Yesterday, I finished reading the new encyclical “Fratelli Tutti” by Pope Francis, and this will be my final reflection upon it.

Since the Fall of the USSR in 1991, the Scientific Socialism of Marx and Engels was defeated, and this left Enlightenment Liberalism to establish a new world order. Pope Francis now confronts the modern evils of Anglo-American Liberalism, as he condemns Individualism for dissolving the family, Consumerism for promoting a selfish waste culture, and Neoliberal capitalism for creating unstable market busts. The Supreme Pontiff also denounces the irreligion of Secular Humanism, noting that human rights without God leaves society only with a Nietzschean Will-To-Power, a cruel world of might makes right. Globalism is condemned for imposing Liberal cultural uniformity, while National Populism is rejected for basing itself in the subjective will rather than the objective good. Pope Francis gives us a solution in Christian Integral Humanism, where the dignity, rights, and duties of the human person is founded on the transcendent Image of God. Communitarianism–a society based on the family unit–is to be the golden mean between the isolated individual of the Right and the collectivist blob of the Left. The economy should be a socially minded market , where the poor are given preference and a family wage is provided. This is the Post-Liberal world Pope Francis envisions, where a family of nations can live in peace, justice, and harmony.

This new Encyclical letter is a call for a new way of living human relations: not only on paper, not only by words, but with our daily actions, in our private, public or professional life, overcoming social, cultural and religious divides, like Jesus explains in the Parable of the Good Samaritan or like St. Francis showed in his meeting with the Sultan al-Malik al-Kamal in 1219”.

‘Fratelli tutti’ is a new compass useful also at the political level. It indicates the path towards integral human development, spelling out the needed steps to transform our economic and political systems and to shape them with attitudes such as openness, dialogue, engagement, solidarity, fairness, care for our common home, justice, promotion of the common good, support for the poor and marginalized.

In the third last paragraph of Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis issues a combined appeal for peace, justice, and fraternity with Grand Imam Ahmad Al-Tayyeb (FT 285). An appeal carries weight as it evokes a sense of urgency. It is significant that this joint appeal rounds out the encyclical, maybe ‘saving the best to last’ in a true spirit of inter-faith ‘fraternity’!  The appeal is a powerful text to read aloud, maybe in a liturgical celebration, at a staff meeting or with students. The appeal is book-ended by reference to God; however, it also invokes the names of all those we relegate to the margins: in the name of: innocent life, the destitute, the marginalized, those most in need, the poor ….

To conclude, the document is a moving one precisely because it is not a policy platform or a doctrinal definition, instead it is a timely restatement—an aggiornamento, to use the language of the Second Vatican Council—of core Christian beliefs about the love of one’s neighbour in a time of profound upheaval and conflict. Determining what is real and what is true may be a painful and terrifying process, but the pontiff is right: it is the only way forward.

Let us pray to the Holy Trinity to use the Catholic Church on Earth to further this Social Kingship of Christ!