Por enquanto são raros os artigos brasileiros( encontrei apenas 2) sobre a Caritas in Veritate, já em lingua inglesa encontra-se um número bem maior. A mesa redonda organizada pelo World Catholic Report apresenta um conjunto bem interessante de análises da Encíclica. Beckwith, abaixo, apresenta uma leitura bem interessante.
That theological anthropology is the proper starting point in discovering the good for which human beings were designed is the animating principle behind Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate (or “Charity in Truth”). For without true knowledge of the human person, one cannot know how to properly direct one’s love (or “charity”) to one’s fellow human being. As Benedict writes, “Without truth, without trust and love for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like the present” (5).
For Benedict, who and what we are, the question of theological anthropology, is the key to a proper understanding of our relationship to one another, our economic progress and regress, the nature of the family and marriage, humanity’s stewardship for the environment, the rule of law, intergenerational justice, as well as our openness to human life at its outset, its end, and the time in between. Yes, Caritas in Veritate mentions all these topics as well as several others. But the answer to the question of what constitutes integral human development—i.e., what are we and what is the good for us as individuals and as a whole?—is the unifying principle that connects them all.
The categories that dominate our public discourse in the United States—left, right, liberal, conservative, etc.—play no role in illuminating the message of Caritas in Veritate. This is why it is a fool’s errand to attempt to artificially divide Catholic social teachings into its left and right wings, as if the Church’s rejection of economic libertarianism and proclamation of the principles of subsidiary and solidarity is a call to socialism or the government ownership of the means of production, or that the Church’s embracing of the exclusivity of male-female marriage and its defense of the sanctity of all human life from conception until natural death means that the Church does not believe in individual liberty.
This “binary model,” as Benedict calls it (41), unnaturally limits our vision of the multilayered and interdependent goods that lead to integral human development, and thus, results in true freedom for the individual to pursue the good. According to the Pope, if we believe that our faith and all that it entails for theological anthropology and the good life is true, we can coherently claim that liberty, rightly understood, prohibits us from rejecting certain unassailable truths about ourselves without which liberty loses its point.
For the Church, the Sermon on the Mount cannot be separated from “Honor thy Father and Mother,” “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and “Thou shalt not steal.” This is not a seamless garment. For it is not an artifice constructed by our wills. It is a living organism, made by God, whose parts work in concert for the benefit of the whole. Thus, the “justice” in social justice refers to a rightly ordered polity, not to the outcomes and/or processes advocated by the ideologies of a Ludwig Von Mises or a Karl Marx. In Christian theology, you can gain the whole world and lose your own soul (Luke 9:25). To paraphrase St. Paul, that’s a stumbling block to the Austrians and foolishness to the Marxists.
Francis J. Beckwith é Professor of Philosophy and Church-State Studies, e Resident Scholar in the Institute for the Studies of Religion, Baylor University.
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