Benedict at his (egg-head) best

What are your reactions to the Pope's latest Encyclical, Caritas in Veritate?

The Pope continues to show his almost unique talent at foxing journalists, and I count myself among them at least for the duration of these articles. In his Encyclical, he continues to give us the feeling that a professor in Pope's clothing is somehow an incongruity, like the wolf in grandma's clothing in Little Red Riding Hood.

There is a striking similarity between two different projections of the same dualism that appears in two different modes of expression of Benedict's persona. On one hand, there is the obvious mismatch between the humanism that is the core content of the Encyclical and the abstruse wording in which that personalist content is formulated over nearly 150 pages of dense print.

On the other, there is the equally obvious mismatch that appeared, for instance, typically in the Pope's audience granted to our President and his family.

The President himself has told us of the homely and avuncular, although insightful, way in which the Pope spoke to his daughter about the role that she had recently sung in a performance of Mozart at the Manoel Theatre.

But we saw the Pope wearing for the occasion not only full ceremonial attire but also a richly embroidered stole that seems to have been taken out from the treasure hoard of the Vatican Museum, like the jewelled mitres and the albs with apparently kilometres of baroque lace that Benedict likes to wear on quite ordinary occasions.

In Charity in Truth, there is a similar contrast between the down-to-earth lovingness that can be sensed in what the Pope wishes to tell humankind on one hand and the over-elaborate verbiage in which it is dressed up.

The motivation of this paradox is the enigma posed by Benedict XVI in all he says and does. It would, however, be a really great pity if we allowed the timely and crucially important message, which the Pope is doing his utmost to deliver, to fail to reach us because of laziness in our mode of uptake.

What then is the gist of his message?

In the first place this Encyclical has to be read as the third instalment of a series. The first two dealt with, respectively, Love and Hope. Logically, the third had to be Faith, and in fact it is the object of faith, namely truth, that is mentioned in the name of the Encyclical, with the affirmation of the essential link found in the Gospels between love and knowledge.

Benedict devotes the first part of the Encyclical to showing that faith is the ground of both hope and love. He devotes the rest of the Encyclical to showing how, if you believe for instance that God is the Trinity, this logically has implications for the political and economic, as well as all other dimensions of human conviviality.

In this connection, the theme that the Pope insists most upon is that economic relations should not be conceived only on the model of contracts. This is perhaps the most striking of the many cases when he harks back to the social teaching of his predecessors, but at the same time signals that he is innovating in his response to changing historical situations.

Pope Pius XI had insisted that employment should not be regarded as just a contract of buying and selling, with the work of the employee being purchased for cash by the employer, but it should rather be regarded as a contract of partnership between two human beings with equal personal dignity. Pope Benedict insists that the very success of economic life requires that, besides contractual relations, there should be also the practice of gifts, on the model of God's own dealings with us, human beings.

The Pope does not explicitly refer to the fact that one of the great themes of contemporary post-modernist philosophy, most notably in the last works of its patriarch, Jacques Derrida, is precisely that of the ethics of gifts and the difficulties of authentic gratuitousness. Nevertheless, it is clear that these discussions, which probably owe their origin to the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss on the Red Indian potlatch conventions, constitute the background for a full understanding of Benedict's message.

Does the Pope bring these moral principles down to practical applications in the present world situations?

The Encyclical has puzzled journalists perhaps most of all when the Pope categorically speaks in favour of a renewed (and bigger) role of public authorities in economic governance, since magnifying the role of the State in economic life is often taken to be an obsolete socialist theory opposed by the Church.

Some have professed surprise that the Pope strongly urges the setting up of world-governance institutions, but this has been a constant in Catholic social thinking, at least since Dante! The only difference between Dante and Benedict is that, in the interval between them, globalisation has occurred and the world-governance idea has ceased to be irremediably utopian.

Besides the long developments on the role of both the State and Civil Society institutions (by which the Pope mainly means not-for-profit business institutions) in addition to the Market as economic agents, Pope Benedict also writes as if he had fully accepted the idea of both husband and wife having working careers.

At least, he nowhere repeats the idea that the place of the married woman is at home. This is probably another instance of quiet innovation carried out on the trajectory of tradition.

There are many other points deserving of consideration, such as the attempt to reformulate the principle of subsidiarity, which has passed from a cornerstone of Papal Social Teaching and Christian Democracy to European constitutional documents. This reformulation interested me particularly, since I had attempted to do something similar on behalf of the government to adapt the principle to the Network Society but it would be too long to go into it now.

Fr Peter Serracino Inglott was talking to Miriam Vincenti.