Pope's Encyclical Uses Love as Framework for Justice, Archbishop says

Catholic News Service – March 12, 2010

NOTRE DAME, Ind. (CNS) — Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical “Caritas in Veritate” is not a political program, but rather a guideline for ethical principles that should be put into action, a German archbishop told an audience at the University of Notre Dame.

Archbishop Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising said when he first read it, he was surprised to find the encyclical begins with love, because he felt that it should have started with justice. With his second reading, however, he said he understood Pope Benedict’s new point that social justice must begin with love.

“When we realize everyone is loved, then we build a society where everyone will have his place,” the archbishop said. And when love is the framework for thinking about what is good for mankind, then the idea of globalization will have a new dynamic, with a new recognition of the notion of the family of mankind in which everyone is loved by God, he said. “We cannot build solidarity without the idea that everyone is in this communion,” Archbishop Marx said, and to achieve this, there must be a re-thinking of global issues, with Catholic social principles playing an active role.