Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - Heart and reason: heart, as the centre of human personality, and reason as the indispensable condition for all authentically personal behaviour. These would appear to be the great coordinates of the third encyclical of Benedict XVI: “Caritas in veritate”. A text which will enter history for the “hermeneutic” scope of the proposal offered. Following what we might now call one of the “directing lines” of the pontificate, hermeneutics of continuity, the Holy Father proposes a careful rereading of the Populorum progressio written by the Servant of God Paul VI, when he says: “ The correct viewpoint, then, is that of the Tradition of the apostolic faith, a patrimony both ancient and new, outside of which Populorum Progressio would be a document without roots — and issues concerning development would be reduced to merely sociological data.” (n. 10). And again: “ The link between Populorum Progressio and the Second Vatican Council does not mean that Paul VI's social magisterium marked a break with that of previous Popes, because the Council constitutes a deeper exploration of this magisterium within the continuity of the Church's life[19]. In this sense, clarity is not served by certain abstract subdivisions of the Church's social doctrine, which apply categories to Papal social teaching that are extraneous to it.” (n. 12).
The categories to which the Pope refers, as we know, are the categories of “tradition” and “progress”, which, illegitimately counterposed, are simply the “secular” version of hermeneutics of continuity and break with the past: the first legitimate, the second foreshadowing serious and dangerous misunderstandings, too often applied to Vatican II and repeatedly stigmatised by the Papal Magisterium, since that historic discourse to the Roman Curia on 22 December 2005.
In fact “ is one thing to draw attention to the particular characteristics of one Encyclical or another, of the teaching of one Pope or another, but quite another to lose sight of the coherence of the overall doctrinal corpus ” (Ivi).
In order to do this however it is necessary to be men! It is necessary not to live of unresolved “ interior pauses”, it is necessary to love sincerely and passionately, the Truth, more than one's self, more than one's little power, more than one's own intellectualistic opinion. It is necessary, in a word, to have “morality of knowledge”, which comes before, both logically and practically, morality of behaviour.
Heart and reason, love and truth, represent the conditions for the possibility of an authentically human life. A life which, necessarily, due to an inner need, demands to be lived in “continuity”, which is not only a hermeneutic category, instead it is, in reality, an anthropological condition: without continuity there can be no history, no culture, and definitively, no mankind.
The Church, as the place for life par excellence, can never be without this moral and anthropological condition of knowledge, certain as she is of the fact the real progress coincides with the proclamation of the Risen Christ; proclamation without which the world has no future and loses, consequently, all dynamic force for development. (Agenzia Fides 9/7/2009; righe 37, parole 496)
