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ENCYCLICAL LETTER
DEUS CARITAS EST
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
BENEDICT XVI
TO THE BISHOPS
PRIESTS AND DEACONS
MEN AND WOMEN RELIGIOUS
AND ALL THE LAY FAITHFUL
ON CHRISTIAN LOVE
INTRODUCTION
1. “God is love, and he who abides in
love abides in God, and God abides in
him” (1
Jn
4:16). These words from the
First Letter of John
express with remarkable clarity the
heart of the Christian faith: the
Christian image of God and the resulting
image of mankind and its destiny. In the
same verse, Saint John also offers a
kind of summary of the Christian life:
“We have come to know and to believe in
the love God has for us”.
We have come to believe in God's love:
in these words the Christian can express
the fundamental decision of his life.
Being Christian is not the result of an
ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the
encounter with an event, a person, which
gives life a new horizon and a decisive
direction. Saint John's Gospel describes
that event in these words: “God so loved
the world that he gave his only Son,
that whoever believes in him should ...
have eternal life” (3:16). In
acknowledging the centrality of love,
Christian faith has retained the core of
Israel's faith, while at the same time
giving it new depth and breadth. The
pious Jew prayed daily the words of the
Book of Deuteronomy which
expressed the heart of his existence:
“Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one
Lord, and you shall love the Lord your
God with all your heart, and with all
your soul and with all your might”
(6:4-5). Jesus united into a single
precept this commandment of love for God
and the commandment of love for neighbor
found in the
Book of Leviticus: “You
shall love your neighbor as yourself”
(19:18; cf. Mk 12:29-31). Since
God has first loved us (cf. 1 Jn
4:10), love is now no longer a mere
“command”; it is the response to the
gift of love with which God draws near
to us.
In a world where the name of God is
sometimes associated with vengeance or
even a duty of hatred and violence, this
message is both timely and significant.
For this reason, I wish in my first
Encyclical to speak of the love which
God lavishes upon us and which we in
turn must share with others. That, in
essence, is what the two main parts of
this Letter are about, and they are
profoundly interconnected. The first
part is more speculative, since I wanted
here—at the beginning of my
Pontificate—to clarify some essential
facts concerning the love which God
mysteriously and gratuitously offers to
man, together with the intrinsic link
between that Love and the reality of
human love. The second part is more
concrete, since it treats the ecclesial
exercise of the commandment of love of
neighbor. The argument has vast
implications, but a lengthy treatment
would go beyond the scope of the present
Encyclical. I wish to emphasize some
basic elements, so as to call forth in
the world renewed energy and commitment
in the human response to God's love.
PART I
THE UNITY OF LOVE
IN CREATION
AND IN SALVATION HISTORY
A problem of language
2. God's love for us is fundamental for
our lives, and it raises important
questions about who God is and who we
are. In considering this, we immediately
find ourselves hampered by a problem of
language. Today, the term “love” has
become one of the most frequently used
and misused of words, a word to which we
attach quite different meanings. Even
though this Encyclical will deal
primarily with the understanding and
practice of love in sacred Scripture and
in the Church's Tradition, we cannot
simply prescind from the meaning of the
word in the different cultures and in
present-day usage.
Let us first of all bring to mind the
vast semantic range of the word “love”:
we speak of love of country, love of
one's profession, love between friends,
love of work, love between parents and
children, love between family members,
love of neighbor and love of God. Amid
this multiplicity of meanings, however,
one in particular stands out: love
between man and woman, where body and
soul are inseparably joined and human
beings glimpse an apparently
irresistible promise of happiness. This
would seem to be the very epitome of
love; all other kinds of love
immediately seem to fade in comparison.
So we need to ask: are all these forms
of love basically one, so that love, in
its many and varied manifestations, is
ultimately a single reality, or are we
merely using the same word to designate
totally different realities?
“Eros” and “Agape” – difference and unity
3. That love between man and woman which
is neither planned nor willed, but
somehow imposes itself upon human
beings, was called eros by the
ancient Greeks. Let us note straight
away that the Greek Old Testament uses
the word eros only twice, while
the New Testament does not use it at
all: of the three Greek words for love,
eros, philia (the love of
friendship) and agape, New
Testament writers prefer the last, which
occurs rather infrequently in Greek
usage. As for the term philia,
the love of friendship, it is used with
added depth of meaning in Saint John's
Gospel in order to express the
relationship between Jesus and his
disciples. The tendency to avoid the
word eros, together with the new
vision of love expressed through the
word agape, clearly point to
something new and distinct about the
Christian understanding of love. In the
critique of Christianity which began
with the Enlightenment and grew
progressively more radical, this new
element was seen as something thoroughly
negative. According to Friedrich
Nietzsche, Christianity had poisoned
eros, which for its part, while not
completely succumbing, gradually
degenerated into vice.[1]
Here the German philosopher was
expressing a widely-held perception:
doesn't the Church, with all her
commandments and prohibitions, turn to
bitterness the most precious thing in
life? Doesn't she blow the whistle just
when the joy which is the Creator's gift
offers us a happiness which is itself a
certain foretaste of the Divine?
4. But is this the case? Did
Christianity really destroy eros?
Let us take a look at the pre- Christian
world. The Greeks—not unlike other
cultures—considered eros
principally as a kind of intoxication,
the overpowering of reason by a “divine
madness” which tears man away from his
finite existence and enables him, in the
very process of being overwhelmed by
divine power, to experience supreme
happiness. All other powers in heaven
and on earth thus appear secondary:
“Omnia vincit amor” says Virgil in
the Bucolics—love conquers
all—and he adds: “et nos cedamus
amori”—let us, too, yield to love.[2]
In the religions, this attitude found
expression in fertility cults, part of
which was the “sacred” prostitution
which flourished in many temples.
Eros was thus celebrated as divine
power, as fellowship with the Divine.
The Old Testament firmly opposed this
form of religion, which represents a
powerful temptation against monotheistic
faith, combating it as a perversion of
religiosity. But it in no way rejected
eros as such; rather, it declared
war on a warped and destructive form of
it, because this counterfeit
divinization of eros actually
strips it of its dignity and dehumanizes
it. Indeed, the prostitutes in the
temple, who had to bestow this divine
intoxication, were not treated as human
beings and persons, but simply used as a
means of arousing “divine madness”: far
from being goddesses, they were human
persons being exploited. An intoxicated
and undisciplined eros, then, is
not an ascent in “ecstasy” towards the
Divine, but a fall, a degradation of
man. Evidently, eros needs to be
disciplined and purified if it is to
provide not just fleeting pleasure, but
a certain foretaste of the pinnacle of
our existence, of that beatitude for
which our whole being yearns.
5. Two things emerge clearly from this
rapid overview of the concept of eros
past and present. First, there is a
certain relationship between love and
the Divine: love promises infinity,
eternity—a reality far greater and
totally other than our everyday
existence. Yet we have also seen that
the way to attain this goal is not
simply by submitting to instinct.
Purification and growth in maturity are
called for; and these also pass through
the path of renunciation. Far from
rejecting or “poisoning” eros,
they heal it and restore its true
grandeur.
This is due first and foremost to the
fact that man is a being made up of body
and soul. Man is truly himself when his
body and soul are intimately united; the
challenge of eros can be said to
be truly overcome when this unification
is achieved. Should he aspire to be pure
spirit and to reject the flesh as
pertaining to his animal nature alone,
then spirit and body would both lose
their dignity. On the other hand, should
he deny the spirit and consider matter,
the body, as the only reality, he would
likewise lose his greatness. The epicure
Gassendi used to offer Descartes the
humorous greeting: “O Soul!” And
Descartes would reply: “O Flesh!”.[3]
Yet it is neither the spirit alone nor
the body alone that loves: it is man,
the person, a unified creature composed
of body and soul, who loves. Only when
both dimensions are truly united, does
man attain his full stature. Only thus
is love —eros—able to mature and
attain its authentic grandeur.
Nowadays Christianity of the past is
often criticized as having been opposed
to the body; and it is quite true that
tendencies of this sort have always
existed. Yet the contemporary way of
exalting the body is deceptive. Eros,
reduced to pure “sex”, has become a
commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought
and sold, or rather, man himself becomes
a commodity. This is hardly man's great
“yes” to the body. On the contrary, he
now considers his body and his sexuality
as the purely material part of himself,
to be used and exploited at will. Nor
does he see it as an arena for the
exercise of his freedom, but as a mere
object that he attempts, as he pleases,
to make both enjoyable and harmless.
Here we are actually dealing with a
debasement of the human body: no longer
is it integrated into our overall
existential freedom; no longer is it a
vital expression of our whole being, but
it is more or less relegated to the
purely biological sphere. The apparent
exaltation of the body can quickly turn
into a hatred of bodiliness. Christian
faith, on the other hand, has always
considered man a unity in duality, a
reality in which spirit and matter
compenetrate, and in which each is
brought to a new nobility. True, eros
tends to rise “in ecstasy” towards the
Divine, to lead us beyond ourselves; yet
for this very reason it calls for a path
of ascent, renunciation, purification
and healing.
6. Concretely, what does this path of
ascent and purification entail? How
might love be experienced so that it can
fully realize its human and divine
promise? Here we can find a first,
important indication in the
Song of Songs, an Old
Testament book well known to the
mystics. According to the interpretation
generally held today, the poems
contained in this book were originally
love-songs, perhaps intended for a
Jewish wedding feast and meant to exalt
conjugal love. In this context it is
highly instructive to note that in the
course of the book two different Hebrew
words are used to indicate “love”. First
there is the word dodim, a plural
form suggesting a love that is still
insecure, indeterminate and searching.
This comes to be replaced by the word
ahabā, which the Greek version of
the Old Testament translates with the
similar-sounding agape, which, as
we have seen, becomes the typical
expression for the biblical notion of
love. By contrast with an indeterminate,
“searching” love, this word expresses
the experience of a love which involves
a real discovery of the other, moving
beyond the selfish character that
prevailed earlier. Love now becomes
concern and care for the other. No
longer is it self-seeking, a sinking in
the intoxication of happiness; instead
it seeks the good of the beloved: it
becomes renunciation and it is ready,
and even willing, for sacrifice.
It is part of love's growth towards
higher levels and inward purification
that it now seeks to become definitive,
and it does so in a twofold sense: both
in the sense of exclusivity (this
particular person alone) and in the
sense of being “for ever”. Love embraces
the whole of existence in each of its
dimensions, including the dimension of
time. It could hardly be otherwise,
since its promise looks towards its
definitive goal: love looks to the
eternal. Love is indeed “ecstasy”, not
in the sense of a moment of
intoxication, but rather as a journey,
an ongoing exodus out of the closed
inward-looking self towards its
liberation through self-giving, and thus
towards authentic self-discovery and
indeed the discovery of God: “Whoever
seeks to gain his life will lose it, but
whoever loses his life will preserve it”
(Lk 17:33), as Jesus says
throughout the Gospels (cf. Mt
10:39; 16:25; Mk 8:35; Lk
9:24; Jn 12:25). In these words,
Jesus portrays his own path, which leads
through the Cross to the Resurrection:
the path of the grain of wheat that
falls to the ground and dies, and in
this way bears much fruit. Starting from
the depths of his own sacrifice and of
the love that reaches fulfillment
therein, he also portrays in these words
the essence of love and indeed of human
life itself.
7. By their own inner logic, these
initial, somewhat philosophical
reflections on the essence of love have
now brought us to the threshold of
biblical faith. We began by asking
whether the different, or even opposed,
meanings of the word “love” point to
some profound underlying unity, or
whether on the contrary they must remain
unconnected, one alongside the other.
More significantly, though, we
questioned whether the message of love
proclaimed to us by the Bible and the
Church's Tradition has some points of
contact with the common human experience
of love, or whether it is opposed to
that experience. This in turn led us to
consider two fundamental words: eros,
as a term to indicate “worldly” love and
agape, referring to love grounded in
and shaped by faith. The two notions are
often contrasted as “ascending” love and
“descending” love. There are other,
similar classifications, such as the
distinction between possessive love and
oblative love (amor concupiscentiae –
amor benevolentiae), to which is
sometimes also added love that seeks its
own advantage.
In philosophical and theological debate,
these distinctions have often been
radicalized to the point of establishing
a clear antithesis between them:
descending, oblative love—agape—would
be typically Christian, while on the
other hand ascending, possessive or
covetous love —eros—would be
typical of non-Christian, and
particularly Greek culture. Were this
antithesis to be taken to extremes, the
essence of Christianity would be
detached from the vital relations
fundamental to human existence, and
would become a world apart, admirable
perhaps, but decisively cut off from the
complex fabric of human life. Yet
eros and agape—ascending love
and descending love—can never be
completely separated. The more the two,
in their different aspects, find a
proper unity in the one reality of love,
the more the true nature of love in
general is realized. Even if eros
is at first mainly covetous and
ascending, a fascination for the great
promise of happiness, in drawing near to
the other, it is less and less concerned
with itself, increasingly seeks the
happiness of the other, is concerned
more and more with the beloved, bestows
itself and wants to “be there for” the
other. The element of agape thus
enters into this love, for otherwise
eros is impoverished and even loses
its own nature. On the other hand, man
cannot live by oblative, descending love
alone. He cannot always give, he must
also receive. Anyone who wishes to give
love must also receive love as a gift.
Certainly, as the Lord tells us, one can
become a source from which rivers of
living water flow (cf. Jn
7:37-38). Yet to become such a source,
one must constantly drink anew from the
original source, which is Jesus Christ,
from whose pierced heart flows the love
of God (cf. Jn 19:34).
In the account of Jacob's ladder, the
Fathers of the Church saw this
inseparable connection between ascending
and descending love, between eros
which seeks God and agape which
passes on the gift received, symbolized
in various ways. In that biblical
passage we read how the Patriarch Jacob
saw in a dream, above the stone which
was his pillow, a ladder reaching up to
heaven, on which the angels of God were
ascending and descending (cf. Gen
28:12; Jn 1:51). A particularly
striking interpretation of this vision
is presented by Pope Gregory the Great
in his Pastoral Rule. He tells us
that the good pastor must be rooted in
contemplation. Only in this way will he
be able to take upon himself the needs
of others and make them his own: “per
pietatis viscera in se infirmitatem
caeterorum transferat”.[4]
Saint Gregory speaks in this context of
Saint Paul, who was borne aloft to the
most exalted mysteries of God, and
hence, having descended once more, he
was able to become all things to all men
(cf. 2 Cor 12:2-4; 1 Cor
9:22). He also points to the example of
Moses, who entered the tabernacle time
and again, remaining in dialogue with
God, so that when he emerged he could be
at the service of his people. “Within
[the tent] he is borne aloft through
contemplation, while without he is
completely engaged in helping those who
suffer: intus in contemplationem
rapitur, foris infirmantium negotiis
urgetur.”[5]
8. We have thus come to an initial,
albeit still somewhat generic response
to the two questions raised earlier.
Fundamentally, “love” is a single
reality, but with different dimensions;
at different times, one or other
dimension may emerge more clearly. Yet
when the two dimensions are totally cut
off from one another, the result is a
caricature or at least an impoverished
form of love. And we have also seen,
synthetically, that biblical faith does
not set up a parallel universe, or one
opposed to that primordial human
phenomenon which is love, but rather
accepts the whole man; it intervenes in
his search for love in order to purify
it and to reveal new dimensions of it.
This newness of biblical faith is shown
chiefly in two elements which deserve to
be highlighted: the image of God and the
image of man.
The newness of biblical faith
9. First, the world of the Bible
presents us with a new image of God. In
surrounding cultures, the image of God
and of the gods ultimately remained
unclear and contradictory. In the
development of biblical faith, however,
the content of the prayer fundamental to
Israel, the Shema, became
increasingly clear and unequivocal:
“Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one
Lord” (Dt 6:4). There is only one
God, the Creator of heaven and earth,
who is thus the God of all. Two facts
are significant about this statement:
all other gods are not God, and the
universe in which we live has its source
in God and was created by him.
Certainly, the notion of creation is
found elsewhere, yet only here does it
become absolutely clear that it is not
one god among many, but the one true God
himself who is the source of all that
exists; the whole world comes into
existence by the power of his creative
Word. Consequently, his creation is dear
to him, for it was willed by him and
“made” by him. The second important
element now emerges: this God loves man.
The divine power that Aristotle at the
height of Greek philosophy sought to
grasp through reflection, is indeed for
every being an object of desire and of
love —and as the object of love this
divinity moves the world[6]—but
in itself it lacks nothing and does not
love: it is solely the object of love.
The one God in whom Israel believes, on
the other hand, loves with a personal
love. His love, moreover, is an elective
love: among all the nations he chooses
Israel and loves her—but he does so
precisely with a view to healing the
whole human race. God loves, and his
love may certainly be called eros,
yet it is also totally agape.[7]
The Prophets, particularly Hosea and
Ezekiel, described God's passion for his
people using boldly erotic images. God's
relationship with Israel is described
using the metaphors of betrothal and
marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and
prostitution. Here we find a specific
reference—as we have seen—to the
fertility cults and their abuse of
eros, but also a description of the
relationship of fidelity between Israel
and her God. The history of the
love-relationship between God and Israel
consists, at the deepest level, in the
fact that he gives her the Torah,
thereby opening Israel's eyes to man's
true nature and showing her the path
leading to true humanism. It consists in
the fact that man, through a life of
fidelity to the one God, comes to
experience himself as loved by God, and
discovers joy in truth and in
righteousness—a joy in God which becomes
his essential happiness: “Whom do I have
in heaven but you? And there is nothing
upon earth that I desire besides you ...
for me it is good to be near God” (Ps
73 [72]:25, 28).
10. We have seen that God's eros
for man is also totally agape.
This is not only because it is bestowed
in a completely gratuitous manner,
without any previous merit, but also
because it is love which forgives. Hosea
above all shows us that this agape
dimension of God's love for man goes far
beyond the aspect of gratuity. Israel
has committed “adultery” and has broken
the covenant; God should judge and
repudiate her. It is precisely at this
point that God is revealed to be God and
not man: “How can I give you up, O
Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O
Israel! ... My heart recoils within me,
my compassion grows warm and tender. I
will not execute my fierce anger, I will
not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God
and not man, the Holy One in your midst”
(Hos 11:8-9). God's passionate
love for his people—for humanity—is at
the same time a forgiving love. It is so
great that it turns God against himself,
his love against his justice. Here
Christians can see a dim prefigurement
of the mystery of the Cross: so great is
God's love for man that by becoming man
he follows him even into death, and so
reconciles justice and love.
The philosophical dimension to be noted
in this biblical vision, and its
importance from the standpoint of the
history of religions, lies in the fact
that on the one hand we find ourselves
before a strictly metaphysical image of
God: God is the absolute and ultimate
source of all being; but this universal
principle of creation—the Logos,
primordial reason—is at the same time a
lover with all the passion of a true
love. Eros is thus supremely
ennobled, yet at the same time it is so
purified as to become one with agape.
We can thus see how the reception of the
Song of Songs in the
canon of sacred Scripture was soon
explained by the idea that these love
songs ultimately describe God's relation
to man and man's relation to God. Thus
the
Song of Songs became,
both in Christian and Jewish literature,
a source of mystical knowledge and
experience, an expression of the essence
of biblical faith: that man can indeed
enter into union with God—his primordial
aspiration. But this union is no mere
fusion, a sinking in the nameless ocean
of the Divine; it is a unity which
creates love, a unity in which both God
and man remain themselves and yet become
fully one. As Saint Paul says: “He who
is united to the Lord becomes one spirit
with him” (1 Cor 6:17).
11. The first novelty of biblical faith
consists, as we have seen, in its image
of God. The second, essentially
connected to this, is found in the image
of man. The biblical account of creation
speaks of the solitude of Adam, the
first man, and God's decision to give
him a helper. Of all other creatures,
not one is capable of being the helper
that man needs, even though he has
assigned a name to all the wild beasts
and birds and thus made them fully a
part of his life. So God forms woman
from the rib of man. Now Adam finds the
helper that he needed: “This at last is
bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh”
(Gen 2:23). Here one might detect
hints of ideas that are also found, for
example, in the myth mentioned by Plato,
according to which man was originally
spherical, because he was complete in
himself and self-sufficient. But as a
punishment for pride, he was split in
two by Zeus, so that now he longs for
his other half, striving with all his
being to possess it and thus regain his
integrity.[8]
While the biblical narrative does not
speak of punishment, the idea is
certainly present that man is somehow
incomplete, driven by nature to seek in
another the part that can make him
whole, the idea that only in communion
with the opposite sex can he become
“complete”. The biblical account thus
concludes with a prophecy about Adam:
“Therefore a man leaves his father and
his mother and cleaves to his wife and
they become one flesh” (Gen
2:24).
Two aspects of this are important.
First, eros is somehow rooted in
man's very nature; Adam is a seeker, who
“abandons his mother and father” in
order to find woman; only together do
the two represent complete humanity and
become “one flesh”. The second aspect is
equally important. From the standpoint
of creation, eros directs man
towards marriage, to a bond which is
unique and definitive; thus, and only
thus, does it fulfil its deepest
purpose. Corresponding to the image of a
monotheistic God is monogamous marriage.
Marriage based on exclusive and
definitive love becomes the icon of the
relationship between God and his people
and vice versa. God's way of loving
becomes the measure of human love. This
close connection between eros and
marriage in the Bible has practically no
equivalent in extra-biblical literature.
Jesus Christ – the incarnate love of God
12. Though up to now we have been
speaking mainly of the Old Testament,
nevertheless the profound compenetration
of the two Testaments as the one
Scripture of the Christian faith has
already become evident. The real novelty
of the New Testament lies not so much in
new ideas as in the figure of Christ
himself, who gives flesh and blood to
those concepts—an unprecedented realism.
In the Old Testament, the novelty of the
Bible did not consist merely in abstract
notions but in God's unpredictable and
in some sense unprecedented activity.
This divine activity now takes on
dramatic form when, in Jesus Christ, it
is God himself who goes in search of the
“stray sheep”, a suffering and lost
humanity. When Jesus speaks in his
parables of the shepherd who goes after
the lost sheep, of the woman who looks
for the lost coin, of the father who
goes to meet and embrace his prodigal
son, these are no mere words: they
constitute an explanation of his very
being and activity. His death on the
Cross is the culmination of that turning
of God against himself in which he gives
himself in order to raise man up and
save him. This is love in its most
radical form. By contemplating the
pierced side of Christ (cf. 19:37), we
can understand the starting-point of
this Encyclical Letter: “God is love” (1
Jn 4:8). It is there that this truth
can be contemplated. It is from there
that our definition of love must begin.
In this contemplation the Christian
discovers the path along which his life
and love must move.
13. Jesus gave this act of oblation an
enduring presence through his
institution of the Eucharist at the Last
Supper. He anticipated his death and
resurrection by giving his disciples, in
the bread and wine, his very self, his
body and blood as the new manna (cf.
Jn 6:31-33). The ancient world had
dimly perceived that man's real
food—what truly nourishes him as man—is
ultimately the Logos, eternal
wisdom: this same Logos now truly
becomes food for us—as love. The
Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of
self-oblation. More than just statically
receiving the incarnate Logos, we
enter into the very dynamic of his
self-giving. The imagery of marriage
between God and Israel is now realized
in a way previously inconceivable: it
had meant standing in God's presence,
but now it becomes union with God
through sharing in Jesus' self-gift,
sharing in his body and blood. The
sacramental “mysticism”, grounded in
God's condescension towards us, operates
at a radically different level and lifts
us to far greater heights than anything
that any human mystical elevation could
ever accomplish.
14. Here we need to consider yet another
aspect: this sacramental “mysticism” is
social in character, for in sacramental
communion I become one with the Lord,
like all the other communicants. As
Saint Paul says, “Because there is one
bread, we who are many are one body, for
we all partake of the one bread” (1
Cor 10:17). Union with Christ is
also union with all those to whom he
gives himself. I cannot possess Christ
just for myself; I can belong to him
only in union with all those who have
become, or who will become, his own.
Communion draws me out of myself towards
him, and thus also towards unity with
all Christians. We become “one body”,
completely joined in a single existence.
Love of God and love of neighbor are now
truly united: God incarnate draws us all
to himself. We can thus understand how
agape also became a term for the
Eucharist: there God's own agape
comes to us bodily, in order to continue
his work in us and through us. Only by
keeping in mind this Christological and
sacramental basis can we correctly
understand Jesus' teaching on love. The
transition which he makes from the Law
and the Prophets to the twofold
commandment of love of God and of
neighbor, and his grounding the whole
life of faith on this central precept,
is not simply a matter of
morality—something that could exist
apart from and alongside faith in Christ
and its sacramental re-actualization.
Faith, worship and ethos are
interwoven as a single reality which
takes shape in our encounter with God's
agape. Here the usual contraposition
between worship and ethics simply falls
apart. “Worship” itself, Eucharistic
communion, includes the reality both of
being loved and of loving others in
turn. A Eucharist which does not pass
over into the concrete practice of love
is intrinsically fragmented. Conversely,
as we shall have to consider in greater
detail below, the “commandment” of love
is only possible because it is more than
a requirement. Love can be “commanded”
because it has first been given.
15. This principle is the starting-point
for understanding the great parables of
Jesus. The rich man (cf. Lk
16:19-31) begs from his place of torment
that his brothers be informed about what
happens to those who simply ignore the
poor man in need. Jesus takes up this
cry for help as a warning to help us
return to the right path. The parable of
the Good Samaritan (cf. Lk
10:25-37) offers two particularly
important clarifications. Until that
time, the concept of “neighbor” was
understood as referring essentially to
one's countrymen and to foreigners who
had settled in the land of Israel; in
other words, to the closely-knit
community of a single country or people.
This limit is now abolished. Anyone who
needs me, and whom I can help, is my
neighbor. The concept of “neighbor” is
now universalized, yet it remains
concrete. Despite being extended to all
mankind, it is not reduced to a generic,
abstract and undemanding expression of
love, but calls for my own practical
commitment here and now. The Church has
the duty to interpret ever anew this
relationship between near and far with
regard to the actual daily life of her
members. Lastly, we should especially
mention the great parable of the Last
Judgment (cf. Mt 25:31-46), in
which love becomes the criterion for the
definitive decision about a human life's
worth or lack thereof. Jesus identifies
himself with those in need, with the
hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the
naked, the sick and those in prison. “As
you did it to one of the least of these
my brethren, you did it to me” (Mt
25:40). Love of God and love of neighbor
have become one: in the least of the
brethren we find Jesus himself, and in
Jesus we find God.
Love of God and love of neighbor
16. Having reflected on the nature of
love and its meaning in biblical faith,
we are left with two questions
concerning our own attitude: can we love
God without seeing him? And can love be
commanded? Against the double
commandment of love these questions
raise a double objection. No one has
ever seen God, so how could we love him?
Moreover, love cannot be commanded; it
is ultimately a feeling that is either
there or not, nor can it be produced by
the will. Scripture seems to reinforce
the first objection when it states: “If
anyone says, ‘I love God,' and hates his
brother, he is a liar; for he who does
not love his brother whom he has seen,
cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1
Jn 4:20). But this text hardly
excludes the love of God as something
impossible. On the contrary, the whole
context of the passage quoted from the
First Letter of John
shows that such love is explicitly
demanded. The unbreakable bond between
love of God and love of neighbor is
emphasized. One is so closely connected
to the other that to say that we love
God becomes a lie if we are closed to
our neighbor or hate him altogether.
Saint John's words should rather be
interpreted to mean that love of
neighbor is a path that leads to the
encounter with God, and that closing our
eyes to our neighbor also blinds us to
God.
17. True, no one has ever seen God as he
is. And yet God is not totally invisible
to us; he does not remain completely
inaccessible. God loved us first, says
the
Letter of John quoted
above (cf. 4:10), and this love of God
has appeared in our midst. He has become
visible in as much as he “has sent his
only Son into the world, so that we
might live through him” (1 Jn
4:9). God has made himself visible: in
Jesus we are able to see the Father (cf.
Jn 14:9). Indeed, God is visible in
a number of ways. In the love-story
recounted by the Bible, he comes towards
us, he seeks to win our hearts, all the
way to the Last Supper, to the piercing
of his heart on the Cross, to his
appearances after the Resurrection and
to the great deeds by which, through the
activity of the Apostles, he guided the
nascent Church along its path. Nor has
the Lord been absent from subsequent
Church history: he encounters us ever
anew, in the men and women who reflect
his presence, in his word, in the
sacraments, and especially in the
Eucharist. In the Church's Liturgy, in
her prayer, in the living community of
believers, we experience the love of
God, we perceive his presence and we
thus learn to recognize that presence in
our daily lives. He has loved us first
and he continues to do so; we too, then,
can respond with love. God does not
demand of us a feeling which we
ourselves are incapable of producing. He
loves us, he makes us see and experience
his love, and since he has “loved us
first”, love can also blossom as a
response within us.
In the gradual unfolding of this
encounter, it is clearly revealed that
love is not merely a sentiment.
Sentiments come and go. A sentiment can
be a marvelous first spark, but it is
not the fullness of love. Earlier we
spoke of the process of purification and
maturation by which eros comes
fully into its own, becomes love in the
full meaning of the word. It is
characteristic of mature love that it
calls into play all man's
potentialities; it engages the whole
man, so to speak. Contact with the
visible manifestations of God's love can
awaken within us a feeling of joy born
of the experience of being loved. But
this encounter also engages our will and
our intellect. Acknowledgment of the
living God is one path towards love, and
the “yes” of our will to his will unites
our intellect, will and sentiments in
the all- embracing act of love. But this
process is always open-ended; love is
never “finished” and complete;
throughout life, it changes and matures,
and thus remains faithful to itself.
Idem velle atque idem nolle
[9]—to want the same thing,
and to reject the same thing—was
recognized by antiquity as the authentic
content of love: the one becomes similar
to the other, and this leads to a
community of will and thought. The
love-story between God and man consists
in the very fact that this communion of
will increases in a communion of thought
and sentiment, and thus our will and
God's will increasingly coincide: God's
will is no longer for me an alien will,
something imposed on me from without by
the commandments, but it is now my own
will, based on the realization that God
is in fact more deeply present to me
than I am to myself.[10]
Then self- abandonment to God increases
and God becomes our joy (cf. Ps
73 [72]:23-28).
18. Love of neighbor is thus shown to be
possible in the way proclaimed by the
Bible, by Jesus. It consists in the very
fact that, in God and with God, I love
even the person whom I do not like or
even know. This can only take place on
the basis of an intimate encounter with
God, an encounter which has become a
communion of will, even affecting my
feelings. Then I learn to look on this
other person not simply with my eyes and
my feelings, but from the perspective of
Jesus Christ. His friend is my friend.
Going beyond exterior appearances, I
perceive in others an interior desire
for a sign of love, of concern. This I
can offer them not only through the
organizations intended for such
purposes, accepting it perhaps as a
political necessity. Seeing with the
eyes of Christ, I can give to others
much more than their outward
necessities; I can give them the look of
love which they crave. Here we see the
necessary interplay between love of God
and love of neighbor which the
First Letter of John
speaks of with such insistence. If I
have no contact whatsoever with God in
my life, then I cannot see in the other
anything more than the other, and I am
incapable of seeing in him the image of
God. But if in my life I fail completely
to heed others, solely out of a desire
to be “devout” and to perform my
“religious duties”, then my relationship
with God will also grow arid. It becomes
merely “proper”, but loveless. Only my
readiness to encounter my neighbor and
to show him love makes me sensitive to
God as well. Only if I serve my neighbor
can my eyes be opened to what God does
for me and how much he loves me. The
saints—consider the example of Blessed
Teresa of Calcutta—constantly renewed
their capacity for love of neighbor from
their encounter with the Eucharistic
Lord, and conversely this encounter
acquired its real- ism and depth in
their service to others. Love of God and
love of neighbor are thus inseparable,
they form a single commandment. But both
live from the love of God who has loved
us first. No longer is it a question,
then, of a “commandment” imposed from
without and calling for the impossible,
but rather of a freely-bestowed
experience of love from within, a love
which by its very nature must then be
shared with others. Love grows through
love. Love is “divine” because it comes
from God and unites us to God; through
this unifying process it makes us a “we”
which transcends our divisions and makes
us one, until in the end God is “all in
all” (1 Cor 15:28).
PART II
CARITAS
THE PRACTICE OF LOVE
BY THE CHURCH
AS A “COMMUNITY OF LOVE”
The Church's charitable activity as a manifestation of Trinitarian love
19. “If you see charity, you see the
Trinity”, wrote Saint Augustine.[11]
In the foregoing reflections, we have
been able to focus our attention on the
Pierced one (cf. Jn 19:37,
Zech 12:10), recognizing the plan of
the Father who, moved by love (cf. Jn
3:16), sent his only-begotten Son
into the world to redeem man. By dying
on the Cross—as Saint John tells
us—Jesus “gave up his Spirit” (Jn
19:30), anticipating the gift of the
Holy Spirit that he would make after his
Resurrection (cf. Jn 20:22). This
was to fulfill the promise of “rivers of
living water” that would flow out of the
hearts of believers, through the
outpouring of the Spirit (cf. Jn
7:38-39). The Spirit, in fact, is that
interior power which harmonizes their
hearts with Christ's heart and moves
them to love their brethren as Christ
loved them, when he bent down to wash
the feet of the disciples (cf. Jn
13:1-13) and above all when he gave his
life for us (cf. Jn 13:1, 15:13).
The Spirit is also the energy which
transforms the heart of the ecclesial
community, so that it becomes a witness
before the world to the love of the
Father, who wishes to make humanity a
single family in his Son. The entire
activity of the Church is an expression
of a love that seeks the integral good
of man: it seeks his evangelization
through Word and Sacrament, an
undertaking that is often heroic in the
way it is acted out in history; and it
seeks to promote man in the various
arenas of life and human activity. Love
is therefore the service that the Church
carries out in order to attend
constantly to man's sufferings and his
needs, including material needs. And
this is the aspect, this service of
charity, on which I want to focus in
the second part of the Encyclical.
Charity as a responsibility of the Church
20. Love of neighbor, grounded in the
love of God, is first and foremost a
responsibility for each individual
member of the faithful, but it is also a
responsibility for the entire ecclesial
community at every level: from the local
community to the particular Church and
to the Church universal in its entirety.
As a community, the Church must practice
love. Love thus needs to be organized if
it is to be an ordered service to the
community. The awareness of this
responsibility has had a constitutive
relevance in the Church from the
beginning: “All who believed were
together and had all things in common;
and they sold their possessions and
goods and distributed them to all, as
any had need” (Acts 2:44-5). In
these words, Saint Luke provides a kind
of definition of the Church, whose
constitutive elements include fidelity
to the “teaching of the Apostles”,
“communion” (koinonia), “the
breaking of the bread” and “prayer” (cf.
Acts 2:42). The element of
“communion” (koinonia) is not
initially defined, but appears
concretely in the verses quoted above:
it consists in the fact that believers
hold all things in common and that among
them, there is no longer any distinction
between rich and poor (cf. also Acts
4:32-37). As the Church grew, this
radical form of material communion could
not in fact be preserved. But its
essential core remained: within the
community of believers there can never
be room for a poverty that denies anyone
what is needed for a dignified life.
21. A decisive step in the difficult
search for ways of putting this
fundamental ecclesial principle into
practice is illustrated in the choice of
the seven, which marked the origin of
the diaconal office (cf. Acts
6:5-6). In the early Church, in fact,
with regard to the daily distribution to
widows, a disparity had arisen between
Hebrew speakers and Greek speakers. The
Apostles, who had been entrusted
primarily with “prayer” (the Eucharist
and the liturgy) and the “ministry of
the word”, felt over-burdened by
“serving tables”, so they decided to
reserve to themselves the principal duty
and to designate for the other task,
also necessary in the Church, a group of
seven persons. Nor was this group to
carry out a purely mechanical work of
distribution: they were to be men “full
of the Spirit and of wisdom” (cf.
Acts 6:1-6). In other words, the
social service which they were meant to
provide was absolutely concrete, yet at
the same time it was also a spiritual
service; theirs was a truly spiritual
office which carried out an essential
responsibility of the Church, namely a
well-ordered love of neighbor. With the
formation of this group of seven, “diaconia”—the
ministry of charity exercised in a
communitarian, orderly way—became part
of the fundamental structure of the
Church.
22. As the years went by and the Church
spread further afield, the exercise of
charity became established as one of her
essential activities, along with the
administration of the sacraments and the
proclamation of the word: love for
widows and orphans, prisoners, and the
sick and needy of every kind, is as
essential to her as the ministry of the
sacraments and preaching of the Gospel.
The Church cannot neglect the service of
charity any more than she can neglect
the Sacraments and the Word. A few
references will suffice to demonstrate
this. Justin Martyr († c. 155) in
speaking of the Christians' celebration
of Sunday, also mentions their
charitable activity, linked with the
Eucharist as such. Those who are able
make offerings in accordance with their
means, each as he or she wishes; the
Bishop in turn makes use of these to
support orphans, widows, the sick and
those who for other reasons find
themselves in need, such as prisoners
and foreigners.[12]
The great Christian writer Tertullian (†
after 220) relates how the pagans were
struck by the Christians' concern for
the needy of every sort.[13]
And when Ignatius of Antioch († c.
117) described the Church of Rome as
“presiding in charity (agape)”,[14]
we may assume that with this definition
he also intended in some sense to
express her concrete charitable
activity.
23. Here it might be helpful to allude
to the earliest legal structures
associated with the service of charity
in the Church. Towards the middle of the
fourth century we see the development in
Egypt of the “diaconia”: the
institution within each monastery
responsible for all works of relief,
that is to say, for the service of
charity. By the sixth century this
institution had evolved into a
corporation with full juridical
standing, which the civil authorities
themselves entrusted with part of the
grain for public distribution. In Egypt
not only each monastery, but each
individual Diocese eventually had its
own diaconia; this institution
then developed in both East and West.
Pope Gregory the Great († 604) mentions
the diaconia of Naples, while in
Rome the diaconiae are documented
from the seventh and eighth centuries.
But charitable activity on behalf of the
poor and suffering was naturally an
essential part of the Church of Rome
from the very beginning, based on the
principles of Christian life given in
the
Acts of the Apostles. It
found a vivid expression in the case of
the deacon Lawrence († 258). The
dramatic description of Lawrence's
martyrdom was known to Saint Ambrose (†
397) and it provides a fundamentally
authentic picture of the saint. As the
one responsible for the care of the poor
in Rome, Lawrence had been given a
period of time, after the capture of the
Pope and of Lawrence's fellow deacons,
to collect the treasures of the Church
and hand them over to the civil
authorities. He distributed to the poor
whatever funds were available and then
presented to the authorities the poor
themselves as the real treasure of the
Church.[15]
Whatever historical reliability one
attributes to these details, Lawrence
has always remained present in the
Church's memory as a great exponent of
ecclesial charity.
24. A mention of the emperor Julian the
Apostate († 363) can also show how
essential the early Church considered
the organized practice of charity. As a
child of six years, Julian witnessed the
assassination of his father, brother and
other family members by the guards of
the imperial palace; rightly or wrongly,
he blamed this brutal act on the Emperor
Constantius, who passed himself off as
an outstanding Christian. The Christian
faith was thus definitively discredited
in his eyes. Upon becoming emperor,
Julian decided to restore paganism, the
ancient Roman religion, while reforming
it in the hope of making it the driving
force behind the empire. In this project
he was amply inspired by Christianity.
He established a hierarchy of
metropolitans and priests who were to
foster love of God and neighbor. In one
of his letters,[16]
he wrote that the sole aspect of
Christianity which had impressed him was
the Church's charitable activity. He
thus considered it essential for his new
pagan religion that, alongside the
system of the Church's charity, an
equivalent activity of its own be
established. According to him, this was
the reason for the popularity of the
“Galileans”. They needed now to be
imitated and outdone. In this way, then,
the Emperor confirmed that charity was a
decisive feature of the Christian
community, the Church.
25. Thus far, two essential facts have
emerged from our reflections:
a) The Church's deepest nature is expressed in her
three-fold responsibility: of
proclaiming the word of God (kerygma-martyria),
celebrating the sacraments (leitourgia),
and exercising the ministry of charity (diakonia).
These duties presuppose each other and
are inseparable. For the Church, charity
is not a kind of welfare activity which
could equally well be left to others,
but is a part of her nature, an
indispensable expression of her very
being.[17]
b) The Church is God's family in the world. In this
family no one ought to go without the
necessities of life. Yet at the same
time caritas- agape extends
beyond the frontiers of the Church. The
parable of the Good Samaritan remains as
a standard which imposes universal love
towards the needy whom we encounter “by
chance” (cf. Lk 10:31), whoever
they may be. Without in any way
detracting from this commandment of
universal love, the Church also has a
specific responsibility: within the
ecclesial family no member should suffer
through being in need. The teaching of
the
Letter to the Galatians
is emphatic: “So then, as we have
opportunity, let us do good to all, and
especially to those who are of the
household of faith” (6:10).
Justice and Charity
26. Since the nineteenth century, an
objection has been raised to the
Church's charitable activity,
subsequently developed with particular
insistence by Marxism: the poor, it is
claimed, do not need charity but
justice. Works of charity—almsgiving—are
in effect a way for the rich to shirk
their obligation to work for justice and
a means of soothing their consciences,
while preserving their own status and
robbing the poor of their rights.
Instead of contributing through
individual works of charity to
maintaining the status quo, we
need to build a just social order in
which all receive their share of the
world's goods and no longer have to
depend on charity. There is admittedly
some truth to this argument, but also
much that is mistaken. It is true that
the pursuit of justice must be a
fundamental norm of the State and that
the aim of a just social order is to
guarantee to each person, according to
the principle of subsidiarity, his share
of the community's goods. This has
always been emphasized by Christian
teaching on the State and by the
Church's social doctrine. Historically,
the issue of the just ordering of the
collectivity had taken a new dimension
with the industrialization of society in
the nineteenth century. The rise of
modern industry caused the old social
structures to collapse, while the growth
of a class of salaried workers provoked
radical changes in the fabric of
society. The relationship between
capital and labour now became the
decisive issue—an issue which in that
form was previously unknown. Capital and
the means of production were now the new
source of power which, concentrated in
the hands of a few, led to the
suppression of the rights of the working
classes, against which they had to
rebel.
27. It must be admitted that the
Church's leadership was slow to realize
that the issue of the just structuring
of society needed to be approached in a
new way. There were some pioneers, such
as Bishop Ketteler of Mainz († 1877),
and concrete needs were met by a growing
number of groups, associations, leagues,
federations and, in particular, by the
new religious orders founded in the
nineteenth century to combat poverty,
disease and the need for better
education. In 1891, the papal
magisterium intervened with the
Encyclical
Rerum Novarum of Leo
XIII. This was followed in 1931 by Pius
XI's Encyclical
Quadragesimo Anno. In
1961 Blessed John XXIII published the
Encyclical
Mater et Magistra, while
Paul VI, in the Encyclical
Populorum Progressio
(1967) and in the Apostolic Letter
Octogesima Adveniens
(1971), insistently addressed the social
problem, which had meanwhile become
especially acute in Latin America. My
great predecessor John Paul II left us a
trilogy of social Encyclicals:
Laborem Exercens (1981),
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis
(1987) and finally
Centesimus Annus (1991).
Faced with new situations and issues,
Catholic social teaching thus gradually
developed, and has now found a
comprehensive presentation in the
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the
Church published in 2004 by the
Pontifical Council Iustitia et Pax.
Marxism had seen world revolution and
its preliminaries as the panacea for the
social problem: revolution and the
subsequent collectivization of the means
of production, so it was claimed, would
immediately change things for the
better. This illusion has vanished. In
today's complex situation, not least
because of the growth of a globalized
economy, the Church's social doctrine
has become a set of fundamental
guidelines offering approaches that are
valid even beyond the confines of the
Church: in the face of ongoing
development these guidelines need to be
addressed in the context of dialogue
with all those seriously concerned for
humanity and for the world in which we
live.
28. In order to define more accurately
the relationship between the necessary
commitment to justice and the ministry
of charity, two fundamental situations
need to be considered:
a) The just ordering of society and the State is a
central responsibility of politics. As
Augustine once said, a State which is
not governed according to justice would
be just a bunch of thieves: “Remota
itaque iustitia quid sunt regna nisi
magna latrocinia?”.[18]
Fundamental to Christianity is the
distinction between what belongs to
Caesar and what belongs to God (cf.
Mt 22:21), in other words, the
distinction between Church and State,
or, as the Second Vatican Council puts
it, the autonomy of the temporal sphere.[19]
The State may not impose religion, yet
it must guarantee religious freedom and
harmony between the followers of
different religions. For her part, the
Church, as the social expression of
Christian faith, has a proper
independence and is structured on the
basis of her faith as a community which
the State must recognize. The two
spheres are distinct, yet always
interrelated.
Justice is both the aim and the
intrinsic criterion of all politics.
Politics is more than a mere mechanism
for defining the rules of public life:
its origin and its goal are found in
justice, which by its very nature has to
do with ethics. The State must
inevitably face the question of how
justice can be achieved here and now.
But this presupposes an even more
radical question: what is justice? The
problem is one of practical reason; but
if reason is to be exercised properly,
it must undergo constant purification,
since it can never be completely free of
the danger of a certain ethical
blindness caused by the dazzling effect
of power and special interests.
Here politics and faith meet. Faith by
its specific nature is an encounter with
the living God—an encounter opening up
new horizons extending beyond the sphere
of reason. But it is also a purifying
force for reason itself. From God's
standpoint, faith liberates reason from
its blind spots and therefore helps it
to be ever more fully itself. Faith
enables reason to do its work more
effectively and to see its proper object
more clearly. This is where Catholic
social doctrine has its place: it has no
intention of giving the Church power
over the State. Even less is it an
attempt to impose on those who do not
share the faith ways of thinking and
modes of conduct proper to faith. Its
aim is simply to help purify reason and
to contribute, here and now, to the
acknowledgment and attainment of what is
just.
The Church's social teaching argues on
the basis of reason and natural law,
namely, on the basis of what is in
accord with the nature of every human
being. It recognizes that it is not the
Church's responsibility to make this
teaching prevail in political life.
Rather, the Church wishes to help form
consciences in political life and to
stimulate greater insight into the
authentic requirements of justice as
well as greater readiness to act
accordingly, even when this might
involve conflict with situations of
personal interest. Building a just
social and civil order, wherein each
person receives what is his or her due,
is an essential task which every
generation must take up anew. As a
political task, this cannot be the
Church's immediate responsibility. Yet,
since it is also a most important human
responsibility, the Church is duty-bound
to offer, through the purification of
reason and through ethical formation,
her own specific contribution towards
understanding the requirements of
justice and achieving them politically.
The Church cannot and must not take upon
herself the political battle to bring
about the most just society possible.
She cannot and must not replace the
State. Yet at the same time she cannot
and must not remain on the sidelines in
the fight for justice. She has to play
her part through rational argument and
she has to reawaken the spiritual energy
without which justice, which always
demands sacrifice, cannot prevail and
prosper. A just society must be the
achievement of politics, not of the
Church. Yet the promotion of justice
through efforts to bring about openness
of mind and will to the demands of the
common good is something which concerns
the Church deeply.
b) Love—caritas—will always prove necessary,
even in the most just society. There is
no ordering of the State so just that it
can eliminate the need for a service of
love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is
preparing to eliminate man as such.
There will always be suffering which
cries out for consolation and help.
There will always be loneliness. There
will always be situations of material
need where help in the form of concrete
love of neighbor is indispensable.[20]
The State which would provide
everything, absorbing everything into
itself, would ultimately become a mere
bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing
the very thing which the suffering
person—every person—needs: namely,
loving personal concern. We do not need
a State which regulates and controls
everything, but a State which, in
accordance with the principle of
subsidiarity, generously acknowledges
and supports initiatives arising from
the different social forces and combines
spontaneity with closeness to those in
need. The Church is one of those living
forces: she is alive with the love
enkindled by the Spirit of Christ. This
love does not simply offer people
material help, but refreshment and care
for their souls, something which often
is even more necessary than material
support. In the end, the claim that just
social structures would make works of
charity superfluous masks a materialist
conception of man: the mistaken notion
that man can live “by bread alone” (Mt
4:4; cf. Dt 8:3)—a conviction
that demeans man and ultimately
disregards all that is specifically
human.
29. We can now determine more precisely,
in the life of the Church, the
relationship between commitment to the
just ordering of the State and society
on the one hand, and organized
charitable activity on the other. We
have seen that the formation of just
structures is not directly the duty of
the Church, but belongs to the world of
politics, the sphere of the autonomous
use of reason. The Church has an
indirect duty here, in that she is
called to contribute to the purification
of reason and to the reawakening of
those moral forces without which just
structures are neither established nor
prove effective in the long run.
The direct duty to work for a just
ordering of society, on the other hand,
is proper to the lay faithful. As
citizens of the State, they are called
to take part in public life in a
personal capacity. So they cannot
relinquish their participation “in the
many different economic, social,
legislative, administrative and cultural
areas, which are intended to promote
organically and institutionally the
common good.”
[21] The mission of the lay
faithful is therefore to configure
social life correctly, respecting its
legitimate autonomy and cooperating with
other citizens according to their
respective competences and fulfilling
their own responsibility.[22]
Even if the specific expressions of
ecclesial charity can never be confused
with the activity of the State, it still
remains true that charity must animate
the entire lives of the lay faithful and
therefore also their political activity,
lived as “social charity”.[23]
The Church's charitable organizations,
on the other hand, constitute an opus
proprium, a task agreeable to her,
in which she does not cooperate
collaterally, but acts as a subject with
direct responsibility, doing what
corresponds to her nature. The Church
can never be exempted from practicing
charity as an organized activity of
believers, and on the other hand, there
will never be a situation where the
charity of each individual Christian is
unnecessary, because in addition to
justice man needs, and will always need,
love.
The multiple structures of charitable service in the social context of
the present day
30. Before attempting to define the
specific profile of the Church's
activities in the service of man, I now
wish to consider the overall situation
of the struggle for justice and love in
the world of today.
a) Today the means of mass communication have made our
planet smaller, rapidly narrowing the
distance between different peoples and
cultures. This “togetherness” at times
gives rise to misunderstandings and
tensions, yet our ability to know almost
instantly about the needs of others
challenges us to share their situation
and their difficulties. Despite the
great advances made in science and
technology, each day we see how much
suffering there is in the world on
account of different kinds of poverty,
both material and spiritual. Our times
call for a new readiness to assist our
neighbors in need. The Second Vatican
Council had made this point very
clearly: “Now that, through better means
of communication, distances between
peoples have been almost eliminated,
charitable activity can and should
embrace all people and all needs.”[24]
On the other hand—and here we see one of
the challenging yet also positive sides
of the process of globalization—we now
have at our disposal numerous means for
offering humanitarian assistance to our
brothers and sisters in need, not least
modern systems of distributing food and
clothing, and of providing housing and
care. Concern for our neighbor
transcends the confines of national
communities and has increasingly
broadened its horizon to the whole
world. The Second Vatican Council
rightly observed that “among the signs
of our times, one particularly worthy of
note is a growing, inescapable sense of
solidarity between all peoples.”[25]
State agencies and humanitarian
associations work to promote this, the
former mainly through subsidies or tax
relief, the latter by making available
considerable resources. The solidarity
shown by civil society thus
significantly surpasses that shown by
individuals.
b) This situation has led to the birth and the growth
of many forms of cooperation between
State and Church agencies, which have
borne fruit. Church agencies, with their
transparent operation and their
faithfulness to the duty of witnessing
to love, are able to give a Christian
quality to the civil agencies too,
favoring a mutual coordination that can
only redound to the effectiveness of
charitable service.[26]
Numerous organizations for charitable or
philanthropic purposes have also been
established and these are committed to
achieving adequate humanitarian
solutions to the social and political
problems of the day. Significantly, our
time has also seen the growth and spread
of different kinds of volunteer work,
which assume responsibility for
providing a variety of services.[27]
I wish here to offer a special word of
gratitude and appreciation to all those
who take part in these activities in
whatever way. For young people, this
widespread involvement constitutes a
school of life which offers them a
formation in solidarity and in readiness
to offer others not simply material aid
but their very selves. The anti-culture
of death, which finds expression for
example in drug use, is thus countered
by an unselfish love which shows itself
to be a culture of life by the very
willingness to “lose itself” (cf. Lk
17:33 et passim) for others.
In the Catholic Church, and also in the
other Churches and Ecclesial
Communities, new forms of charitable
activity have arisen, while other, older
ones have taken on new life and energy.
In these new forms, it is often possible
to establish a fruitful link between
evangelization and works of charity.
Here I would clearly reaffirm what my
great predecessor John Paul II wrote in
his Encyclical
Sollicitudo Rei Socialis
[28] when he asserted the
readiness of the Catholic Church to
cooperate with the charitable agencies
of these Churches and Communities, since
we all have the same fundamental
motivation and look towards the same
goal: a true humanism, which
acknowledges that man is made in the
image of God and wants to help him to
live in a way consonant with that
dignity. His Encyclical
Ut Unum Sint emphasized
that the building of a better world
requires Christians to speak with a
united voice in working to inculcate
“respect for the rights and needs of
everyone, especially the poor, the lowly
and the defenseless.”
[29] Here I would like to
express my satisfaction that this appeal
has found a wide resonance in numerous
initiatives throughout the world.
The distinctiveness of the Church's charitable activity
31. The increase in diversified
organizations engaged in meeting various
human needs is ultimately due to the
fact that the command of love of
neighbor is inscribed by the Creator in
man's very nature. It is also a result
of the presence of Christianity in the
world, since Christianity constantly
revives and acts out this imperative, so
often profoundly obscured in the course
of time. The reform of paganism
attempted by the emperor Julian the
Apostate is only an initial example of
this effect; here we see how the power
of Christianity spread well beyond the
frontiers of the Christian faith. For
this reason, it is very important that
the Church's charitable activity
maintains all of its splendor and does
not become just another form of social
assistance. So what are the essential
elements of Christian and ecclesial
charity?
a) Following the example given in the parable of the
Good Samaritan, Christian charity is
first of all the simple response to
immediate needs and specific situations:
feeding the hungry, clothing the naked,
caring for and healing the sick,
visiting those in prison, etc. The
Church's charitable organizations,
beginning with those of Caritas
(at diocesan, national and international
levels), ought to do everything in their
power to provide the resources and above
all the personnel needed for this work.
Individuals who care for those in need
must first be professionally competent:
they should be properly trained in what
to do and how to do it, and committed to
continuing care. Yet, while professional
competence is a primary, fundamental
requirement, it is not of itself
sufficient. We are dealing with human
beings, and human beings always need
something more than technically proper
care. They need humanity. They need
heartfelt concern. Those who work for
the Church's charitable organizations
must be distinguished by the fact that
they do not merely meet the needs of the
moment, but they dedicate themselves to
others with heartfelt concern, enabling
them to experience the richness of their
humanity. Consequently, in addition to
their necessary professional training,
these charity workers need a “formation
of the heart”: they need to be led to
that encounter with God in Christ which
awakens their love and opens their
spirits to others. As a result, love of
neighbor will no longer be for them a
commandment imposed, so to speak, from
without, but a consequence deriving from
their faith, a faith which becomes
active through love (cf. Gal
5:6).
b) Christian charitable activity must be independent
of parties and ideologies. It is not a
means of changing the world
ideologically, and it is not at the
service of worldly stratagems, but it is
a way of making present here and now the
love which man always needs. The modern
age, particularly from the nineteenth
century on, has been dominated by
various versions of a philosophy of
progress whose most radical form is
Marxism. Part of Marxist strategy is the
theory of impoverishment: in a situation
of unjust power, it is claimed, anyone
who engages in charitable initiatives is
actually serving that unjust system,
making it appear at least to some extent
tolerable. This in turn slows down a
potential revolution and thus blocks the
struggle for a better world. Seen in
this way, charity is rejected and
attacked as a means of p |
