At the beginning of the pontificate of the new Pope, who had come from the Congregation for the Doctrine of faith, many feared a time of rigid attention to the observance of the dogmas and the perfection of orthodoxy. We cannot deny that this worry is so much an integral part in the life and faith of Pope Ratzinger as to pay a relevant attention to the right doctrine. Having said this, we must admit that the first encyclical letter of his papacy clears many fears because Benedict XVI does not trace back the essential nucleus of Christianity in a dogma defined by old Councils, nor from an ex cathedra definition, but more simply from Love. This is the rock, on which we must build the house of the Christian community and of the entire humanity. This is the lymph, which we must allow to run in the veins of the world. This is the sense of our living and dying, of our believing and acting, of our being in the world. Therefore, the intention of the encyclical letter is essentially one of evangelisation

The fact of having pointed decidedly at Love, leads the Christian Community itself to get rid of superfluous pinchbecks to recuperate the latest sources of one’s existence, the basic motive for which Christ has thought of it and delivered it to the World. “We have believed in the love of God” –this is how the Christian can express the fundamental choice of his life, as we read in the introduction to the Encyclical Letter.  At the beginning of our being Christian, we do not find an ethical decision or a big idea. Rather, we find the encounter with an event, with a Person, who gives a new horizon and a decisive direction to life.

 John expresses this event in the Gospel with the following words, “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him   …    may have eternal life”. (3,16).  At the same time, the Pope proposes this truth to the whole world, so that all may have the chance of catching the fullness of its sense and meaning. In this way, the Letter is not an arid academic or theological exercise. On the contrary, it exercises a concrete and relevant impact on the life of the world.  

The author himself declares this in the introduction, “In a world where at times we link the name of God with vengeance or even with the duty of hatred and violence, this message is of real actuality and of a very concrete meaning. This is why in my first Encyclical, I wish to speak of love, with which God fills us and which we must communicate to others”.

At this point, it is interesting to discover that even a lay commentator, Eugenio Scalfari, who is far from nurturing sympathy towards the Catholic Church, is positive in his comments.  “In an epoch, in which fundamentalism advances, even among those declared as Christian or those that use Christianity as an “intrumentum regni”, the recalling of Ratzinger to the centrality of love, to the passion for love, to the identification between love and charity, his force and meekness, configures a very firm position of resistance against any call to arms in the name of the unique God common to the three great monotheistic religions, particularly the Gospel message of Christianity, of the Catholic and apostolic church”.

Reading the Encyclical, we feel to hear again the words of Antonino Bello, the prophetic Bishop, who based his reflection of the church of the apron and his own tenacious commitment to peace and to the least ones, directly on the heart of the Trinity.  Don Tonino Bello develops a series of considerations on the statements of Vatican II. The Council, in fact, presents the Trinity of God as “the exemplar cause of the Church and of the human community”. He succeeded “to give up himself” to the Trinitarian mystery. He easily became a close relative of human things, as the relations among persons, but he proposed it as a foundation of ethical principles. He adopted a mathematical formula tending to explain the mystery.  True, one plus one plus one equals three, but this additional operation does not explain the mystery of the Trinity. It is the multiplication of one by one by one, namely the living one for the other in an absolute ablative sense. It is only one by one, by one that gives one as a result!  The “by” is Love, which renders meaningful and gives sense to the Trinitarian life. This must become an ethical foundation, a leader and a model for humanity. It will be only one thing, it will band war from the dictionary definitively, it will erase hunger from all human geography   …    only when we shall no longer live one against the other, nor one more than the other, but only one for the other!. I think that also the Encyclical of Benedict XVI is in this happy intuition of Don Tonino Bello, which echoes the Gospel of Christ and Vatican II.

At this point, the charitable activity of the Church descends at full title from the Will of God. A world in which we recognise the dignity and rights of every person, satisfying everybody’s needs, is a world in which God realises his dream for humanity. We believers must collaborate with this dream of God, we must hasten and realise it, each of us according to the charism of our call, according to the gifts, which the Father has poured into our life. … Nobody can withdraw from this task, delegate it or escape from it. It is everybody’s task. The Encyclical enters the details and specifies an intimate and new relation between Charity and Justice. It specifies that the competence and the duty to actuate justice pertains to the State and is proper of the political identity. However, he describes the Church as a prophetic and critical voice of the society of men and women in which she lives.  “She cannot and does not intend to hold the politic battle in her hands or take the place of the State, yet she cannot and must not stay at the margin of the fight against justice”.  

Joint value

In this action, there is a joint value, which the governments of nations cannot offer. It is a value, which actually renders justice insufficient in itself to satisfy the deep demand of men and women: love. It is here that the Pope sees the indispensable contribution of the Christian community. It is here that Benedict XVI asks the Church to watch, so that the responsible political persons may not be polluted by the search for power and personal interests. Moreover, he asks us to contribute to the realisation of the common good with a creative charity, which expresses itself concretely in the creation of appropriate services. These services must be characterised by quickness in answering new needs, by professional competence and sense of humanity –the Pope calls it “attention of the heart”- and the availability of as many as work in the field of charity to co-ordinate their work. This would avoid the risk of creating double services, while leaving empty spaces in our responses to the needs. I like to underline the indications with which the Pope treats this aspect, to make us understand that this passage is meaningful for the Love of God to be salt, able to give savour to the human life and conviviality, reflected in the action of the Church.

The last aspect of the Church’s contribution concerns the task of the lay faithful committed with responsibility to build up a society animated by a spirit of equality, solidarity and peace. Here also, we are not at a dutiful passage, but before a precise choice of the service, which we must offer. The Pope makes an analysis of the times we live in and suggests the themes of equality, solidarity and peace as indispensable elements, which the lay believers must bear and witness. This is the apron, which they have to put on. Benedict XVI concludes his message urging the lay faithful to live charity as a prophecy. “It pertains to them to open new ways of politics in their political acting. However, I am particularly concerned about underlining that justice can never make love superfluous. Love, and only love gives soul to justice”. What follows is the realisation, the workshop, the laboratory of the innovation, which they authoritatively ask us to set in motion, so that Love may colour the world with a new hope, capable of concretising the dream of the Creator.