VIDEO
CONFERENCE - Prof. Rodney Moss,
Johannesburg
Tuesday
28th. February
2006
“DEUS CARITAS EST”
12.
The Charitable organisms of the Church: contribution to the humanisation of
the World.
The
Encyclical Deus Caritas Est addresses the heart of the Christian faith:
Christian love, that interconnected and inseparable relationship that exists
between the love that is God and the love of humanity, indeed, of all creation.
God who is love has made us for love so that in the words of Pope Benedict, “… love
of neighbour is a path that leads to the encounter with God, and that closing
our eyes to our neighbour blinds us to God” (para.16 ).
The
second section of the encyclical treats of the practical exercise of love in
the Church. Active Christianity is essential to the very nature of the Church:
the ecclesial community must love in proclaiming the Gospel, celebrating the
sacraments and in exercising charity ( para. 20-22). As the Pope notes: “The
Church cannot neglect the service of charity any more than she can neglect the
Sacraments and the Word” (para.22 ).
In
order to address the question of how the charitable organisms of the Church can
aid the humanisation of the world we must understand how God’s word and love
can complete our human nature; how human faith can purify reason so, in this
context, we can better appreciate the demands of justice; how eros
(human love or desire) needs to be purified by agape, God’s love (total
commitment and nuturing) and how justice is perfected by charity.
The
Pope notes, “ the just ordering of society and the state is a central
responsibility of politics” ( para. 28 ). But
active Christian charity is essential to the church as God’s love
completes and perfects our human nature. Charity, then, “ …is first of all the
simple response to immediate needs and specific situations: feeding the hungry,
clothing the naked, caring for and healing the sick, visiting those in
prison…”(para.31 ); secondly, it is “ … independent of parties and ideologies”
(ibid.) and thirdly, because love is free” … it cannot be used as a means of
engaging in what is nowadays considered proselytism”(ibid.)
Charity,
then, is a new kind of loving, a purification, an elevation, a completion of
human love that will enable us to go beyond human nature and love with a love
that could not have been foreseen of anticipated by our natural abilities
alone.
God
and his love will transform the world but this transformation will come through
human collaboration and, indeed, through, institutional collaboration of which
the charitable organisms of the Church are a major part. The Church, the Body
of Christ needs to remind the world that charity is passionate, enthusiastic,
self-effacing, an active and whole-hearted sharing in the humanisation of the
world. In a nutshell, only God and his love can effectively transform the world
for as Pope Benedict notes,
Practical activity will always
be insufficient unless it
visibly expresses a love for man,
a love nourished by
an encounter with Christ. My deep
personal sharing
in the needs and sufferings of
others becomes a
sharing of my very self with them:
if my gift is not to
prove a source of humiliation, I
must give to others not
only something that is my own, but
my very self; I must
be personally present in my gift. (
para. 34 ).
That
surely is the perfection and end of love: love as the gift of my very self.