Papal Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, available online

You can download Pope Benedict's new encyclical, Caritas in Veritate on the papal website. I plan to read most of it tonight at my weekly hour of Eucharistic adoration. I'm sure studying it in the Real Presence of Our Eucharistic Lord can't help but increase my understanding.

I've only read the introduction, but I'm excited at what Pope Benedict is articulating. Charity and truth, he says, are so intimately connected they cannot be separated. When charity is divided from truth it "degenerates into sentimentality." The relativism that results is a "fatal risk" threatening love that distorts it to the degree "it comes to mean the opposite."

We can certainly see this in the abortion debate where those promoting "choice" deny the biological truth of life's beginning. Their "charity" toward women is cold indeed, based on lies and distortions. And so the reality becomes "the opposite," not love but hatred for the unborn child in the womb who, even when fully developed and easily recognizable as a member of the human family, is treated as so much trash. The end result for the woman is hatred and rejection of both her unborn baby and her very self. Her fertility and her natural gift of nurturing become a curse rather than a blessing. Self-hatred is the result. That explains a lot, for example radical feminism's strident anger, its connections to lesbianism, and its sublimation and hatred for all things feminine.

But back to the pope's introduction - in the social sphere, the pope says, truth is essential not only to establishing a just society but a charitable one. "Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is 'mine' to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is 'his', what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot 'give' what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice....justice is inseparable from charity, and intrinsic to it."

Thus, charity begins with justice, but never ends there. In the broader context it desires "the common good" which "is a great challenge for the Church in a world that is becoming progressively and pervasively globalized." The pope makes it clear that the Church does not interfere "in the politics of States." But instead she has a "mission of truth to accomplish, in every time and circumstance" which is at the "service of truth." Charity, truth, and justice -- a subject worth a lifetime of reflection.

To be continued.