Online Symposium: Fitzgibbon on Solidarity, Love, and Friendship

The latest contribution to the MOJ Online Symposium on the jurisprudential legacy of Pope John Paul II comes from Boston College's Scott Fitzgibbon.  Click here for "A Wojtylan Insight into Solidarity, Love, and Friendship:  Shared Consciousness and the Culture of Life."  Here is the introduction:

One of Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals  identifies the virtue of solidarity.  A document from the recent Synod for Europe refers to a “crisis of solidarity.”  In the year 2000, the Holy Father stated that  ‘the century now beginning ought to be the century of solidarity.”

To refer to the virtue of solidarity is to refer to the goods of close affiliations:  friendships, households, marriages, and the bonds among citizens, partners,  members of the staffs of hospitals, and the faculties of universities.   To warn of a crisis of solidarity is to observe that there has been, in the Twentieth Century, a crisis of affiliation; a crisis of philia.  It has been as though man were losing his capacity  to be a political  animal (as Aristotle called him); and "not only a political but also a house-holding animal" (as Aristotle also called him} and a koinonikon being:  a partnership-forming creature.  It has been, has it not, as though man were losing his capacity to be a culture-forming, culture-belonging animal  -- a creature which forms and nourishes a life-sustaining culture, rather than a culture of death.   To refer hopefully to a forthcoming century of solidarity is to invite us to a deeper understanding of the structures of close affiliation.

To invite us to a deeper understanding of affiliation is to invite us to think anew about the philosophy of the person and his communities.  To think anew about just those things seemed to be the life work of Professor Karol Wojtyla prior to his election as Pope John Paul II; and some of his writings (scholarly writings; also plays and poems)  develop impressive insights on those subjects.  This Article discerns one major line of development suggested by his writings about the mind and identifies its implications, occasionally made explicit in Wojtylan writings, for an enriched understanding of human solidarities and how they can go wrong.

Rick