Fr. Aidan Nichols, O.P., who has written several books for Ignatius Press (most recently,
Lovely Like Jerusalem: The Fulfillment of the Old Testament in
Christ and the Church), is one of my favorite contemporary theologians. He reflects on Caritas in Veritate in the July 17th edition of The Catholic Herald:
For Benedict, charity needs illumining by both reason and faith (3; 9),
two distinct yet convergent ways of knowing. Not surprisingly, then,
there is more genuine theological doctrine in the new encyclical.
Sometimes it is upfront, sometimes it is expressed in a coded way which
is one of the reasons people may find this letter difficult to read -
something which certainly could not be said about Paul VI's enviably
clear and far more straightforward document. The upfront theology is
easy to spot. Benedict's thought about social engagement is
Christological and even (54) Trinitarian. Let me take some examples of
his Christocentrism, itself a sine qua non of genuinely Christian
thought. The "charity in truth" of his title is the human face of the
divine person of the incarnate Word (1). It reflects the God who is
simultaneously Logos and Agape (3). If "humanism" is what you are
looking for, only Christ is the revelation of what humanity is (18), a
passage indebted to Pope John Paul II's 1979 letter Redemptor Hominis
(which itself initiated a more Christocentric reading of the Second
Vatican Council's Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern
World, Gaudium et Spes). The Church's social doctrine points,
therefore, to the "New Man", Christ "the principle of the charity that
'never ends' " (12).
Like Benedict's earlier letter Spe Salvi (2007), Caritas in Veritate is also eschatological, and this is another litmus test of thoroughly revelation-grounded thinking. If global society could achieve unity and peace it would, to that extent, prefigure the final City of God to which the Church directs her own longing (7). The cosmic nature in which human society is set and which it inevitably transforms will be re-capitulated in Christ at the end of time (48): a difficult concept but essential for any distinctively Christian attitude towards the environment.
Moving on to the "coded" theology, this concerns chiefly the idea of gift or gratuitousness (34; 37; 39). Gift theory entered sociology in the Twenties and reached philosophical theology some decades later. The practice of giving, or gift exchange, can be seen as a signal of transcendence, and a clue to how to understand the doctrine of creation. That reminded theologians of a theme of ancient Christian thought, the self-diffusiveness of the divine goodness, itself with a background in the best paganism (the gods are not envious). Benedict uses a low-key version of gift theory to promote the idea that connatural with the divine plan are forms of economic activity with a built-in element of the gratuitous: in effect, preferential treatment by business in dealing with the poor. There is a touch of the divine about it.
This larger injection of theology indicates one of the things Benedict is seeking to do in this encyclical, which is to shoe-horn papal social doctrine into tradition with a capital "T". In other words, he wants to argue that, thanks to its consonance with elements in Scripture and the Fathers, and its affinities with confessors or martyrs who died for defending the demands of the common good, these documents, whose continuity before and after the Second Vatican Council he stresses, cannot be regarded as merely prudential or exclusively natural in character (12). It will be interesting to see how far this line of thought is allowed to go. Pope John Paul II's first encyclical began a process of linking the content of Church comment on social issues more closely with key doctrines. But what is now being suggested is that the authority of the apostolic Paradosis in some way also covers social encyclicals of this kind.
Like Benedict's earlier letter Spe Salvi (2007), Caritas in Veritate is also eschatological, and this is another litmus test of thoroughly revelation-grounded thinking. If global society could achieve unity and peace it would, to that extent, prefigure the final City of God to which the Church directs her own longing (7). The cosmic nature in which human society is set and which it inevitably transforms will be re-capitulated in Christ at the end of time (48): a difficult concept but essential for any distinctively Christian attitude towards the environment.
Moving on to the "coded" theology, this concerns chiefly the idea of gift or gratuitousness (34; 37; 39). Gift theory entered sociology in the Twenties and reached philosophical theology some decades later. The practice of giving, or gift exchange, can be seen as a signal of transcendence, and a clue to how to understand the doctrine of creation. That reminded theologians of a theme of ancient Christian thought, the self-diffusiveness of the divine goodness, itself with a background in the best paganism (the gods are not envious). Benedict uses a low-key version of gift theory to promote the idea that connatural with the divine plan are forms of economic activity with a built-in element of the gratuitous: in effect, preferential treatment by business in dealing with the poor. There is a touch of the divine about it.
This larger injection of theology indicates one of the things Benedict is seeking to do in this encyclical, which is to shoe-horn papal social doctrine into tradition with a capital "T". In other words, he wants to argue that, thanks to its consonance with elements in Scripture and the Fathers, and its affinities with confessors or martyrs who died for defending the demands of the common good, these documents, whose continuity before and after the Second Vatican Council he stresses, cannot be regarded as merely prudential or exclusively natural in character (12). It will be interesting to see how far this line of thought is allowed to go. Pope John Paul II's first encyclical began a process of linking the content of Church comment on social issues more closely with key doctrines. But what is now being suggested is that the authority of the apostolic Paradosis in some way also covers social encyclicals of this kind.
Read the entire piece. Also see:
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