Let's be honest: since age and illness nearly ended Cardinal Martini's public life, those of us at Fede e Luce have felt a little orphaned. Up there, in the upper reaches of the Roman Church, we had someone. Not to pull strings—thank God, and thanks also to Jean and Marie-Helene, who gave the Arche and Fede e Luce their character of poverty and humility, we don't need that. But our Cardinal was a source of hope for renewal in the Church. He helped us resist the temptation to grow too angry with hierarchies that often disappoint us. So now we search constantly for encouragement. And we found some.
It came through the Pope's invitation to five non-believing philosophers to join the gathering at Assisi alongside the witnesses of the great religions. Why did this invitation make such a stir? We might answer simply: because we didn't expect it. But that would be wrong. In fact, it was Benedetto XVI himself who called to his side in Rome the true architect of dialogue with non-believers: Monsignor Ravasi, friend, student, and collaborator of Cardinal Martini!
No, perhaps the answer lies elsewhere. It would have been normal—conventional—for atheists to stay away from a gathering of religious leaders. The gesture of Ratzinger and Ravasi is real encouragement for us precisely because it is an act of rebellion against what Jean Vanier calls "the tyranny of normalcy." How many times have Fede e Luce families felt the despotic weight of social convention—how hard it is to bring to Mass, onto the subway, or shopping a child who speaks too loud or makes unexpected movements! Normal people stare. And if you lack courage, they force you back into line, back home. Perhaps it is no accident that Jean speaks of "the tyranny of normalcy" in dialogue with one of the five philosophers invited to Assisi: Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian by birth, French by choice, psychoanalyst, semiologist, mother of David, a young man living with psychiatric disability.
She and Jean have published their letters together—Their Gaze Pierces Our Shadows: A Dialogue Between an Unbeliever and a Believer on Disability and Fear of the Different, published by Donzelli—not a correspondence of mutual compliments but one where, at a certain moment, facing Jean's enthusiasm for how he engages with difficulties in his relationships with friends at the Arche and the running of the foyer, Kristeva bursts out: "He must live outside the world to exult that way!"
A beautiful friendship blooms across these letters between two people so different in education and experience, yet both with lives built on listening to the other. To rebel against normalcy means to turn toward the individual, Kristeva writes. And in her powerful address at Assisi, the concept returns when the philosopher asks everyone—but especially the young, it seems to me—not to resign themselves to becoming "elements of language in accelerated hyperconnection."
Don't be alarmed; it's one of the few passages where Kristeva "speaks difficult"! But the reference is clear: social networks, and the development of personal communication devices more broadly. If you use them without ever asking about the person on the other end, about their "singularity," you are trapped in a social pattern of being perpetually connected to everyone yet ultimately with no one. And this applies, in a sense, to disability too.
In 2005, Kristeva was one of the driving forces behind France's National Assembly on Disability. "Since then we have made much progress," she says, "but two areas remain uncovered: individual support for wounded people and attention to their emotional lives." If these decades have taught us to care for the "category" of disabled people, the challenge ahead is to move from the plural to the singular.
And where will we find the money, you ask, especially now? It's true that one-to-one support costs more than social services. But that's precisely why the dialogue between Jean Vanier and Julia Kristeva matters. Yes, one-to-one would be better, but when it isn't possible, being one person with five can happen in many ways: by running from difference—from encounter with the unknown of our own vulnerability and fear of physical and psychological death—or by taking something from that difference for ourselves.
Kristeva describes, for example, how her son David, though "surrounded by me and his father with so much love, and also demands and activities that never cut him off from the world, lives his own solitude with a mature serenity that has become for me an example—the best way for me to meet my own capacity to be alone."
As a non-believer, Julia Kristeva came to Assisi on terrain most familiar to her "opponent": the question of human personhood. "Humanism is in crisis," the philosopher said, "and we must thank the Pope for gathering us in an attempt to refound it." Starting from what? From what we have forgotten, Kristeva answers.
That is: it's true the "human machine" has an enormously powerful engine—the drive to know—but it must also have a destination, a need to believe. Without the prospect of ultimate certainty, human striving becomes mere technique and "the automatization of our species."
For this drift, Kristeva uses the word secularization—the Pope likely appreciated that. Perhaps less so what she considers the essence of humanism: "a process of continuous refoundation; humanism develops necessarily through ruptures that are innovations. To know intimately the Greco-Judeo-Christian inheritance, to subject it to rigorous examination, to 'revalue' tradition—there is no other way to combat ignorance and censorship."
Vito Giannulo, 2011