Duty Before Dialogue?

Giuseppe Mazzini and Unitatis Redintegratio in the Moral Calling for Christian Unity

The ecumenical movement is most often described in the language of hope, friendship, and dialogue. These are important themes; however, there is another word that has almost disappeared from our ecumenical vocabulary - duty.

We speak readily of our rights as Christians; for example, our freedom of conscience, our entitlement to worship according to our traditions, the respect owed to our particular inheritance. What we speak less often about is our obligations to one another. One of the most arresting insights on this theme is from the nineteenth-century Italian thinker Giuseppe Mazzini.  He argues that communities flourish only when people understand duties to be at least as important as rights - a conviction that turns out to also illuminate the vision of Christian unity articulated in Unitatis Redintegratio - the Second Vatican Council's Decree on Ecumenism.   Mazzini focuses on duties in a way that is unexpected and, I suggest, genuinely interesting.

My own interest in Mazzini began through doctoral research into what I call a Mazzinian-inspired moral form of patriotism - an attempt to develop a philosophically serious account of why love of one's own country (patriotism), properly understood, is not in tension with wider moral concern but can become its foundation.

Mazzini's ethical vision was central to that project, and the more I worked with his ideas, the more I found them reaching beyond their original political context of liberal nationalism into questions about the nature of community, obligation, and human flourishing that have remained with me. In this article, and with the benefit of my experience as County Ecumenical Officer, I want to explore these questions in the case of ecumenism.

At first glance, Mazzini is an improbable guide for ecumenical reflection. He is remembered as a nineteenth-century patriot, revolutionary, and principal architect of Italian unification. His hostility to the institutional Church was fierce; for example, he regarded the papacy as a corrupting political power that had suppressed the moral development of the Italian people and substituted hierarchical authority for genuine civic conscience.

Mazzini believed that God is the moral governor of the universe and that humanity has a divine purpose; that is, to progress morally and spiritually through the fulfilment of duty, liberty and fraternity. He rejected both atheism and purely individualistic religion, arguing instead that faith should inspire active service to others and to one’s nation as part of God’s providential plan for the unity and advancement of humankind. For Mazzini, religion and politics were inseparable because both were ultimately concerned with carrying out God’s will in history. His Christianity was intensely ethical and activist, seeing devotion to God as inseparable from working for the moral progress and unity of humankind.

​Clearly, if the question were one of ecclesial politics, Mazzini would be the last person to consult. But the question here is a moral one, and on moral questions his thinking (at least for me) has a wonderful depth and reach.

Giuseppe Mazzini was born in Genoa in 1805 and died in 1872. A lawyer by training, he became the most influential intellectual voice of the Risorgimento - the movement for Italian unification. He spent much of his life in exile, orchestrating revolutionary movements from London and elsewhere. He founded the Young Italy movement and later Young Europe (a precursor many say for the EU). He was driven by the conviction that free peoples, each contributing their particular genius to the common life of humanity, would produce a more just and peaceful world than any arrangement of empires or dynastic states. 

His influence stretched far beyond Italy: it shaped nationalist movements across Europe, South America, and the Middle East, and his insistence on the moral priority of duty over mere rights influenced, among others, Mahatma Gandhi. He was, in essence, a secular prophet as his language is saturated with the religious vocabulary of God, mission, vocation, and consecration, even though he stood in sharp opposition to the institutional Church of his day. For me, it is precisely this combination - belief in God and moral seriousness without ecclesial loyalty - that makes him so interesting a thinker for ecumenical reflection.

At the heart of his 1858 book The Duties of Man is a challenge to the liberal culture of his time, which he believed had become dangerously fixated on entitlements at the expense of the obligations that alone make those entitlements meaningful. Essentially, his argument is that: "rights cannot exist except as a consequence of duties fulfilled, and one must begin with the latter to arrive at the former."

This is not a dismissal of rights. Mazzini was a passionate defender of human dignity, as his brief tenure as Triumvir in the ill-fated 3-month long Roman Republic in 1849 demonstrated. His point is about moral sequencing and motivational depth. A culture that leads with rights tends, he believed, toward a harmful individualism in which each person or group asserts its entitlements against every other, producing division rather than solidarity. Duty, by contrast, orients the agent outward, asking not what I am owed, but what I owe, and not what the community must give me, but what I must give to it.

For Mazzini, this duty-shaped life is inseparable from belonging to particular communities. Individuals do not become fully human by pursuing their interests in isolation. They become fully human by recognising that they belong to something larger than themselves, and by embracing the obligations that arise from that belonging. He presents a hierarchy of obligations beginning with duty to God, followed by duties to oneself, family, country, and ultimately humanity. For Mazzini, each level builds upon the last, so that love of nation (for example) is not an end in itself but part of a broader divine mission to promote justice, moral progress, and the flourishment of the human family.

Crucially, however, he rejects any form of community loyalty that closes in on itself. Attachment to one's own particular community, whether it be nation, family, or parish, is not the end point but the moral school; that is, the place where we learn, through concrete obligation and local solidarity, to extend our concern beyond ourselves toward the good of humanity as a whole. The end, he writes, is humanity; the pivot, the point of support, is the particular community to which we belong. Here love of the local (rightly ordered) is a stepping stone to universal concern.

This has a direct bearing on ecclesial identity, and it is where Mazzini's moral vision intersects most productively with the ecumenical calling. The Baptist committed to Christian unity does not become less Baptist by entering genuine ecumenical engagement. Nor does the Anglican become less Anglican, or the Methodist less Methodist, or the Catholic less Catholic. What changes is not the particularity of the commitment but its direction of travel. 

In fact, in my experience, secure belonging to a tradition that is faithfully inhabited enables generous encounter. On the other hand, what masquerades as ecumenical openness, while actually dissolving particular identity, is not unity but evasion. Both Mazzini and Unitatis Redintegratio are alert to this danger. The latter decree is unambiguous on this point by claiming that a certain diversity of customs and observances in the Church: "only adds to her splendour and is of great help in carrying out her mission." (s.16)  The particulars of a tradition are not obstacles to overcome but gifts to be brought into communion.

Unitatis Redintegratio, crucially, does not present ecumenism as an optional task for specialists. It presents the restoration of unity as a matter that: "concerns the whole Church, faithful and shepherds alike" (s.5) and it frames that concern in the language of obligation, not merely aspiration. For example, before speaking of what other traditions offer or lack, the decree turns inward, directing its primary charge at self-examination: the "primary duty is to make a careful and honest appraisal of whatever needs to be done or renewed in the Catholic household itself" (s.4).

This is duty-first reasoning in a theological sense. And the decree presses the point further elsewhere: "there can be no ecumenism worthy of the name without a change of heart" (s.7).  In doing so it calls for genuine self-denial, humility, and service of others. The language is not that of invitation but of calling. Unity is not an attractive option for only those inclined, it is a demand that arises from the nature of Christian identity itself.

This rejection of passivity is one of the deepest meeting points between Mazzini and Unitatis Redintegratio. Mazzini had no patience with what he regarded as moral indifference; namely, the refusal to engage, contribute, and sacrifice. The person who stands apart from the common endeavour, enjoying the benefits of community while evading its obligations, had failed the most basic test of seriousness. Unitatis Redintegratio has the ecclesial equivalent of this and says with directness: "the divisions among Christians prevent the Church from attaining the fullness of catholicity proper to her" (s.4). Indifference to that failure is not a neutral stance.

The decree does not merely commend ecumenical work but charges the bishops to have it "vigorously stimulated by them and guided with prudence"(s.4). That charge carries weight and suggests something closer to urgency than encouragement.  It is a recognition that the default human tendency, in churches as in political communities, is to settle into comfortable passivity when action is required. Mazzini held a similar view.  He was scathing about the kind of cosmopolitanism that spoke eloquently of humanity while remaining detached from any lived particular loyalty. Grand aspirations without rooted obligation, he believed, produced rhetoric rather than moral action. 

Both the decree and Mazzini, then, are equally alert to the danger of abstract idealism; that is, the mistake of gesturing toward great purposes without accepting the concrete obligations those purposes demand.

I believe there is an ecumenical equivalent to this: a Christianity that speaks warmly of unity at the level of sentiment while remaining entirely undisturbed at the level of practice. Again Unitatis Redintegratio understands this by insisting that ecumenical concern extends to every member of the faithful: "according to his talent, whether it be exercised in his daily Christian life or in his theological and historical research"  ( s.5).  This is a deliberate counter to that temptation. Unity is not a project for ecumenical officers and theological commissions alone, but belongs to every Christian as a central feature of their discipleship.

Surely this is right, we must face the ecumenical challenge with honesty. I say this because it is tempting to approach the work of unity by asking what other traditions or confessions should offer, or even what concessions might reasonably be required by them, before meaningful engagement can begin. For me, the more searching and honest question is different: when it comes to unity what does my own discipleship require of me? 

Well, in answer, some of the richest ecumenical conversations I have been part of have not happened when differences were minimised, but when they were acknowledged honestly and approached with genuine mutual respect. Unity built on pretence is fragile.  However, unity pursued through truthfulness and humility may be more demanding but it is definitely more enduring, and (of course) more honest about what we are actually asking of each other.

I recognise that the language of duty may sound (at least to some) as unfashionable in an age seemingly preoccupied with autonomy, individualism, and personal choice. Nevertheless, I still believe that there is something liberating in recognising that we are called, not merely to protect our own interests, but to contribute to the common good that exceeds any one of us.

Mazzini believed that human flourishing required individuals willing to accept obligations beyond themselves. Unitatis Redintegratio, in its own theological language, makes a comparable claim about the Church. Christian unity is not someone else's task, it is for all the disciples of Christ, and the refusal of indifference is where it begins.

Perhaps the question facing the people of God today, is not whether we value unity, but whether we are prepared to regard its pursuit as one of the duties that discipleship itself demands. Mazzini, of all people, suggests we should.

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Giuseppe Mazzini: A Brief Note

Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872) was an Italian political thinker who spent long periods in exile, principally in London, where he wrote extensively. His influence on nineteenth-century political thought was considerable, extending to figures including Mahatma Gandhi and Woodrow Wilson who acknowledged Mazzini's insistence on duty as a formative influence on their own moral thinking - indeed his nickname was the 'Apostle of Duty.'

His principal work bearing on the theme of this article is The Duties of Man (1858), in which he argues that a society built on rights alone is morally insufficient, and that lasting social renewal requires citizens to embrace obligations to one another and to the common good. Although he was hostile to the institutional Church as a political power, his moral framework, with its emphasis on God, duty, mission, vocation, and the ordering of particular loyalties toward universal human flourishing, contains resources that prove surprisingly inspiring for ecumenical reflection.

References and links:

• Mazzini, G. (1858) The Duties of Man [1862 published version]
• Decree on Ecumenism - Unitatis Redintegratio
• Watson, I (2023). A Mazzinian Inspired Moral Form of Partiality: MfP Patriotism. Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis The Open University.

Concept and article by Dr. Ian Watson, whose lay views are his alone. He serves as County Ecumenical Officer with responsibilities to promote, support, and provide guidance on Christian Unity throughout Norfolk and Waveney. The purpose of Ian's regular reflections is to build on the standard arguments for Church unity in order to generate fresh intellectual and pastoral energy by offering conceptual frameworks that re-describe unity in ways that feel both rigorous and surprising.

Image created with the help of OpenAI.
 

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