The European Union and the spirit of family in the vision of Pope Francis

Attention to the values at the foundation of coexistence between the countries of the European Union plays an important role in the pontificate of Pope Francis who intervened on the subject several times inviting us to take up the mystique of the founding fathers, placing it in relation to the themes of solidarity and hope, using the metaphor of the family of peoples and the spirit of family “whereby each contributes freely to the common home in accordance with his or her own abilities and gifts”. The objective of this contribution is to try to highlight the distinctive elements that characterize Francis' vision of Europe through the textual analysis of a representative corpus of his speeches, in the belief that their relevance does not derive so much from Bergoglio's status understood as a subject of power (the Pope), but rather from the traits that make this pontiff a completely original figure of leader, a charismatic subject of the social space able to significantly affect the public debate and the media agenda. To reconstruct the characterizing traits of the perspective of an authoritative leader such as the Pope on the current situation in Europe and on future challenges, it was therefore chosen to use a semiotic methodology focused on the analysis of the speech intended as a narrative, as a construct whose functioning responds to a logic of signification and whose effectiveness is manifested in the ability to produce specific effects of meaning.