Benedict XVI and the Divine Love Story

GEORGE WEIGEL

German journalist Peter Seewald once posed a question to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger: Why is the Catholic Church always saying “No?” Cardinal Ratzinger explained that the Church wasn’t fundamentally a matter of “No” but of “Yes” — God’s “Yes” to humanity, most dramatically revealed in the Incarnation, when God entered the human world in order to redeem it.


Pope Benedict XVI signs
Deus Caritas Est
If the Church has to say “No” sometimes, that “No” is in service to a higher “Yes.” The Church says “No” to call us to the dignity and glory that are ours through God’s redemptive action in Christ.

That “Yes” rings clearly throughout Pope Benedict XVI’s first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love). The text is classic Joseph Ratzinger: a master theologian, weaving together materials from the Bible and two millennia of Christian reflection to teach the basic truths of Catholic faith. The subject matter is also classic Ratzinger. Those who bought the cartoon of “God’s Rottweiler” might have imagined a first encyclical entitled “No You Don’t.” The real Ratzinger, the real Benedict XVI, wrote something quite different: an encyclical of affirmation, an invitation to ponder more deeply and live more completely “the heart of the Christian faith” — the claim that God is love.

Press attention to the encyclical, such as it was, tended to focus on its second, programmatic part, which explores living the charity which the love of God should compel in each of us. The pope makes some important points here, including a critique of the notion that charitable giving and charitable work are a distraction from our obligations to build just societies; Benedict neatly scuttles that piece of soft-Marxist flotsam with a few well-chosen sentences.

The theological meat of the encyclical is in its first part, however, and here, four ideas seemed particularly striking.

First, Pope Benedict teaches that God’s relationship to the world is best understood as a love story, not as a relationship of power that expresses itself in a contest of wills. The God who comes into history in search of man does so precisely to draw men and women into a communion of love — with each other and with the Triune God. As God’s love enters ever more deeply into our lives, the pope writes, “self-abandonment to God increases and God becomes our joy.”

First, Pope Benedict teaches that God’s relationship to the world is best understood as a love story, not as a relationship of power that expresses itself in a contest of wills.

Second, the pope suggests that the image of God in a culture will have a profound effect on that culture’s image of man. The fundamental orientation of a culture is not derived from its family patterns, its way of doing politics, or its method of allocating goods and services. Rather, cultures take their basic direction from what they worship: from the way in which a culture imagines the divine, thinks of the divine (if it imagines that the divine can be “thought”), and relates to the divine. To believe in and worship a God who is love “all the way through” (as Thomas More puts it in A Man for All Seasons) gives Christian cultures a distinctive view of the human enterprise in all its dimensions.

Which brings us to a third point Benedict makes, if briefly: warped ideas of God lead to warped ideas of the human, warped understandings of human relationships, and, ultimately, warped politics. When Pope Benedict speaks of “a world in which the name of God is sometimes associated with vengeance or even a duty of hatred and violence,” it is not difficult to imagine at least one of the primary reference points. That the pope has jihadist Islam in mind here is also suggested by his address to the diplomatic corps at the Vatican on January 9, when he spoke of a danger that had been “rightly” described as a “clash of civilizations.”

Finally, the pope neatly links the two great commandments, reminding us that we can love our neighbor because we have been first loved by God. Love of neighbor is thus a response to the experience of love by which God has first graced us, rather than rote obedience to an order from an external authority.

A great teacher and an acute cultural analyst sits in the Chair of Peter.

Read Deus Caritas Est here.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

George Weigel. "Benedict XVI and the Divine Love Story." The Catholic Difference (March 6, 2005).

Reprinted with permission of George Weigel.

George Weigel's column is distributed by the Denver Catholic Register, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Denver. Phone: 303-715-3123.

THE AUTHOR

George Weigel, a Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Roman Catholic theologian and one of America's leading commentators on issues of religion and public life. Weigel is the author or editor of seventeen books, including God's Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church (2005), The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God (2005), Letters to a Young Catholic: The Art of Mentoring (2004), The Courage to Be Catholic: Crisis, Reform, and the Future of the Church (2002), and The Truth of Catholicism: Ten Controversies Explored (2001).

George Weigel's major study of the life, thought, and action of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II (Harper Collins, 1999) was published to international acclaim in 1999, and translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Slovak, Czech, Slovenian, Russian, and German. The 2001 documentary film based on the book won numerous prizes. George Weigel is a consultant on Vatican affairs for NBC News, and his weekly column, "The Catholic Difference," is syndicated to more than fifty newspapers around the United States.

Copyright © 2006 George Weigel


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