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This time Mattarella chooses a close-up on the Republic, the “watershed of our history” with its values of freedom and democracy – “stronger than any obstacle” – and chooses to address, in particular, young people who are poorly described, judged as “distrustful, detached, angry” but it is on them that he bets, asking them not to give up and to know how to renew the republican roots. A necessary renewal, because there is a time of great changes ahead that requires firm values and a decisive step, starting from the great international crises to those affecting the economy or technology. Times that can shake the foundations of what we have built in 80 years.
The wait for peace with the words of Leo XIV
Fifteen minutes of dialogue with the Italians in which he begins by talking about a “not easy” year and “our expectations aimed at peace”. He remembers the bombings in Ukrainian cities, the destruction of power plants that leave children and elderly people freezing and the devastation of Gaza where “newborns freeze to death in the cold”. Here, in the face of this “the desire for peace is increasingly higher and the refusal of those who deny it because they feel stronger becomes incomprehensible and repugnant”.
He quotes Pope Leo and reflecting on his words explains that peace is nothing more than “a way of thinking, of living together with others respecting them without trying to impose one’s own interests, one’s own dominion”. The Pontiff underlines the exhortation to “disarm words”.
The Republic «is us»
An invitation that he accepts but first, he says, “the fatalistic sense of impotence that risks oppressing us must be removed.” In this sense, the history of our Republic acquires value. These 80 years, explains Mattarella, tell us that the principles that inspired it must still be defended with an urgency and necessity dictated above all by the contemporary era which challenges democratic principles. “We are faced with old and new problems increased by the uncertainty of the international context we are experiencing” and we are entering “a time in which everything becomes global and interdependent, from the economy to the environment, to the climate to technological revolutions, to the risks of pandemics, to networks of fundamentalist terrorism”.
And then there are the “old and new” poverty “which must be urgently combated”, as well as the inequalities, injustices and behaviors such as corruption, fiscal infidelity, environmental crimes, “cracks that risk compromising the very social cohesion that we consider a precious asset that we have at our disposal”. Here we all have to work and no one can “feel exempt because we are the Republic, each of us”.
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