Caritas in Veritate: Good News for Society

Introduction¹

Announced for 2007 to mark the fortieth anniversary of Populorum Progressio (1967) of Pope Paul VI and the twentieth of Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (1987) of Blessed John Paul II, Caritas in Veritate² was originally intended to celebrate the memory of these two encyclicals, especially for their treatment of human development. It would in turn take up the issue of development in the new and changed situation of a globalized world, for the social issues that beset humanity in the days of Popes Paul and John Paul had now become global.

The economic crisis of 2008–09 prompted Pope Benedict XVI to treat the ethics of economics in greater detail in the context of human development. This somewhat delayed the promulgation of the encyclical; but on the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul (June 29, 2009), the Pope signed the new social encyclical, and in the month of St. Benedict (on July 7, 2009) it was promulgated just before the meeting of the G-8 in L’Aquila, Italy.

Like many others beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum of 1891, Caritas in Veritate is a social encyclical.³ In it the insights of theology, philosophy, economics, ecology, and politics have been harnessed to formulate a coherent social teaching that places the human person with his total and integral development at the center of all world systems of thought and activity. Man and his salvation were at the center of the mission and ministry of Jesus Christ as the revelation of the love of the Father (Jn 3:16) and the truth of man’s creation in God’s image and of his transcendent vocation to holiness and to happiness with God. This is the setting of the two concepts, love and truth,⁴ which drive the encyclical. Lying at the heart of the mission and ministry of Jesus, love and truth correspond with and describe the essential character of the life and activity of man on earth. The human person receives God’s love as a gift and is furthermore endowed with a vocation to become a gift and a source of love in return. “This dynamic of charity received and given is what gives rise to the Church’s social teaching, which is caritas in veritate in re sociale: the proclamation of the truth of Christ’s love in society” (Civ 5).

The res socialis (human society) forms the contextual reference of the Church’s social teaching, and it has evolved dramatically over the past 120 years. Pope Leo XIII was concerned about the misery of workers in the days after the industrial revolution and the influence of Marxism; Pope Pius XI addressed the crisis of 1929; Popes John XXIII and Paul VI dealt with decolonization and the emergence of “third worldism”; Pope John Paul II faced issues stemming from the fall of the Berlin Wall and political changes in Eastern Europe; and now Pope Benedict XVI is addressing globalization, underdevelopment, and recent financial, economic, moral, and anthropological crises (cf. Civ 75). To these changing situations, the social encyclicals steadily reapply the basic principles of the Church’s social teaching. So “the Church’s social doctrine illuminates with an unchanging light the new problems that are constantly emerging.”⁵ It was in this sense that Pope Pius XII believed that papal encyclicals, even when they are not ex cathedra, can nonetheless be sufficiently authoritative to end theological debate on a particular question.⁶

The issuing of encyclicals indicates a high papal priority for an issue at a given time; but they are not the only means available to popes to teach on social issues. It is the pontiff who decides under what circumstances an encyclical should be issued⁷ “in order to shed the light of the Gospel on the social questions of his time.”⁸ And this is precisely what Caritas in Veritate seeks to do in our day.

Thus Caritas in Veritate continues the tradition of popes exercising their prophetic and teaching office in order to provide guidance for the way the Church...