Does 2021 mark a step towards greater human brotherhood?
This questioning echoes today, on the front page of the newspaper La Croix, entitled: "Our hymn to love" and to the "multiple dimensions of this feeling so powerful that it allows everyone to get out of themselves". With caution, the time has come to lift health restrictions, relational life is gradually reinvesting common spaces. The street, the terraces ... are once again becoming paths and squares of conviviality.
As a new horizon of living together emerges, how can we benefit from the lessons of fraternal commitment experienced in times of crisis? In our living spaces but also on the scale of our country or the world, examples of greater human fraternity can inspire us. I am thinking of the notions of "common" and "common good".
The flourishing of the term "commons" in economics, politics and many other fields is not unrelated to this inspiration in the context of crises. The commons are resources made available to all as part of sustainable management within a community - natural resources (a forest, a river, a garden, etc.), material (e.g. tools, etc.) or immaterial (e.g. software). In connection with a reflection on the Anthropocene, the economist and Jesuit priest Gaël Giraud defended, at the Centre Sèvres in Paris, at the end of 2020, a doctoral thesis in theology on the politics of the commons.
Regarding the commons, we can be pleased to see the proposal that vaccines can be made available, equally, to all the inhabitants of the world, "in the public domain with financial compensation for the laboratories", according to the appeal launched a few weeks ago by more than 155 personalities from around the world - Nobel Peace Prize or Medicine Prize winners, former heads of state or government.
However, human fraternity is being thwarted everywhere, on an international scale, as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has shown again in recent weeks. And yet... while the conflict rages, hospitals like in Haifa are places of tolerance and peaceful coexistence: Israelis and Palestinians, "we live like a family" testifies a nurse. Under the aegis of "we stand together", initiatives are emerging; on May 20, a human chain, Arabs and Jews for peace was organized around the ramparts of Jerusalem.
International resolutions also continue to awaken hope for living together in peace and as brothers. At the initiative of Khaled Ben Tounès, Sheikh of the Al-Alawiyya Sufi brotherhood, every May 16th is the International Day of Living Together in Peace by a decision unanimously voted by the UN General Assembly on December 8, 2017. And in line with the publication, in 2019, of the Document on Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together, co-signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyeb, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed February 4th the International Day of Human Fraternity. As Secretary-General António Guterres stated:
“In these trying times, we need this spirit more than ever.”
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