Giustizia e Carità by Reginaldo M. Pizzorni, O. P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 517 in showing that all history-secular as well as sacred-is study for the theologian. God is the beginning and end of all things-history included. His principal thesis is that Christ is the center of all history, secular as well as sacred. The Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (No. 10) says as much: "She (the Church) holds that in her most benign Lord and Master can be found the key, the focal point and the goal of men, as well as all human history." In the latter part of the book Father Lewry deals with Christ as Lord of history, the fulfillment of all previous history and the norm of all future history. We recommend this book to the student of theology. Pope Paul in his allocution at the opening of the Second Session of the Council put among the main objectives of the Council the Church's desire and need to give a more thorough definition of herself. The sixteen documents of the Council contain the answer. Much, by way of commentary , has been written on the Church since. The last booklet under review is a further contribution to the vast literature. Taking the local Church as the starting point, chapters are devoted to the unity of the Church, its essential structures, the diversity of tasks in the Church, and a final chapter to the mission of the Church. What is the particular merit of the booklet? To my mind, Father Hebblethwaite sets out to give a study of the Church from the documents of Vatican II. He has no axe to grind, no chip on his shoulder; he does not find the Church irrelevant nor the Pope insincere. There is a tone of hope and confident optimism about the whole of the booklet. He makes the basic distinction in the very first pages: the Church is both human and divine. On the one hand, it is made up of very ordinary people with failings, inadequacies and sins. And so the Council could speak of the Church as being in constant need of purification. But the Church is also divine, founded by Christ and given the guarantee that his Spirit would be with the Church until the end. And the author has this to say: it is prayer, patience, and a basic conviction that one should not separate oneself from the bishop, and not any ill-tempered assertion of rights, that in the Church wins through in the end. Old ideas perhaps, but worth thinking about in these hectic days. St. Charles' Seminary Nagpur, India. MARTIN BROWNE, O.P. Giustizia e Carita. By REGINALDO M. PrzzoRNI, 0. P. Rome; Lateran University Press, 1969. Pp. 151. If there are two words which are used quite synonymously today, and two realities which are confused when they need not be, they are " love " 518 BOOK REVIEWS and "social justice." There is a certain urgency that these notions of justice and charity, as understood in the Christian tradition, be more clearly sorted out through a deeper understanding of their respective formalities (meaning, function, limits, interrelationship) so that the realities expressed might be more fruitfully lived in our own developing society. Fr. Pizzorni, professor of philosophy at both the Lateran University and the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, has attempted such a clarification in this monograph. He notes that charity " e in crisi," since it has been rejected in the name of social justice; thus there is the risk of losing both the one and the other. "Love in most men will grow cold" (Mt. 24 :12); this is the source of much of current society's maladies. The author then poses the question whether there can be a justice without charity, a social consciousness without love. Nations and peoples have been driven apart and even devastated in wars in the name of justice; something more is needed to unite and to bind together, and this is charity understood in the Christian sense. In the first chapter the author establishes the Christian notion of charity and its implications: charity surpasses and must integrate justice. Two fundamental and indispensable moral attitudes should prevail in order to...