A Symposium on Caritas Et Veritate

The editors of Communio are pleased to devote the Winter, 2010 issue to Pope Benedict XVI’s third encyclical, Caritas in veritate . The essays were prepared for a conference on “Family, Common Good, and the Economic Order: A Symposium on Caritas in veritate ,” sponsored by the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family in December of 2010. . . .

“Catholic social teaching is a vision of reality—an understanding of being, man, and God—that unfolds an entire way of life, at the heart of which is a moral-social practice.”

“ Caritas in veritate conceives the logic of gift not simply as an addition or moral corrective to current economic practice and theory, but as a basis for rethinking the nature of the economy itself.”

“The liberal worldview needs to be countered with a message that is more imaginatively appealing, perhaps beginning with what is common among us all, that we are ‘restless to be loved and to love.’”

“It is exactly this logic—the gift comes first, before us—that Benedict insists is true about the environment, about technology, about sexuality, and about life itself. Indeed, it is a feature at the heart of Benedict’s entire theological trajectory.”

“Without meaningful functionality, including economic functionality, families will never enjoy ‘the centrality and integrity’ on which Catholic social teaching insists.”

“The common good . . . is not merely an object of desire, but a way of being—specifically, a paradoxical unity of giving and receiving.”

“Ulrich has developed a philosophy that is perhaps better equipped than any other to mediate between the parties in the strained relation between philosophy and theology, reason and faith.”

“Both the poetry of the Spiritual Canticle and the commentary on it are so immersed in trinitarian doctrine that they turn out to be primarily ecclesiological.”

“If the essence of the mission of Christ consists in putting himself in the place of all men, then the mission of the Church cannot be otherwise: it too consists in being at the service of all mankind.”