Caritas in Veritate: The Truth about Humanity

This is part of a series by Jennifer Roback Morse. This installment focuses on the introductory chapter.

Many commentators read Pope Benedict XVI’s Caritas in Veritate as if it were a think tank white paper, and ask whether he endorses their particular policy preferences. It is a mistake to read the encyclical in this way. A close look at the document’s introduction makes plain that Benedict is not a man of the Left or of the Right: He is a non-ideological man of God.

The opening sentence soars above any political platform: “Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal force behind authentic development of every person and of all humanity.” This is our first clue that we are not dealing with a technocrat or ideologue. “Authentic development” points away from the deliberations of politicians and policy wonks. Benedict does not define his objectives in material terms, such as maximizing GDP. Neither does he conduct focus groups or consult experts to figure out what people want. Rather in this encyclical, Benedict reflects on what it means to be authentically human and what the human good actually entails. That is to say, he seeks the truth about man in society.

http://www.acton.org/press/caritas_in_veritate_truth_about_humanity.php

Freedom, solidarity, subsidiarity

Martin Fitzgerald

Pope Benedict XVI's new encyclical continues 120 years of Catholic social doctrine based on the dignity of the human person and his participation in society.

To understand Pope Benedict XVI’s recent encyclical, Caritas in veritatem (Charity in truth), you need to know something about the history of ideas. This is not a document which the Pope tossed off after a couple of months of reflection. It is the latest instalment of at least 120 years of major documents from popes commenting on social trends especially in the field of economics. Broadly speaking, this is called the “social doctrine” of the Catholic Church. It is a collection of principles governing social development while still respecting the integrity of the human person.

http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/Freedom_solidarity_subsidiarity/

Liberal academic Edward Green: the Pope is right about Aids and condom

According to Harvard professor Edward Green, Benedict XVI tells the truth about fighting the plague of the millennium in Africa: fidelity and abstinence promotion are better weapons than preservatives.

During his latest visit to Africa pope Benedict XVI told the journalists: “Condom distribution is not the solution to Aids, on the contrary they worsen it”. An editorial comment of The Lancet retorted that the Pope's comment was “outrageous and wildly inaccurate”. Based on your experience about the issue, is the Pope right or wrong?

http://www.tempi.it/007320-liberal-academic-edward-green-pope-right-about-aids-and-condom?page=0

Beauty and the Pope

Pope Benedict's homily in St. Patrick's cathedral followed the time-honored and venerable Catholic custom of using art as a catechetical tool. He first noted the historical significance of St. Patrick's: "Perhaps more than any other church in the United States, this place is known and loved as "a house of prayer for all peoples" (cf. Is 56:7; Mk 11:17). Each day thousands of men, women and children enter its doors and find peace within its walls. ... Archbishop Hughes (who built St. Pat's) wanted this cathedral to remind the young Church in America of the great spiritual tradition to which it was heir, and to inspire it to bring the best of that heritage to the building up of Christ’s body in this land."
He invited the congregation to look around the cathedral.

I would like to draw your attention to a few aspects of this beautiful structure which I think can serve as a starting point for a reflection on our particular vocations within the unity of the Mystical Body.

The first has to do with the stained glass windows, which flood the interior with mystic light. From the outside, those windows are dark, heavy, even dreary. But once one enters the church, they suddenly come alive; reflecting the light passing through them, they reveal all their splendor. Many writers -- here in America we can think of Nathaniel Hawthorne -- have used the image of stained glass to illustrate the mystery of the Church herself. It is only from the inside, from the experience of faith and ecclesial life, that we see the Church as she truly is: flooded with grace, resplendent in beauty, adorned by the manifold gifts of the Spirit.

This grand tradition of the arts as teaching tools fell into disrepute during the Reformation, and took another, almost fatal blow after Vatican II. But the human need for beauty can not be suppressed or diverted. Benedict is showing us the way forward by focusing on the timeless realities of the human experience and the deepest needs of the human soul.

Benedict XVI on the social dimension of the sexual abuse scandals

I'm proud of Pope Benedict. He has forthrightly talked about the sexual abuse scandals, saying that he is deeply ashamed. In his address to the US Bishops, he urges them to continue to do all they can to protect children. However, he goes on to stress the social context in which these abuses took place:

Children deserve to grow up with a healthy understanding of sexuality and its proper place in human relationships. They should be spared the degrading manifestations and the crude manipulation of sexuality so prevalent today. They have a right to be educated in authentic moral values rooted in the dignity of the human person. This brings us back to our consideration of the centrality of the family and the need to promote the Gospel of life. What does it mean to speak of child protection when pornography and violence can be viewed in so many homes through media widely available today?

Putting the child at the center, and asking what is owed to the child, gives us an expanded sense of responsibility to the young. I've often thought it was a little tacky for the sex-saturated media to pile on the Catholic Church for harboring pedophiles, while the media pumps sexually explicit messages into the culture for the consumption of ever younger and more vulnerable persons. Here is Benedict:

We need to reassess urgently the values underpinning society, so that a sound moral formation can be offered to young people and adults alike. All have a part to play in this task - not only parents, religious leaders, teachers and catechists, but the media and entertainment industries as well. Indeed, every member of society can contribute to this moral renewal and benefit from it. Truly caring about young people and the future of our civilization means recognizing our responsibility to promote and live by the authentic moral values which alone enable the human person to flourish. It falls to you, as pastors modelled upon Christ, the Good Shepherd, to proclaim this message loud and clear, and thus to address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores. Moreover, by acknowledging and confronting the problem when it occurs in an ecclesial setting, you can give a lead to others, since this scourge is found not only within your Dioceses, but in every sector of society. It calls for a determined, collective response.

Benedict XVI on Marriage

When Benedict spoke to the US Bishops, he stressed the importance of marriage.

To some young Catholics, the sacramental bond of marriage seems scarcely distinguishable from a civil bond, or even a purely informal and open-ended arrangement to live with another person. Hence we have an alarming decrease in the number of Catholic marriages in the United States together with an increase in cohabitation, in which the Christ-like mutual self-giving of spouses, sealed by a public promise to live out the demands of an indissoluble lifelong commitment, is simply absent. In such circumstances, children are denied the secure environment that they need in order truly to flourish as human beings, and society is denied the stable building blocks which it requires if the cohesion and moral focus of the community are to be maintained.

This is the beauty of Catholic teaching. People often believe Catholic teaching is nothing but a set of prohibitions. But, here, Benedict stresses what the Church is positively in favor of: Marriage is more than a civil union, more than a contract. Marriage is the lifelong commitment of mutual self-giving. You can't have that in cohabitation or in a union that is understood to be temporary.

Artificial Reproductive Technology

Ryan Anderson has an important post on Artificial Reproductive Technology over on the First Things blog. What are the public arguments we can offer on the subject, not of embryo destruction, or cloning, or freezing of embryos? Summarizing Benedict XVI's address to the Congregation of the Faith,, Anderson says:

Benedict argued that non-conjugal reproduction such as in vitro fertilization had created “new problems”—the freezing of human embryos, for instance, and the selective abortion of medically implanted embryos, together with pre-implantation diagnosis, embryonic stem-cell research, and attempts at human cloning.

He argued that these “clearly show that with extra-corporeal artificial fertilization, the barrier that served to protect human dignity has been violated. When human beings in the weakest and most defenseless stage of their lives are selected, abandoned, killed, or used as mere ‘biological material,’ how can it be denied that they are no longer being treated as ‘someone’ but rather as ‘something,’ hence, calling into question the very concept of human dignity?”

Worth noticing is that his public argument is about the consequences of assisted reproductive technologies, how they result in embryo killing, freezing, and other abuses. The argument never touches on any objection to IVF per se—how the creation of new human beings in this way is itself wrong.

The new problem we face, according to Ryan Anderson is:

What we need is to build robust, publicly accessible arguments about procreation and the moral norms that govern it. We need to develop deeper discussions about the meaning and nature of parenthood, gender, and biology. And to the arguments we already have about the killing of embryos, we need to add arguments about the conditions under which we may bring those embryos into existence in the first place.

Read the whole post here.