Apr 4 Fri
Charity without truth?
Pointers from the Encyclical ‘Caritas in Veritate’ of Benedict XVI.
Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled arbitrarily. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. (no. 3).
Fideism: thinking that faith is independent of reason.
Truth frees charity from the slavery of emotionalism; Fideism deprives Truth of human and universal breathing space. (no. 3).
Charity without God.
A Christianity of ‘charity without truth’ would be more or less a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance. Thus, there would no longer be any real place for God in the world. (no. 4).
The Church does not go into politics.
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…. This mission of truth is something that the Church can never renounce. (no. 9).
The Church is for man’s true progress.
Progress, in its origin and essence, is first and foremost a vocation: “In the plan of God, every man is called upon to develop and fulfill himself, for every life is a vocation.” This is what gives legitimacy to the Church's involvement in the whole question of development.” (no. 16).
Intellectual property.
On the part of rich countries, there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care. (no. 22)
Integral progress.
Progress of a merely economic and technological kind is insufficient. Development needs, above all, to be true and integral. The mere fact of emerging from economic backwardness, though positive in itself, does not resolve the complex issues of human advancement. (no. 23).
Job insecurity.
When the uncertainty over working conditions, caused by mobility and deregulation, becomes endemic, tends to create new forms of psychological instability, giving rise to difficulty in forging coherent plans for one’s life, including marriage. This leads to situations of human decline, to say nothing of the waste of social resources. (no. 25).
Man, the first asset.
I would like to remind everyone, especially governments engaged in boosting the world's economic and social assets, that the primary capital to be safeguarded and valued is man, the human person in his or her integrity: “Man is the source, the focus and the aim of all economic and social life” (no. 25).
Fight against hunger.
In the global era, the elimination of world hunger has also become a requirement for safeguarding the peace and stability of the planet. Hunger is not so much dependent on lack of material things as on shortage of social resources, the most important of which are institutional. (no. 27).
Life and development.
Openness to life is at the center of true development. When a society moves towards the denial or suppression of life, it ends up no longer finding the necessary motivation and energy to strive for man's true good. (no. 28).
New forms of slavery.
When man is far from God, he is unsettled and ill at ease. The new forms of slavery like drugs and the lack of hope into which so many people fall, can be explained not only in sociological and psychological terms but also in essentially spiritual terms. The emptiness of a soul that feels abandoned, despite the availability of many therapies for body and mind, leads to suffering.
There cannot be holistic development and universal common good unless people's spiritual and moral welfare is taken into account, considered in their totality as body and soul. (n. 76).
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