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For Catholics, charity is 'guiding principle' |
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By Maria Wiering
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Tuesday, 14 July 2009 |
 Robert Kennedy is a professor in the Catholic studies and business programs at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul and is an expert on Catholic social thought. The following excerpts are from his interview with The Catholic Spirit about the main themes in the new encyclical.
“For the Catholic social tradition, the fundamental social tradition is not justice, it’s charity. Charity has to be the guiding principle for everything we are concerned about in the social tradition. Charity is love, willing the good for the other and so on, but charity has to be informed by truth. [The pope says:] ‘Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell.’
“What we’ve got here is [Pope] Benedict playing out one of his principal themes of this pontificate — he thinks one of the major challenges to Christianity today is relativism. . . . The challenge of the church today is to defend even the very idea of truth in a relativistic culture. What he says, and he says it very eloquently here, is as Christians we are not animated principally, or in the first place, by a concern for justice, but a concern for charity. If we have charity, we can’t be indifferent to justice issues, but if we’re only concerned with justice, we can be very indifferent to charity.
“None of us really wants to live in a just world, because if we live in a just world, we get what we deserve. We want to live in a merciful and charitable world. Again, that charity has to be informed by truth, which means for Benedict that we have to know who and what the human person is, what that person’s destiny is, and what’s truly fulfilling for that person. Only then can we wholeheartedly will the good for another person.
“If we don’t have that orientation to truth, then we find ourselves, as Benedict says, in the situation of a lot of modern psychology, and that is we just want people to feel good — we’re looking for emotional well-being, not true well-being, but just emotional well-being. . . . What Benedict is suggesting is that without truth, charity is just a vague desire to help people feel good. If it’s informed by truth, about who the human person is, and what that human person’s destiny is, then it shifts directions entirely.
“[Pope Benedict] has a comment I thought was very memorable. He said: ‘As society becomes ever more globalized, it makes us neighbors but does not make us brothers.’ That’s just vintage Benedict. There’s this sharp insight — we’ve become closer neighbors by globalization, but we haven’t become brothers. And it’s appropriate for human dignity that we work on becoming brothers. That’s a great idea.”
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