CARITAS IN VERITATE


LOVE IN TRUTH

EUROMITHRAIC VERSION

INTRODUCTION

1. Charity in truth is the principal driving force
behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity. Love —
caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous
and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace. It is a force that
has its origin in God, Eternal Love and Absolute Truth. Each person finds his
good by adherence to God's plan for him, in order to realize it fully: in this
plan, he finds his truth, and through adherence to this truth he becomes free .
To defend the truth, to articulate it with humility and conviction,
and to bear witness to it in life are therefore exacting and indispensable forms
of charity. Charity, in fact, “rejoices in the truth” . All
people feel the interior impulse to love authentically: love and truth never
abandon them completely, because these are the vocation planted by God in the
heart and mind of every human person. The search for love and truth is purified
and liberated by the Christ Lord from the impoverishment that our humanity brings
to it, and he reveals to us in all its fullness the initiative of love and the
plan for true life that God has prepared for us. In Christ, charity in truth
becomes the Face of his Person, a vocation for us to love our brothers and
sisters in the truth of his plan. Indeed, he himself is the Truth.

2. Charity is at the heart of the Christian social doctrine. Every
responsibility and every commitment spelt out by that doctrine is derived from
charity which, according to the teaching of Jesus, is the synthesis of the
entire Law. It gives real substance to the personal
relationship with God and with neighbour; it is the principle not only of
micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups)
but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones). For the
Christian, charity is everything because, as Saint John teaches “God is love”:
everything has its origin in
God's love, everything is shaped by it, everything is directed towards it.
Love is God's greatest gift to humanity, it is his promise and our hope.

I am aware of the ways in which charity has been and continues to be
misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being
misinterpreted, detached from ethical living and, in any event, undervalued. In
the social, juridical, cultural, political and economic fields — the contexts,
in other words, that are most exposed to this danger — it is easily dismissed as
irrelevant for interpreting and giving direction to moral responsibility. Hence
the need to link charity with truth not only in the sequence, pointed out by
Saint Paul, of veritas in caritate (truth in love), but also in the
inverse and complementary sequence of caritas in veritate (love in truth). Truth needs to
be sought, found and expressed within the “economy” of charity, but charity in
its turn needs to be understood, confirmed and practised in the light of truth.
In this way, not only do we do a service to charity enlightened by truth, but we
also help give credibility to truth, demonstrating its persuasive and
authenticating power in the practical setting of social living. This is a matter
of no small account today, in a social and cultural context which relativizes
truth, often paying little heed to it and showing increasing reluctance to
acknowledge its existence.

3. Through this close link with truth, charity can be recognized as an
authentic expression of humanity and as an element of fundamental importance in
human relations, including those of a public nature. Only in truth does
charity shine forth, only in truth can charity be authentically lived. Truth
is the light that gives meaning and value to charity. That light is both the
light of reason and the light of faith, through which the intellect attains to
the natural and supernatural truth of charity: it grasps its meaning as gift,
acceptance, and communion. Without truth, charity degenerates into
sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.
In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to
contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and
distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite. Truth frees charity
from the constraints of an emotionalism that deprives it of relational and
social content, and of a fideism that deprives it of human and universal
breathing-space. In the truth, charity reflects the personal yet public
dimension of faith in the God of the Christian Bible, who is both Agápe and
Lógos: Charity and Truth, Love and Word.

4. Because it is filled with truth, charity can be understood in the
abundance of its values, it can be shared and communicated. Truth, in
fact, is lógos which creates diá-logos, and hence communication
and communion. Truth, by enabling men and women to let go of their subjective
opinions and impressions, allows them to move beyond cultural and historical
limitations and to come together in the assessment of the value and substance of
things. Truth opens and unites our minds in the lógos of love: this is
the Christian proclamation and testimony of charity. In the present social and
cultural context, where there is a widespread tendency to relativize truth,
practising charity in truth helps people to understand that adhering to the
values of Christianity is not merely useful but essential for building a good
society and for true integral human development. A Christianity of charity
without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good
sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. In other words,
there would no longer be any real place for God in the world. Without truth,
charity is confined to a narrow field devoid of relations. It is excluded from
the plans and processes of promoting human development of universal range, in
dialogue between knowledge and praxis.

5. Charity is love received and given. It is “grace” (cháris).
Love has God as its source and comes down to us from the Christ Lord. It is creative love, through which we have
our being; it is redemptive love, through which we are recreated. Love is
revealed and made present by the Christ Lord and “poured into our
hearts through the Holy Spirit” . As the objects of God's love,
men and women become subjects of charity, they are called to make themselves
instruments of grace, so as to pour forth God's charity and to weave networks of
charity.

This dynamic of charity received and given is what gives rise to the Christian
social teaching, which is caritas in veritate in re sociali (love in truth in matters social): the
proclamation of the truth of Christ's love in society. This doctrine is a
service to charity, but its locus is truth. Truth preserves and expresses
charity's power to liberate in the ever-changing events of history. It is at the
same time the truth of faith and of reason, both in the distinction and also in
the convergence of those two cognitive fields. Development, social well-being,
the search for a satisfactory solution to the grave socio-economic problems
besetting humanity, all need this truth. What they need even more is that this
truth should be loved and demonstrated. Without truth, without trust and love
for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social
action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in
social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like
the present.

6. “Caritas in veritate” is the principle around which the Christian
social doctrine turns, a principle that takes on practical form in the criteria
that govern moral action. I would like to consider two of these in particular,
of special relevance to the commitment to development in an increasingly
globalized society: justice and the common good.

First of all, justice. Ubi societas, ibi ius (wherever society, there justice): every society draws up
its own system of justice. Charity goes beyond justice, because to love
is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice,
which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason
of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without
first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with
charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not
extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to
charity: justice is inseparable from charity, and intrinsic to it.
Justice is the primary way of charity or, “the minimum
measure” of it, an integral part of the love “in deed and in truth”
. On the one hand, charity
demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of
individuals and peoples. It strives to build the earthly city according
to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes
it in the logic of giving and forgiving. The earthly city is
promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even
greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy
and communion. Charity always manifests the Right Lord's love in human relationships as
well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in
the world.

7. Another important consideration is the common good. To love someone is to
desire that person's good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the
good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the
common good. It is the good of “all of us”, made up of individuals, families and
intermediate groups who together constitute society. It is a good
that is sought not for its own sake, but for the people who belong to the social
community and who can only really and effectively pursue their good within it.
To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of
justice and charity. To take a stand for the common good is on the one hand
to be solicitous for, and on the other hand to avail oneself of, that complex of
institutions that give structure to the life of society, juridically, civilly,
politically and culturally, making it the pólis, or “city”. The more we
strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours,
the more effectively we love them. Every Christian is called to practise this
charity, in a manner corresponding to his vocation and according to the degree
of influence he wields in the pólis. This is the institutional path — we
might also call it the political path — of charity, no less excellent and
effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbour directly,
outside the institutional mediation of the pólis. When animated by
charity, commitment to the common good has greater worth than a merely secular
and political stand would have. Like all commitment to justice, it has a place
within the testimony of divine charity that paves the way for eternity through
temporal action. Man's earthly activity, when inspired and sustained by charity,
contributes to the building of the universal city of the Rightlord, which is the
goal of the history of the human family. In an increasingly globalized society,
the common good and the effort to obtain it cannot fail to assume the dimensions
of the whole human family, that is to say, the community of peoples and nations,
in such a way as to shape the earthly city in unity and peace, rendering
it to some degree an anticipation and a prefiguration of the undivided city
of the Rightlord.

8. In
Populorum Progressio (the encyclical released by Pope Paul VI in 1967) is illuminated the great theme of the
development of peoples with the splendour of truth and the gentle light of
Christ's charity. It teaches that life under the Christ Lord ('life in Christ') is the first and principal
factor of development and that we are entrusted with the task of
travelling the path of development with all our heart and all our intelligence,
that is to say with the ardour of charity and the wisdom of truth. It is the
primordial truth of the Right Lord's love, grace bestowed upon us, that opens our lives to
gift and makes it possible to hope for a “development of the whole man and of
all men”, to hope for progress “from less human conditions to those
which are more human”, obtained by overcoming the difficulties that
are inevitably encountered along the way.

I express my
conviction that Populorum Progressio deserves to be considered “the
Rerum Novarum (the encyclical released by Pope Leo XIII in 1891 which is the foundation of modern Christian social teaching) of the present age”, shedding light upon humanity's journey
towards unity.
I intend to revisit its teachings on integral human development and take my place within
the path that they marked out, as did Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (the encyclical released by Pope John Paul II in 1987) before me so as to apply them to the present moment.

9. Love in truth — caritas in veritate — is a great challenge for the
Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized. The
risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and
nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that
would give rise to truly human development. Only in charity, illumined by the
light of reason and faith, is it possible to pursue development goals that
possess a more humane and humanizing value. The sharing of goods and resources,
from which authentic development proceeds, is not guaranteed by merely technical
progress and relationships of utility, but by the potential of love that
overcomes evil with good , opening up the path towards
reciprocity of consciences and liberties.

The Church does not have technical solutions to offer and does
not claim “to interfere in any way in the politics of States.” She
does, however, have a mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and
circumstance, for a society that is attuned to man, to his dignity, to his
vocation. Without truth, it is easy to fall into an empiricist and sceptical
view of life, incapable of rising to the level of praxis because of a lack of
interest in grasping the values — sometimes even the meanings — with which to
judge and direct it. Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth,
which alone is the guarantee of freedom and of
the possibility of integral human development. For this reason the Church
searches for truth, proclaims it tirelessly and recognizes it wherever it is
manifested. This mission of truth is something that the Church can never
renounce. Her social doctrine is a particular dimension of this proclamation: it
is a service to the truth which sets us free. Open to the truth, from whichever
branch of knowledge it comes, the Christian social doctrine receives it,
assembles into a unity the fragments in which it is often found, and mediates it
within the constantly changing life-patterns of the society of peoples and
nations.