A space for reflection is always a necessity in a world that is changing, perhaps too rapidly. However, the conference held in Madrid demonstrated the difficulty of an honest dialogue on fundamental issues such as those discussed at the conference.
Today we are witnessing a sort of competition for power, in which ideologies of one or the other sign fight for the space of power and in which, at the same time, the consequences of a loss of the sense of the common good in all spheres of human life are evident.
There is no doubt that the foundations of any social system: the family and education, are going through difficult times in our society.
On the one hand, the lack of institutional support to the family was bluntly denounced by the journalist Ana Iris SimónHe was a very clear statement when he said that there is a part of society that talks about the family but does not work so that families can exist. There is nothing so that "we young people can build a biography that allows us to have a family"..
Education, on the other hand, has gone from being a key element of social development to a mere "sweet tool" for politicians, manifested in continuous changes in legislation that lead, on the one hand, to a practical indifference of teachers to these legislations and, on the other hand, to the creation of a fictitious war between public, private and subsidized educational options that ends in the reduction of rights and freedoms for families.
From the lack of solidity of this social base, we can glean those problems that were highlighted during the round tables that took place at the recent meeting of the Paul VI Foundation.
The lack of employment and of training adequacy to the labor market, the political polarization that is locked in resolving the life of the parties and not of the citizens; or the consideration of democracy as a kind of supreme religion that we see, all too often, subjected to the vagaries of the laws of propaganda and not to the search for the common good, were some of the realities that, in one way or another, were referring, throughout these reflections, to the absence of a common space of non-negotiable principles such as the dignity of the human being or the fundamental rights that are the foundation of any society.
As a result, the future is, to say the least, uncertain. Perhaps for this reason, the table dedicated to the expectations of today's youth was one of the most critical and accurate in the analysis of this generation "anxious for principles and values" that attaches great value to the securities they have not been able to have: a home, family stability, a job....
The coming generation is the generation that "comes back" from the myth of life without ties and, as Diego Garrocho pointed out, postmodernity has gone from being relativistic to being fundamentalist.
A polarization of the positions that can contribute little in the public space and that has the danger of distancing its defenders from the enrichment and the need for dialogue, based on the basic principles of human dignity.
For this reason, and although it went more unnoticed than other issues, the denunciation by the president of the Spanish Episcopal Conference of the silencing of the Catholic proposal by the ".thriving ideologies of the moment".The "in particular on four points: the Catholic vision of the human being, sexual morality, the identity and mission of women in society and the defense of the family formed by marriage between a man and a woman" leads, in fact, to a serious error and a serious loss in the plurality and openness of social dialogue and in the construction of a common future.
In this inscrutable future, in which possible and impossible scenarios seem to go hand in hand, the voice of Catholics has the challenge, in the words of Jesús Avezuela, Director General of the Paul VI Foundation, to "to provide answers and offer solutions, generating an enabling environment that will help us build a current program, while being respectful of everyone's choices".
