All you need is love

The first encyclical that a Pope publishes is generally considered to be, in more sense than one, a programme of his pontificate. Most probably this is also true of Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God is love).

The nearly 16,000-word encyclical was issued on Wednesday in seven languages. Addressed to all Catholics, it was divided into two sections, one on the meaning of love in salvation history, the other on the practice of love by the Church.

These two sections point to two important aspects of the present Papacy. It has now been confirmed that work on the second part of the encyclical, on charity, was begun by Vatican experts under the late John Paul II and taken up by Benedict XVI after his election last April.

Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, said that he was particularly delighted with the Pope's decision to take up a topic that John Paul II had chosen. The late Pope had begun work on an encyclical about charity, which was left unfinished when he died.

Archbishop Cordes, whose council supervises the charitable activities of the Holy See, was asked to prepare a report on those activities for Pope John Paul; he completed a new version of that report for Benedict XVI. This is another indication that this pontificate is a continuation of the previous one; but it is a creative continuation, not a copy. The themes addressed during the pontificate of John Paul are addressed once more, this time through a different medium: Joseph Ratzinger.

The first part, which is a more theological and speculative section, clearly evidences the stamp of Ratzinger the theologian. Archbishop William Levada, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, while agreeing that the unfinished work of John Paul II was "a stimulant" to Pope Benedict, emphasised that the new Pope structured the encyclical entirely from his own perspective. He observed that the treatment of human and divine love, eros and agape, in Deus Caritas Est closely follows the treatment of the same topics in Introduction to Christianity, a book written by Joseph Ratzinger in 1960.

In the encyclical the Pope does not condemn theological errors or concentrate on current public controversies. Rather, Deus Caritas Est urges readers to reconsider the most fundamental aspect of Christian faith: God's love for mankind, and man's response. Benedict XVI's first encyclical is evidence of both his great scholarship and his profound spiritual insight.

The Pope said his aim was to "speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in return must share with others." The two aspects, personal love and the practice of charity, are profoundly interconnected, he said. The encyclical begins with a phrase from the First Letter of John: "God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." The Pope said the line expresses the heart of the Christian faith, which understands the creator as a loving God and which sees Christ's death as the ultimate sign of God's love for man.

In today's world, however, the term "love" is frequently used and misused, he said. Most commonly, it is understood as representing eros, the erotic love between a man and a woman. The Church, from its earliest days, proposed a new vision of self-sacrificial love expressed in the word agape, he said. At times, the Pope said, the Church, with all its commandments and prohibitions, has been accused of poisoning eros or of being ready to "blow the whistle" just when the joy of erotic love presented itself.

But in modern society, he said, it has become clear that eros itself has been exalted and the human body debased.

"Eros, reduced to pure 'sex', has become a commodity, a mere 'thing' to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man's great 'yes' to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will," he said.

Properly understood, he continued, eros leads a man and woman to marriage, a bond that is exclusive, and therefore monogamous, as well as permanent. While it is true that the happiness of eros can give people a "foretaste of the divine", eros needs to be disciplined and purified if it is to provide more than fleeting pleasure, the Pope said.

The solution is to rediscover a balance between the ecstasy of eros and the unselfish love of agape, he said.

The key to regaining this balance, he said, lies in a personal relationship with God and an understanding of the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ. He said Christ gives the ultimate lesson in "love of neighbour", which means: "I love even the person whom I do not like or even know."

Pope Benedict said there was an essential interplay between love of God and love of neighbour. "If I have no contact whatsoever with God in my life, then I cannot see in the other anything more than the other, and I am incapable of seeing in him the image of God," he said.

"But if in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid," he said.

The second half of the encyclical makes two main points:

* As a community, the Church must practise love through works of charity and attend to people's sufferings and needs, including material needs.

* The Church's action stems from its spiritual mission and must never be undertaken as part of a political or ideological agenda.

Archbishop Cordes, while commenting on this second part of Deus Caritas Est, said that the Pope had called attention to a very real problem: the risk that Catholic charitable agencies might become secularised in their approach, losing their distinctively Christian identity.

"There is a risk of secularism; there is a risk that today's man lives with less sense of the presence of God in his ordinary life, and that certainly affects charitable associations," the German archbishop said. He said that while Catholic charities may be efficient in distributing humanitarian aid, and effective in raising funds, they must always maintain their connection with the Church.

Archbishop Cordes also said that Church agencies must be careful to avoid becoming absorbed in political crusades, and becoming more concerned with theoretical issues of social justice than in practical efforts to help those who are in need.

The Pope said there was a connection between the commitment to justice and the ministry of charity, but also important distinctions. Building a just social and civil order is an essential political task to which the Church contributes through its social doctrine, but it "cannot be the Church's immediate responsibility," he said.

"A just society must be the achievement of politics, not of the Church," he added. "The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the state...Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice." The Church's role is to make the rational arguments for justice and awaken the spiritual energy needed for the sacrifices that justice requires, he said.

"Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies. It is not a means of changing the world ideologically, and it is not at the service of worldly stratagems, but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs," he said.

The Pope examined and rejected the Marxist arguments that the poor "do not need charity but justice", and that charity is merely a means of preserving a status quo of economic injustice. He said the Church must help the needy wherever they are found, and he cited Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta as an example of love in action.

"One does not make the world more human by refusing to act humanely here and now," he said. And charity will always be necessary, even in the most just society, he said. In any case, he said, it is an illusion to think that the state can provide for all needs and fully resolve every problem.

"We do not need a state which regulates and controls everything," but a state that supports initiatives arising from different social forces, he said. The Church is one of those forces, he said.

The Pope said that prayer should not be forgotten as the Church tries to alleviate the immense needs around the world. "People who pray are not wasting their time, even though the situation appears desperate and seems to call for action alone.

"Piety does not undermine the struggle against the poverty of our neighbours, however extreme," he said.