its laws.
II
The Italian company was able to overcome challenges with hard work but always with great vitality; Recently, however, gives signs, more and more obvious and serious unraveling, degradation, displacement and insecurity. It is therefore necessary to roll up our sleeves and fight. Faced with the negative effects of secularism, the lure of the almighty technoscience, the illusions of easy money, the spread of social corporatism, our first efforts will be aimed at protecting human life and the family which is his natural habitat, the freedom of education and, finally, an ecology of media to make them allies of the civil development of moral schools, families and society.
The fact is that we are losing in our society the virtues of honesty, openness, respect for self and others, responsibility and freedom of creativity, in a word it is losing the seed of all genuine freedom. Thus, in the language and intention of the policy will be losing the sense of common good. Conversely it is, in our opinion, the only foundation of every public act, without which the same decade the need for political activity.
Revive and spread the culture of the common good: this is therefore the first core of a plan for the future of Italian society. A program based on a clear ethical and an equally clear social project.
From the ethical standpoint we feel who have a positive conception of the secular state. For us it is sacred, inviolable self-determination of the private morality of each individual. It must be defended constantly by each of the ethical, ideological or religious it is. But it is also considered sacred charter of our universal values \u200b\u200bthat are largely the values \u200b\u200bof Christianity. By the time the Act, any Act, deemed to be overcome and bend him, as happened in the twentieth century, at the same moment, the freedom of man would begin to wane. The dawn of tyranny.
For us, the liberal principle of state secularism has nothing to do with that ideological secularism that seeks to expunge the religious dimension from public life, relegating it to mere private choice. If it is true that no State may take any liberal religious doctrine as the foundation of its jurisdiction, it is equally true that none of the liberal religious values \u200b\u200bcan not be excluded from the construction of its public ethics. Where the candidates withdraw from democracies to establish their social and political agreement on the centrality of the person and the primacy of natural law, they would negate the very basis of their freedom. That's because being secular, as we are in public life, does not in any way mean to be nihilistic or relativistic or unrelated to the absolute and universal values \u200b\u200bof Christianity.
Equally clear is our social project. We hear from time urgency of a new season of Italian modernization. In the last fifteen years, despite the emphasis from across the political spectrum to the need to liberalize the economy, the labor market and the administrative system, little has been able to do, in fact accumulating further delay. So the long Italian transition, instead of promoting a reconciliation between citizens and politics after the collapse of the nineties, is in danger of closing new poisons spreading anti-politics and, ultimately, undemocratic.
has come forward to say, therefore, the reasons for a new policy or, indeed, good policy, looking toward modernizing liberal and supportive of our country.
The current socio-economic dynamics, in addition to not provide the growth needed, spread unease in the country, uncertainty, insecurity. The old welfare state, inefficient and assistance programs, provides growth and lead to the wings does not help, even aggravates the social malaise. In fact, it feeds on the one hand statism and individualism on the other; puts the brakes of all kinds together and produce increasing economic all'intrapresa dissipation of resources devoted to solidarity.
should therefore be a new program for the nation that has centered on the individual and the family and that it rests on three pillars: 1) an efficient social market economy finally liberated from prejudice, strings and wires, and 2) the deployment of a effective solidarity with those who need and 3) the realization of the principle of subsidiarity according to which the smaller body, starting with the family, the right to choose and to act independently and to seek help from larger institutions and bodies, without being coerced .
on these three principles, you can switch the Welfare State welfare society creating a true social market economy as part of a harmonious reorganization of institutions and an effective reduction of the public sphere.
We think that this is the way to strengthen social cohesion and revitalizing civil society. This, in turn. involves the adoption of three priority 1) revitalization of education, research and training 2) the restoration of legality and safety 3) reduction of taxes in order to hold together the economic growth with social cohesion and civil. If you are not reinforcing the links between business and society, if not passed by the Welfare State to Welfare Society, it also threatens national unity.
III
We are not nationalists, we are convinced Europeans, but we live in the nation as a strong and prosperous communities and, not least as a source of historical dignity, feeling and heritage that we receive from our ancestors and we want to leave our children. At the same time feel
Europe as a meeting of peoples and nations, whose cultural and historical peculiarities, economic and social, combining the best in the sign of Christian values, they must do with the wealth of our continent. For this the new Union's institutional framework needs to be regulated by the principle of subsidiarity. So while we give in units of sovereignty to the European homeland, I feel bound to consolidate the unity of the Italian nation. Having been largely undermined by the ideological and political divisions of the Cold War, it is now exposed to the risk of arbitrary contrast between the emerging issue of the North and the historic Southern Issue.
These different problems to be solved together in a spirit of solidarity. The issue of the North is essentially in the right and pressing demand for a more modern and effective state able to respond to the extraordinary capacity for growth that have made Northern Italy one of the most prosperous regions of Europe.
the Southern question instead is the expression of a historic economic divide and social differences between the South and the North of the country, almost one hundred and forty years of national unification, is likely to expand today. Just consider that migration from South to North has returned to the levels of the sixties. The difference is that now no longer migrate laborers and unskilled workers, but graduates, depriving the South of his best human resources and its remaining hopes of development. Paradoxically, while continuing the oppression of the plot bureaucracy-clientele-crime, there is today an unprecedented historic opportunity to undo the knots most tenacious of the Southern question.
fact with the emergence of new Eastern powers like India and China, the Mediterranean regain a privileged position in the game of the great streams of development, offering to our south, natural Mediterranean platform, the ability to intercept increasing flows of energy resources, cargo, capital and persons crossing the "small sea of \u200b\u200bgreat civilizations." But the platform should be equipped and managed with appropriate economic policy decisions and foreign policy interests of the country.
In this perspective, the expected recovery in North and South can bind waiting for redemption, as never before, filling, including economic and social work of the Risorgimento. Moreover, as recently reaffirmed by the Governor of the Bank of Italy, North without the South did not start again.
other hand will never be any way out of fueling the conflict between North and South would be a false and sterile opposition, which would provide an alibi for those who want to leave things as they are making it impossible for any serious political and institutional reform.
We believe that the transition from Welfare State to Welfare Society and the Central institution for full implementation of subsidiarity, it is also the key to the solution of the matter is that of the south and north of their current threat of dualism.
This implies many things, and first two. 1) The process of renewal must be experienced in a spirit of national solidarity and to put an end to a sort based on active cooperation and solidarity between different regions of the country.
2) If the size of European economic and political center of Brussels is decisive for Italy, which is crucial to be chosen for each national context, even the Mediterranean. Italy must take the lead in the Barcelona process and new development initiatives euro-Mediterranean, claiming its geopolitical position, its historical experience and the peculiar vocation of its southern Mediterranean. Even now, the development is the new name for peace.
IV is now clear that the Italian political system has not yet managed to close the transition began in the nineties. This undermines the credibility of the ruling class by making it appear far from the reality of the country and unable to understand the questions from the company, select them, give their order and then decide. We recognize the great merits of the old political system, but we have no nostalgia for that which consociativismo his first inclination toward forms of popular democracy and then eventually crystallize into party politics. But we are absolutely convinced that nothing positive can come from the suggestions of anti-. Indeed, under the illusion that the people in front of the complex problems of contemporary society there may be shortcuts for solutions. But history has shown us that shortcuts are not and anti-politics produces bad policy soon, unskilled personnel, and general disappointment folding illiberal.
However, we must recognize that in the present situation of our country, the daughter of anti-politics is bad politics: namely, the lack of reliability and quality of the political class, the decline in the level of cultural representation, the growing alienation of the common good and general fall of morality that is felt rather than in civil society, among the political leaders, trade union, economic and cultural.
should, therefore, difficult to walk along the road of promoting real reform through democratic selection, a class manager with civil passion and competence, professionalism and technical policy. Freedom, quality and reliability are the three watchwords of good policy should be to Italy.
From this point of view we feel the need to also review the First Part of the Constitution, freeing it from some parts anachronistic, but does not alter the plant built by the founding fathers. Let us think for a Republic that is equipped with: 1) reporting the most advanced of state intervention and private initiative, so that it also commences the horizontal subsidiarity and finally recognize the space due to the creativity of the individual, family and bodies intermediate all fields of activity, 2) a strong institutional and political system but not pervasive, both the center and the periphery, 3) more powers of the executive decision-making at all levels, 4) a more decisive role in steering and monitoring of representative assemblies , 5) a joint federal spending decisions and tax collection; 6) of an electoral system that embodies the sovereignty and democracy of citizens in the selection of governments.
The bipolarity is for us an achievement to which modern Italy can not give up. But if we recognize that currently uses it rude and immature, perhaps by promoting unnatural alliances to win but not suited to govern. Instead, we believe that more can and should reach a mature bipolar son of alliances homogeneous, bound by common values \u200b\u200band ideals. This result can not be achieved only by changing the electoral law. Any election law, even the best, it can be circumvented if it is accompanied by bold political decisions, cultural and even ethical by the parties. Ally with anyone, even far from its values, but to win is not good policy and it is not real politics.
For our part, we work in our area because it comes just one big party of moderates Italians linked to the EPP, a party of freedom, reliability and quality, leading to completion the history of the Italian center-positive and formed groups and the popular and liberal voters also placed differently. By analogy, we welcome the birth of the Democratic Party hope that it will resolve the contradictions of values \u200b\u200band programs that characterize it so far, so that it becomes not only our loyal opponent, but also authoritative partner in the democratic process.
We bring these ideas and resolutions to social week of Italian Catholics in the hope that they can contribute to the commitment of our entire society for the common good.
