own bodies turns, often subtly, into thinking that we enjoy absolute power over creation. Learning to
accept our body, to care for it and to respect its fullest meaning, is an essential element of any genuine
human ecology. Also, valuing one’s own body in its femininity or masculinity is necessary if I am
going to be able to recognize myself in an encounter with someone who is different. In this way we
can joyfully accept the specific gifts of another man or woman, the work ofGod the Creator, and find
mutual enrichment. It is not a healthy attitude which would seek “to cancel out sexual difference
because it no longer knows how to confront it”.
121
IV.
THEPRINCIPLEOFTHECOMMONGOOD
156. Human ecology is inseparable from the notion of the common good, a central and unifying
principle of social ethics. The common good is “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow
social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own
fulfilment”.
122
157. Underlying the principle of the common good is respect for the human person as such, endowed
with basic and inalienable rights ordered to his or her integral development. It has also to do with the
overall welfare of society and the development of a variety of intermediate groups, applying the
principle of subsidiarity. Outstanding among those groups is the family, as the basic cell of society.
Finally, the common good calls for social peace, the stability and security provided by a certain order
which cannot be achieved without particular concern for distributive justice; whenever this is violated,
violence always ensues. Society as a whole, and the state in particular, are obliged to defend and
promote the common good.
158. In the present condition of global society, where injustices abound and growing numbers of
people are deprived of basic human rights and considered expendable, the principle of the common
good immediately becomes, logically and inevitably, a summons to solidarity and a preferential option
for the poorest of our brothers and sisters. This option entails recognizing the implications of the
universal destination of the world’s goods, but, as I mentioned in the Apostolic Exhortation
Evangelii
121
Catechesis
(15April 2015):
L’OsservatoreRomano
, 16April 2015, p. 8.
122
SECONDVATICAN ECUMENICALCOUNCIL, Pastoral Constitution on the Church in theModernWorld
Gaudium
et Spes
, 26.
