“The Lord gave me brothers”
Fraternity: Foundation of the Common Good
Francis establishes a fraternity: its name, the “friars minor”, evokes a bond of equality, service and mutual responsibility. The fraternity lives in the concrete world of relationship as a social value, in mutual generosity, empathy, and trust, with simplicity; it is according to this model that the Franciscan community is built. The life of evangelical fraternity, in the logic of poverty and minority, attracted people of all social conditions, making them 'in fact’' simple and attentive to all, and especially, to the most needy.
Fraternity: This keyword expresses better than any other the need for the common good. Vital and central to the Franciscan vision, ‘fraternity’ appears centuries later in the ideal and civil trinomial of the French revolution (liberté - égalité - fraternité). In that dramatic historical context, of the three ideals, fraternity was the least recognizable and the least enacted, even though lived fraternity provides the inspiration for freedom and equality in its capacity to evoke mutual respect within the community.
As Pope Francis has repeatedly pointed out, a society in which the sense of fraternity fades away is incapable of progress and is without a future. A more authentic fraternity must be recovered in social and economic life, whereby the lived expressions of gratuitousness, gift, solidarity, sharing, and relational exchanges can be found.
On many sides and with increasing frequency we perceive a demand for fraternity, manifested in a ‘craving for community' (e.g., the phenomenon of social networking) and in an urgency to establish new links among citizens and even among and within industrial entities. We must become ever more conscious and sensitive to the need for greater solidarity among workers, and for a personal, interior dialogue, as well as within our respective cultures and with other cultures. We must enter into an honest assessment of the effects of globalization on daily life and of the urgent need for addressing the tragedy of millions of human beings, fleeing their homes because of poverty, dictatorships and war. We must also cultivate a heightened sensitivity regarding new worldwide ecological realities, making us ever more aware of our common fragility, impotence and vulnerability.