15-07-2009

THE POPE KNOWS WHERE WE HAVE TO GO - on the magazine "Tempi" Mgnr Crepaldi introduces into Caritas in Veritate

THE POPE KNOWS WHERE WE HAVE TO GO

Published in the tomorrow´s issue (16 July) of the weekly magazine ´Tempi´ will be an article by Rt. Rev. Giampaolo Crepaldi, President of our Observatory´, on Caritas in Veritate and entitled: “The Pope Knows where we have to go”. Bishop Crepaldi´s article is most germane since it delves into the heart of the encyclical itself, focusing especially on the gaze with which it proposes we look upon reality. Offered to our associates is a foretaste of the article, translated in English as well.

By Mgnr Giampaolo Crepaldi

Caritas in veritate is destined to speak to us for a long time to come, and we should speak about it for just as long. Approximately twenty years after the Centesimus annus of John Paul II the Church once again sets its sights on the heart of the problem regarding the construction of the world and transforms the social issue as such into nothing less than the issue of “integral human development in charity and truth”. Thus is the Social Doctrine of the Church situated at the point where the Church and the world encounter one another, where they meet. Paragraph 34 of the encyclical states quite clearly that in the wake of sin the world is unable to construct itself on its own. As John Paul II said, the Church’s social doctrine is an instrument of salvation because it is the announcement of Christ in temporal realities. Caritas in veritate reiterates the Christian “claim”: apart from me you can do nothing.  

Without the force of charity and the light of Christian truths man is not able to hold himself together, loses pieces of himself, contradicts himself, comes apart at the seams and is ‘decomposed’. The Christian ‘claim’ is that only Jesus Christ fully reveals man to man and enables him to hold himself together as a single whole. A reading of Caritas in veritate from this point of view would be most interesting. Leftwing and rightwing, conservativism and progressivism, capitalism and anti-capitalism, nature and culture. . .these and other separations or reductions are completely overlooked; reality is more than they are, and reality is given by charity and truth. Just think about the most frequent expressions of ideological disjunction: the separation of the themes of life and the family from those of social justice and peace. Readily evident is separation, for example, in ecological reductionism or in the development of poor peoples linked with abortion or forced reproductive planning. The encyclical says that all this is to be “kept together. Then again, think about the frequent interpretation of development only in terms of quantity in comparison with other causes – qualitative – of both underdevelopment and super-development. The ideology of technology is the new absolutism (see chapter IV) because it separates: if all the problems of the human person are reduced to psychological problems able to be solved by calling on “expert” technicians, we end up no longer knowing what we mean by development.  Man is the unity of body and soul. Caritas in veritate restores to the spirit and to life their rightful place in the construction of the earthly city.

The Christian ‘claim’ is to succeed in holding all this together. But likewise in responding to a need or, even better, to an expectation. This second aspect of the Christian ‘claim’ is present as well in Caritas in veritate. Without denying the diverse levels of truth and competence, and hence without denying its own limits, the Church knows it announces the definitive Word and that this Word is not sort of added on from the outside like an opinion, but professes to be the response to human expectations. Thus does God have His place in the world and the Church its “right of citizenship”. In order for God to have a place in the world requires the world to need Him in order to be world, to attain its natural ends; otherwise God is superfluous. Useful, perhaps, but not indispensable. If God is only useful, then Christianity is nothing more than ethics. God is indispensable and therefore the faith purifies reason and charity purifies justice. Purify means making them  reason and charity in the full and effective sense of the words. It is like saying that reason without faith is unable to be reason, and justice without charity is unable to be justice.

It will not be possible to understand Caritas in veritate in depth if we merely dwell on the individual thematic chapters without taking into consideration the overall vision. The true theme addressed by the encyclical is the place of God in the world. This is why Caritas in veritate is likewise a political and social ‘stock-taking’ of modernism and the damages to true development caused by the inability to grasp what we ourselves do not produce. Chapter 34 is one of the most beautiful parts of the encyclical – and most important – insofar as it takes up “the astonishing experience of gift”. Modernism in its emerging version eliminates the very possibility of “receiving” and “welcoming” something truly new that “bursts into” our life. It prevents us from grasping the charity and love which are always what cannot be foreseen and produced. It therefore takes away from God His place in the world, because God is Charity and Love. It takes away the possibility of recognizing one another as “brothers”, because closeness can be produced – says the encyclical—but not fraternity. It has been remarked that the encyclical speaks more about fraternity than solidarity. This is true; the real point, however, is not in order to do away with the word solidarity, but to clarify it even better in the light of the Christian faith.  Fraternity requires a single Father and cannot but be a gift. Solidarity runs the risk of turning into yet another ‘ism’ and hence be limited to sort of horizontal ethics. We could say that Christian fraternity purifies human solidarity.

What relationship is there between the perspective of gift and that of liberty and responsibility? Caritas in veritate situates the theme of development in this latter ambit, the ambit of responsibility and not mechanisms. This issues forth not from what we produce ourselves, but from the acceptance of indisputable duties. Otherwise liberty would be license and responsibility irresponsible. Well worth attentive reading is article 43 on rights and duties. In that paragraph modernism is purified, modernism is liberated of itself in order to be itself in a more genuine way. From an irresponsible modernism to a responsible modernism. Underdevelopment is produced. It is produced less by a shortage of resources and more by a shortage of heart and thought, heart and mind. If not reduced to opinion and feeling, heart and thought bring us face to face with what challenges us because we do not produce it. They indicate the true sense of the development to be assumed in a free and responsible manner without entrusting the realization thereof to bureaucracies or mechanisms.

The greatness of Caritas in veritate resides in its broad scope. Without God, as we read in the Conclusion, man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is. Without God the economy is only economy, nature is nothing more than a deposit of material, the family only a contract, life nothing more than a laboratory product, love only chemistry, and development nothing more than a form of growth. Man wavers back and forth between nature and culture, one moment seeing himself as nature alone and the next moment as culture alone, without realizing that culture is the vocation of nature, the non arbitrary fulfillment of what it already awaited.