On January 25, 2006 the Holy See published Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical entitled “Deus Caritas Est” (“God is Love”). In this commentary, Bishop Javier Echevarría, the Prelate of Opus Dei, shares his reflections on the Pope’s encyclical.
The Pope chose as the Latin title of his first encyclical the words of St. John, "Deus caritas est" - God is love (as nearly every version of the Gospel translates it). Is charity the same as love? In part, yes; in part, no. The Catechism of the Catholic Church recalls that charity is the virtue that enables us to love God above all things and our neighbor as ourselves, for love of God. It also affirms that "charity secures and purifies our human capacity to love."
This is because human beings need to love and be loved. When it is faithful, requited, and refined, love is the deepest longing of the heart. Our whole existence consists in a quest for true love, a struggle to overcome obstacles that rise before us and within each one of us.
Jesus Christ is the fullness of Revelation: In Him we know God; in Him we know man fully, as Vatican II teaches and John Paul II often repeated. In Christ we discover our vocation and our greatness. Charity is an essential part of that discovery; it is the love that Jesus ennobles and purifies. For along with his Love, He has brought us gaudium cum pace - joy and peace.
The word love has undergone a kind of inflation: Perhaps we use it too much, sometimes referring to ephemeral sentiments, or even - as the Pope notes - to manifestations of egoism. But with the word charity there has been something like a semantic restriction: We use it, perhaps, too little, to refer only to certain activities carried out on behalf of others in special cases. But charity is not something exceptional; it is part of a Christian's identity: "In this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another," said the Lord. Pagans recognized Christians that way: "See how they love each other," they exclaimed. Christian love consists of a moral disposition that expresses itself in an enormous variety of actions. Charity means serving, understanding, consoling, listening, smiling, accompanying, correcting, encouraging, asking forgiveness and
pardoning, giving and receiving. Charity spreads out in concentric circles, from
personal relationships to the entire society.
At the origin of the family, spousal love creates the environment in which life is born; the home where new beings receive affection; the climate within which persons reach maturity.
Charity enriches the working world: Exercising one's profession in accord with the Gospel precept means exercising it for the sake of love, with a desire to serve, putting one's heart into thinking of the others. Sanctifying work is the same as converting it into an _expression of love for God and an occasion for giving ourselves to others by filling it with justice and charity.
The Church's geography is embellished by those points of light: the places where Christians are striving to work and to serve in silence for the sake of love. It is enough to think of Africa, the continent that most needs the cooperation of all. There the Church manifests her love as an essential part of her mission - "as an ecclesial act," in the Pope's words. Charity promotes magnanimity, not remaining indifferent to the needs of others. This is how the Holy Father summarizes this process of an expanding charity: "Love is divine because it comes from God and unites us to God; through this unifying process, it transforms us into a We that overcomes divisions and makes us one single thing, until in the end God is 'all in all' (I Cor 15:28; sec. 18). This is what explains the perennial youthfulness of the
Church.”
The key to the new evangelization is also rooted in charity. In substance, the task of spreading the Gospel consists in bringing many people to experience Christian charity so that their minds might open to the light of faith by means of the language of love, the universal tongue that all of us are able to understand. For as St. Paul writes, faith operates by means of charity.
St. Josemaria Escriva comes right to the point: "The principal apostolate we Christians must carry out in the world, the best way we witness the faith, is by making sure that the climate of authentic charity breathes within the Church."
At the Last Supper, Christ called the precept of charity "new": "a new commandment I give to you, that you love one another as I have loved you." It was new then, and continues to be new today - for everyone, 2000 years later. If we approach the encyclical to read and meditate on it with the healthy curiosity of one who knows what it is to discover something new, with mind and heart open, we shall find in it the permanent newness of that marvelous revelation: God is love, a love that is radiated to all human beings and to each one. That will fulfill the desire of Benedict XVI: that this encyclical "enlighten and assist our Christian life."
+ Javier Echevarria
Prelate of Opus Dei
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