Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth)

Caritas in Veritate (Charity in Truth)
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Thursday, July 30, 2009

Again and again Pope Benedict XVI focuses on the truth. Whatever it may be, most of us are afraid of the truth. If we face the truth directly we are free; otherwise we become slaves to half-truths and it becomes part of our lives when we view reality. If we are too busy to share and speak the truth: lies will prevail.

Thankfully, renowned writer George Weigel, “The Catholic Difference” hit the nail on the head in his article in the Los Angeles The Tidings, July 24/09.
Benedict XVI and the Truth about Charity

... sundry partisans sought to capture Caritas in Veritate as a weapon with which to bolster the Obama administration’s economic, health care and social welfare policies… self-consciously progressive Catholic magazines, bloggers and freelances, many of whom would have preferred to eat ground glass rather than see Joseph Ratzinger as Bishop of Rome, blasting those who dared raise questions about the encyclical’s intellectual provenance and some of its formulations.
Where were these stout-hearted crusaders when the going was tough – when, for example, the pope was under fire for his Regensburg Lecture on Islam, or for attempting to reconcile four excommunicated Lefebvrist bishops to the Church?...

In any event, there is an important theme in Caritas in Veritate that were all Catholics to take it seriously, might have measurable impact on the American culture wars and on the U.S. Church’s internal struggle to define Catholic identity – and that is the encyclical insistence several times, THAT THE LIFE ISSUES ARE SOCIAL JUSTICE ISSUES, so that Catholic social doctrine includes the Church’s defense of life from conception until natural death.

This teaching began with John Paul II’s 1995 encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life), in which John Paul warned that democracies risk to become “tyrant states” if moral wrongs are legally declared “rights.”

The Cardinal Ratzinger went a step further in his homily at the Mass for the Election of a Pope, on April 18, 2005. THERE RATZINGER WARNED AGAINST A “DICTATORSHIP OF RELATIVISM” in which coercive power would be used to enforce the by-products of a culture skeptical about the human capacity to know the moral truth of anything; by-products such as ABORTION-ON-DEMAND, EUTHANASIA, AND GAY-MARRIAGE.”…

Caritas in Veritate has now put Catholic legislators and politicians on notice: you can’t duck the life issues, or vote the wrong way on the life issues, by hiding behind an alleged commitment to the Church’s social justice agenda...

That is what Roe v. Wade and its judicial progeny have done in the United States; that is why laws protective of life from conception until natural death are an imperative of social justice; that is why “common ground” efforts to lower the incidence of abortion, while welcome, are inadequate from the point of view of Catholic social doctrine – the moral equivalent of saying, in 1955, “OK, let’s see if we can’t get you black folks into one or two segregated restaurants in every county.”…

George H. Kubeck, The encyclical of this Pope speaks to America. How blessed we are!