The breadth and originality of the pope's message is distorted by contemporary blinkers about Christianity, writes JOHN WATERS
IN RECENT days I have read a number of reports about the third encyclical of Pope Benedict XVI, all of which treated the pope as they would a philosopher, or political leader, who had delivered a warning to society about the need to mend itself. Inevitably, perhaps, reports of the encyclical’s contents tended to suggest the pope had “attacked” this or that – materialism, capitalism, ideology. Nowhere in the reportage I encountered did the meaning of the title, Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth), come across.
One problem is that the entity at the heart of the pope’s reflections is not treated as a rational phenomenon in our culture. It is all but impossible, therefore, for anything relating to Christianity to be accurately communicated because the language required to do so has been shunted into a siding. To write or talk about what the pope has actually written, and in a manner faithful to his intentions, is necessarily to invoke a language which immediately signals itself as the language of irrationality and superstition. And anyway, our societies do not recognise anything as true except what is politically and “scientifically” arrived at.
In this culture, the story of Christ may to a degree be respected as vaguely historical, but is regarded somewhat differently to “factual” history. Journalistically, Christ is treated with a mix of scepticism and pluralism-inspired “tolerance”.
Reports concerning Christianity therefore almost always implicitly separate questions of the content of Christian culture from its originating phenomenon. No journalist wants to risk isolation or worse by referring in an implicitly affirmative way to beliefs that are, by common consent in modern society, to be “tolerated” at most.
Everything of Christianity is predicated on the idea that Christ, the Son of God, died to save mankind, rose again on the third day, and continues to exist as a presence in earthly reality. If we do not accept this, why bother reporting what the pope says at all? If we report what the pope says and leave out the bits where he refers to this core meaning of Christianity, how can any of it make sense? In this encyclical, the pope demonstrates his extraordinary clarity on a range of counts. He has interesting things to say about markets and how they might be harnessed to a moral energy in the common good. Markets are not intrinsically bad, he says, but can be made so by ideology. He stresses that charity cannot be separated from justice, which it complements and transcends. It is not sufficient to give someone what is “mine” if I have prevented him having what is rightly “his”.
Christians have a responsibility to the common good, and in a global society this means the good of all humanity. The Church does not offer technical solutions, but seeks to draw attention to the nature and structure of man, the truth of the human condition.
Development must include spiritual alongside material growth. You cannot have Christianity without Christ. Christian charity is the face of Christ, the only truth there is. Love is not in our gift but is given when we open to it. There is no love, no hope, without Christ.
The Christian proposal presents Christ not as a story from history, but a fact of the present moment. He is here, now, and knowledge of this, yes, fact is what frees us to do what is “right”. His presence renders love safe. If we deny Him, all we have is sentiment, sanctimony and self-interest. There is no alternative route to conscience.
“A Christianity of charity without truth,” writes the pope, “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.”
There is a danger in digesting the contents of this complex encyclical by the logic of a culture which sees Christ, at best, as a teacher of social philosophy. Just as true Christianity liberates Christ from the sentimentalism and moralism that pursues social control rather than truth, the pope warns that charity not founded in Christ is defined by an “emotionalism that deprives it of relational and social content”.
To put this another way: only by venerating the Truth in our culture do we enable true charity to prosper. Without it there is only moral pressure, obligation and guilt. The Holy Father warns: “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 globalised society at difficult times like the present.” This is a succinct description of our situation.
Unhitched from truth, faith is reduced to ethics, which unravel when disconnected from their source. “Without God man neither knows which way to go, nor even understands who he is,” the pope tells us. The problem is that, in our culture now, this is liable to be heard as an opinion or a warning, rather than a simple statement of fact.