There is need for a Yes campaign

Yes! We do need a Yes campaign! A campaign that acknowledges the true potentialities of man, that encourages his full and holistic fulfilment. A campaign that provides him with a vision that gives meaning to his life and strengthens his freedom and responsibility. A campaign that embraces man in his quest for truth, in his thirst for greater things and ideals to become fully human.

We need a Yes campaign that is a yes to man: a yes to human love, love being the essence of man, his nucleus – or better – his heart. Saying yes to love means saying no to hatred. Saying yes to love means saying no to division. Saying yes to love means saying no to pessimism. Saying yes to man means saying no to anything that doesn’t respect his dignity.

Yes, man can love, man is capable of loving. Man is because he loves. Man is in so much as he loves. Man is as much as he loves. Love is in this sense the event that makes man known to himself, that manifests the I to self-conscience. This is man: “Amo ergo sum”, to use Emmanuel Mounier’s principle: “I love, therefore I am”.

The human being is a mystery to himself and only his heart, in relation to love, can explore this mystery zone. Man, discovering himself not only as a biological entity (quid est) but also as a transcendental being with a meaning (ad quid est) – who is because loved and becomes in as much as he loves – undertakes the path of love and of transcendence to love the other and be with him, loving him not in his own way of loving but in the way of the other.

The other is loved for the fact that he is: he is a person, a “you” with whom I enter in intimacy to the extent that my I becomes his you.

Among humans, true love is, as Fëdor Dostoevskij puts it, “seeing the other as God sees him” or, in the words of Jesus of Nazareth, to “love the other as oneself”. “To love is to give one’s own being”, says philosopher Jacques Maritain.

This innate desire to become one with another person is expressed by the language of human sexuality. As sexual beings we enter in relationship with others in love – a person may, out of love, dedicate all his life for others; others may be moved by love to become husband and wife and thus create a community of love and life, hence becoming one body with the other not just physically but wholly as a person through self-giving reciprocal love.

Love is thus the heart and climax of man. Without love man cannot be. It’s in love that man discovers himself and gives meaning to his life as a self-donation to another. If this weren’t true, then human relationships wouldn’t be that important in a human being’s life. But also to survive we need the care and love of others. It might seem a simplistic and obvious affirmation and, yet, it touches the heart of who we really are. Without the love of another we cannot be; without loving we cannot become.

Yes, then, for man. Yes for man’s love. We need a campaign that trusts in man, that trusts in human love and human life. We need a campaign that provides a vision, that gives man and society hope for a better life and a better future.

A Yes campaign is false to its very nature if it falls short from giving trust to man. A credible Yes campaign can’t simply accept the failure of human love and propose to give a legal framework to it. A Yes campaign goes beyond; it goes to the root of the problem for only by going deep into the causes one might come with the best answers and solutions.

Only an in-depth elaboration provides the proposal for a long-term solution and an effective vision for the future. A Yes-to-man campaign reaches man, awakens his very nature, makes him aware of his potentialities and capacities. It doesn’t accommodate him by recognising his failure or suffocate him by not giving him the option to go beyond.

A Yes campaign is needed to help man believe in love, giving the possibility to the separated person to elaborate her suffering, go deep into the causes of failure in the relationship and, eventually discovering ways to live with this failure without considering herself as a failure.

We need a true Yes campaign that helps the separated person believe in her capacity to love and to continue to say yes to her love, to strengthen her freedom and the possibility to reaffirm the yes pronounced on the wedding day, even if this entails living separated, coping with an injustice. This does not mean the separated person must live as a desperate or should inflict pain upon herself. Nor it is a way of being insensible towards the pain and suffering of those who undergo separation. But it’s for this very reason that, in such painful circumstances, the separated person should be helped and supported to continue to believe in the capacity of human love as a commitment until death, to continue to love in new, albeit unfortunate and painful, circumstances also when one has to separate himself from the other.

A Yes campaign promotes in society a conscience and an environment for true and authentic human love and opposes that kind of mentality or legislation that advocates or simply acknowledges the failure of human love without proposing any true remedy.

What is then a Yes for divorce campaign?

Truly, it’s time to start a real Yes campaign that is a yes to man, a yes to human love, a yes to life.