For the common good

In this difficult time I found myself praying more.
A year after the beginning of the pandemic, with all the complexities we are experiencing, from the economic crisis to the transformations of political life in our country and in the whole world, I feel that prayer and contemplation still push me to broaden my gaze and embrace new responsibilities. They push me to put the experience of our Arsenals at the service of the whole society as a concrete model, to help give back to society, politics, the economy, research the vision of a community, a nation, a world that starts from God. Making his impulse of love that wants to reach and save everyone our own means putting the person at the center, respect for life, respect for creation, means having new priorities, means going in the direction of a peace that is the fruit of works of justice. It means restarting the community dimension of society, the participation of all in social life in view not only of their own well-being, but of the common good. In the past months I have summarized this change with five words: transparency, gratuitousness, availability, passion, fraternity.

This new great moment of hope is marked for me by four other words:
Tomorrow, wisdom, justice, beauty.
The beauty that encourages and raises the gaze and the soul.
Justice that enters into all customs and laws of a people.
Wisdom as a warning.

Tomorrow, the new economy that must find us prepared, that helps us to enter into a far-sightedness, to break the old pattern that sees the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer.
Four words to announce that a new world is possible. In our Arsenals, as in the laboratory, we have experienced all this. We live the community dimension of the Gospel and it is concrete. We are already experiencing this new economy and we feel that it is a model that can be reproduced everywhere. It is an experience that encourages us and makes us say that it is possible to start afresh from this vision of values ​​and from a method with which to translate them into life. It is possible to work as a team, to pass from I to us, to put oneself at service with one's own interiority and with one's skills to enter into a common project and create fraternity: brothers. All.

As a fraternity, as small communities scattered almost everywhere, let us put ourselves at the service of this change.
In our small way we make hope visible with our works, with our credibility, with the humility of those who feel a servant and we look for responsible people in every field with whom to share these thoughts, with whom to dialogue, with whom to encourage each other, with which to gather once again those who believe in good, those who are willing to say "no" so that the "yes" is credible, to correct their attitude in view of a greater good.

Ernesto Olivero
Editorial
NP March 2021