Christmas in the Brotherhood, Christmas in your home, Christmas in your soul.Strolling through the cityI have never been through the Channel Tunnel, but I can imagine what it must be like to enter it with a specific landscape, climate, language and culture, and then find yourself in a different environment. A different language and customs, which requires adapting one's behavior to these new circumstances, but without losing one's own identity.
We have gone through the pandemic tunnel in the same way. We enter it from a known world and when we come out - if we are coming out at all - we find ourselves in a quite different social environment.
The pandemic has not been the cause of these changes, but it has accelerated trends that were already manifesting themselves and are trying to shape a new social model. It is now necessary to verify whether this proposed society is livable, is human, whether it is adapted to the reality of man.
The most immediate thing is to identify what these changes are. If they refer only to superficial issues or affect our values, our worldview and our relationship with God. If so, in this case, we would have to resort to Christian anthropology to reconstruct the truth about man, and the brotherhoods must be involved in this task.
The keys to such analysis are not in sociology - "everyone thinks it," "everyone does it" - because sociology is not a normative science.
The values that sustain the activity of people are not established by majority or consensus, nor from dialectical conflict, nor from cyberactivism, but by their adequacy to the truth, which man can reach to know only with the help of reason, driven, in his case, by faith. Of course, this task requires an intellectual effort that may discourage some.
In a risky comparison, we could establish a certain parallelism between this situation and the Spain of the Liberal Triennium (1820-1823) promoted by Riego against the absolutist immobilism of Ferdinand VII. It should be noted that the liberals were a minority and were among the most enlightened of the emerging middle class.
Simplifying a period as intense as it was complex in the history of Spain, we will say that the liberal adventure ended early, barely three years, and badly.
Riego was hanged and Ferdinand VII was received in Madrid amidst the enthusiasm of the people to the shouts of "Long live the chains!". Thus proclaiming their fear of living in freedom, of having to consider and solve the problems of coexistence and political organization.
It seems that this fear of freedom still lingers in some Christian and fraternal environments. Even now there are those who prefer to embrace absolutist approaches, taking refuge in a misunderstood tradition. They renounce the act proper to freedom, which is to love the good, and their capacity to orient themselves with their actions towards God, who is Good and Truth.
It is the study of action that reveals the person. The reality of the person is constructed from the person himself, uniting the subjectivity of experience with the objectivity of revealed truth.
Just the opposite of social engineering, which tries to create new values - rather counter-values - to which the person has to adapt his actions or behavior, thus changing the reality of man.
This is now the task of the brotherhoods: to elaborate a model of analysis of reality, with a rigorous doctrinal foundation. An analysis that truly serves their mission towards their brothers and sisters and society: to assume their own truth as a vocation.
D. in Business Administration. Director of the Instituto de Investigación Aplicada a la Pyme. Eldest Brother (2017-2020) of the Brotherhood of the Soledad de San Lorenzo, in Seville. He has published several books, monographs and articles on brotherhoods.
