Love in Truth: My first thoughts on the new encyclical

The first paragraph is a sort of love song (or truth song!) to Caritas and Veritas, love and truth — both found in their ultimate form in God, but both also flowing from God to all men and women as part of our basic desires and callings. It’s stuff you know, but very nicely put together.

The next three or four paragraphs explain why the heck the Pope is writing this sucker. You kinda get the feeling that he’s playing off all the people who insist that they’re “speaking the truth in love”. His concern is that all of us also get cracking to speak the “love in truth”, and yes, I think there’s a bit of a pointed look at us bloggers. (Of course, I always think everything in the sermon contains a pointed look at me and mine. This is what happens when you have a mother who believes in pointing out relevant points with her elbow in your ribs.) It is speaking and doing with love that gives credibility to any speaking of the truth, because in this age of relativism, people believe personal experience more than words.

But on the other hand, the next couple of paragraphs tell the folks who think love doesn’t mean hard truths that they are also wrong. Love without truth is nothing but sentimentality and fluffy pink bunnies. (Okay, he didn’t mention fluffy pink bunnies.) Here’s the striking thing he points out: love without truth is only an empty shell — a void which can be filled with anything at all, purely arbitrarily.

Theology as horror movie. Brrrr.

The word “love” comes to mean the opposite. Brrr.

So, he goes on to point out, truth frees charity from being so goopily schmoopy that it forgets to care about anybody else around it or whatever damage it may do to those whose existence interferes with Twoo Wuv (like inconvenient spouses and kids and people telling you you’re acting like an idiot, or those inconvenient poor people who tell you they don’t want your program because it’s all theory and no go), and from being so entirely free of reason and taken entirely on faith that your ‘charity’ crushes all others in its path while you remain sure that it must just be magically good, because your intentions are good and that’s all that matters.

Aren’t you glad he uses theological jargon instead?

The whole encyclical goes on like this, moving constantly back and forth between who God is and what He does, the sheer philosophical beauty of Love and Truth, and what we should be doing to help a world full of people in need. It really rewards a close read.