Article: Caritas in Veritate: A Symposium

MICHAEL NOVAK, FATHER JAMES SCHALL, S.J., & ROBERT ROYAL

Benedict’s latest encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, appeared in Rome yesterday. Digesting this document will take no little time, but several of the regular writers for The Catholic Thing have looked over the text and offer here some brief, early observations.

Michael Novak

Just after Vatican Council II, Joseph Ratzinger (now Benedict XVI) joined others in founding a school of thought called "Communio Theology." The inner life of the Revealed God is a Trinity, a Communion of Persons. So should be the inner life of every image of God, every human person.

Thus, the four main ideas in the new Encyclical Caritas in Veritate are communion, gift, caritas, and truth. Undoubtedly, this is the most theological, most specifically Catholic, of all social encyclicals since 1891. Its aim is to show the divine context of political economy and the drama of its upward-leaping tongues of fire: its inspiration, its aspiration.

As Abraham Lincoln pointed out, slavery in the United States could not be overcome by a Lockean fear or self-interest alone, but must be married to a larger and more generous grasp of the reality of the other. Progress and human development always depend upon an upward pull.

Benedict XVI sees political economy today caught in a worldwide updraft, whose possibilities we must read accurately. The world's peoples are becoming ever more pushed together, misunderstanding each other, rubbing against each other. They are called to be one. More and more often, they learn from each other ideas of human rights, protest, free association, free speech, justice, fairness.

The world, in short, groans for inner communion. And some of the most important secrets of human communion spring from the realities of Person and Communion in the free, gratuitous Creator of all. Persons, even in communion with one another, subsist in their uniqueness.

In the distinctively Catholic view of the cosmos, everything begins in the inner personal, communal life of the Godhead. This tallies with our own personal experience that the two most "divine" experiences in our lives, the two that are most God-like, are the kind of love that is perfect communion with another, and the sweet sense of self-control and personal responsibility in moments of great stress. ("Confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.")

From this, the Catholic vision concludes that "Everything we look upon is gift." Creation itself flows from a superabundant gift. A shopkeeper who moves into a neighborhood to bake fresh bread and sweets in the morning brings a great gift to one's life. Those who spend their lives bringing such goods to one another bear gifts, especially if their human manner in so doing is kind and considerate. The pope asks us to look at economic life in the light of gift-giving, even when it is conducted according to conventions of exchange and price. It is the human generosity of the thing -- the human dimension of commerce -- that should not be lost sight of, if the world is to remain (or to become) more human.

James V. Schall, S. J.

After reading Caritas in Veritate, I said to myself that the general Catholic and world population has no idea of the brilliance of this pope. Of course, I said that when I finished Spe Salvi, Deus Caritas Est, Jesus of Nazareth, and about a zillion other writings by Pope Ratzinger. God must be amused that the brightest man of our time is the Pope of Rome.

Though I have always admired him, I have considered Paul VI's Populorum Progressio to be the most nearly ideological of all papal social encyclicals. Caritas in Veritate, which commemorates Paul VI's document forty years later, I must confess, regards it as one of the best. Aside from not touching on labor union corruption or the potential totalitarian nature of the ecology movement, this latest encyclical is simply great. While noting obvious problems, it is amazingly positive about business, its potential, varieties, and openness to ethics.

But the heart of this encyclical is something else. It is a concise re-presentation of what a human person is in his relation to God, the earth, to another person, to the family, to what it is we are meant for, both in this world and in our eternal destiny.

The proposal about a better world international institution goes back to Robert Maynard Hutchins and Jacques Maritain, to the Hague Conventions, to the League of Nations, and even the Holy Roman Empire. The pope defines the need for authority at a higher level, but with sufficient restrictions to prevent it from being either a world government or a tyranny. The American Founding Fathers probably were more concerned with the dangers of tyranny, as was Augustine. Our experience with how easy it is for international institutions to become ideological instruments needs great structural attention, especially if this international authority is armed to enforce itself.

But the heart of this encyclical is something else. It is a concise re-presentation of what a human person is in his relation to God, the earth, to another person, to the family, to what it is we are meant for, both in this world and in our eternal destiny. Everything belongs together, but in a coherent order. Catholicism remains quietly committed to doing what can be morally and ethically done at every level, even in the worst situations.

Benedict is eloquent on the defects of modernity, but also on its potential. Like Spe Salvi, which I think is a greater document, it places man within this world in such a way that he is not imprisoned within it. I particularly loved Benedict's initial reminder that everything about us is gift-oriented. As he already indicated in Deus Caritas Est, every political and economic institution needs to be both just and open to what is more than justice.

The Trinitarian and relational understanding of being in this encyclical shows the relation between our head and our deeds. Thinking properly is a precondition to acting properly. Of course, Aquinas said this long ago, but it is nice to see it here. And this pope is a God-oriented person. He knows that what lies behind all our aberrations is what we think of God.

The genius of this document appears in its very title. No "charity" exists without "truth," All truth leads to putting love in our being and in our world, but in the right order. "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" (#4). It needed to be said.

Robert Royal

Charity is a much used word in the Catholic tradition. After 2000 years, you would think that virtually everything that could be said about it has been. But that would be to judge by mere human standards, and to underestimate the Holy Spirit -- and Papa Ratzinger.

If there has been a more pointed and simultaneously expansive treatment of Christian love in the encyclical tradition of the last century or so than we find in the first few pages of Caritas in Veritate, I have not stumbled across it. As we have come to expect from this pope, brilliant aperçus appear as he goes about his business, seemingly without effort:

• When you consider the alternatives -- the cold perspective of scientific materialism, the sad narrowness of homo economicus, the grey pragmatism of modern politics, the weightless inconsequence of cultural relativism -- even a pope groping around for how to speak about love, God's love, in every dimension of life, with an unshakeable faith that it's there, waiting, why, it's almost enough to give you hope.

  "Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality."
• "Truth , in fact, is lógos which creates diá-logos, and hence communication and communion."
• "Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth, which alone is the guarantee of freedom (cf. Jn 8:32) and of the possibility of integral 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."

These few sentences light up so much of the landscape that Benedict wants to explore, that they come close to encapsulating, in themselves, this entire encyclical.

You do not need to be a literary critic, however, to notice a change in voice as the encyclical turns from charity to more strictly social concerns. Indeed, it's clear that there are several voices in that part of the text, sometimes working at cross purposes, sometimes almost impossible to decipher -- very odd in a document by a man with such a powerful and synthesizing intellect (and unusual even for the typically dense language of an encyclical). Professional Vatican watchers have already begun to parse out which passages may be traced to which of a number of more or less acknowledged consultants. It's an important pastime, because anything that seems to be the voice of the Successor of Peter bears serious consideration.

But despite the sometimes irritating fits and starts, assertions, qualifications, doubtful formulas, and doubling back, perhaps ultimately all that is not so very important. Because Benedict has put on the table a wide range of questions -- wider than any other world figure possibly could -- that will have to be worked through in the coming years. And just to raise certain questions already enriches the conversation on several current crises.

To be clear, it would be a great mistake to approach this encyclical in terms of left versus right, as has often been the reductive, politicized way of reading social encyclicals. Though Benedict says that Populorum Progressio, a controversial encyclical written at an inopportune moment in the 1960s, is the "new Rerum Novarum," his own encyclical is not at all ideological. Don't believe anyone who simply tells you the pope has endorsed some political position. A pope has to be the pope of everyone, and he of all the public figures on the world stage must reflect the legitimate concerns of workers and employers, developed and developing nations, industries and environmentalists, and many others.

The Church is not some uber-school of business, sociology, economics, or political science And previous popes as well as this one are quick to point out that the Church has no technical solutions to propose. It has some general principles -- ultimately the overarching perspective that everything begins and ends in charity -- that it seeks to introduce into every nook and cranny of the questions that emerge in our wayward pilgrimage through this life.

When you consider the alternatives -- the cold perspective of scientific materialism, the sad narrowness of homo economicus, the grey pragmatism of modern politics, the weightless inconsequence of cultural relativism -- even a pope groping around for how to speak about love, God's love, in every dimension of life, with an unshakeable faith that it's there, waiting, why, it's almost enough to give you hope.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Michael Novak, Father James V. Schall, S.J., Robert Royal. "Caritas in Veritate: A Symposium." The Catholic Thing (July 8, 2009).

Reprinted with permission from The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@thecatholicthing.org.

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THE AUTHOR

Michael Novak, the George Frederick Jewett Scholar in Religion, Philosophy and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute was the winner of the 1994 Templeton Prize. He has written some 27 books including, most recently, No One Sees God: The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers, Washington's God, as well as The Universal Hunger for Liberty: Why the Clash of Civilizations Is Not Inevitable, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, Tell Me Why: A Father Answers His Daughter's Questions About God (with his daughter Jana Novak), and On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding.

THE AUTHOR

Father James V. Schall, S.J., is Professor of Political Philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of many books in the areas of social issues, spirituality and literature including The Mind That Is Catholic: Philosophical & Political Essays, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs: Teaching, Writing, Playing, Believing, Lecturing, Philosophizing, Singing, Dancing; Roman Catholic Political Philosophy; The Order of Things; The Regensburg Lecture; The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking; Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes; Another Sort of Learning, Sum Total Of Human Happiness, and A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning.

THE AUTHOR

Robert Royal is editor-in-chief of The Catholic Thing, and president of the Faith & Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. Among his books are The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century: A Comprehensive Global History, Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality, The Pope's Army: 500 Years of the Papal Swiss Guard, 1492 and All That: Political Manipulations of History, The Virgin and the Dynamo: The Use and Abuse of Religion in Environmental Debates, and most recently, The God That Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West. Robert Royal is on the advisory board of the Catholic Education Resource Center.

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