Charity

There Is No Charity Without God
From Deus Caritas Est to the addresses to Non Government Organizations, in the Church’s Magisterium we often find that word–charity–which the world reduces to “doing good.” The President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum explains the difference

edited by Riccardo Piol

‘‘Icome before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope.” These are the words John Paul II pronounced before the General Assembly of the United Nations, October 5, 1995–another time, another world, certainly different from that of Paul VI, the first pope to speak at the UN headquarters, in 1965, but different, too, from that to which Benedict XVI is speaking today. Yet, when speaking with Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, I realize that there is a continuity in the pontifical visits to the UN, a continuity that travels across the upheavals of history, giving back to each epoch the singularity of the Church’s experience and of her presence on the international scene.
Cardinal Cordes, as President of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, looks at an institution like the UN, and at the relationship it has with the Church, through a particular lens, that of charity. It is therefore inevitable that we take our cue from Benedict XVI’s first encyclical letter in speaking of the UN meeting on April 18th. All the more so because, at the end of February, Cor Unum dedicated its Plenary Assembly, gathering all the international charitable organizations (NGOs) that form part of the Council, to Deus Caritas Est.
“We chose to take up the encyclical again two years after its publication,” says Cordes, “for two reasons. In the first place, because of its importance: the announcement of God as love has always been the heart of the Church’s preaching. It must be even more so in our current day, in which the absence of God seems to be generating a widespread disorientation on the meaning of love. And then we wanted to understand better what effects the encyclical had had on the work of the organizations that are members of Cor Unum.”

And what did you discover?
Firstly, that the encyclical was well accepted and is widely read, even more than we expected. It was taken up at different levels: in personal reflection, as a concrete instrument of reflection in the offices, and in the structures of the organizations, but also at the level of institutional initiatives, seminars and conferences.

What do you think this “success” is due to?
On one hand, because it is the very first document on the Church as the subject of charitable activity. And then because it does not deal with what we should do, it does not deal with the people who are to be helped, but tackles the problem of the root, that is, those who, in the Church, “do works of charity:” who are they and what do they want to offer; what do they want to be and what do they want to give? It is an important step for giving importance and autonomy to the theology of charity. Perhaps it is a kind of brake to the opinion of those who want our NGOs to become mere political laboratories. So the accent is on what the Pope calls the “formation of the heart” (no. 31a).

What does he mean by “formation of the heart?”
If, in the one working, there is not, shall we say, a sensitivity for the person, then the person is not reached. In other words, we don’t primarily furnish technical services, but we meet people to whom we have to give the chance to experience what the Pope defines as “a wealth of humanity.” So we have the humility to acknowledge that the task is greater than our strength; we are free from proselytism, from ideology, and we don’t fall into the presumption of solving all the problems.

So, it’s as if the encyclical gives us a clear direction, a compass for Catholics who do works of charity?
Better, it relocates charitable activity inside Revelation. Because the idea came across many times that since charity can be done by anyone–and in a way it is true–then, in practice, we can very well do without God in our activity.

After all, this is the reasoning of those who interpreted the encyclical as if it were made up of two separate parts: the theology in the first part, and then the praxis in the second…
To reason like this is to identify with the world. The Pope instead writes that the two parts are “deeply connected to each other”(no. 1). He reads charity in the light of Revelation, in the light of the fact that God manifested himself as love. Therefore, even charitable activity is to be referred to this source, which is Revelation, who is God manifesting Himself as love and making man, in his turn, capable of love. So there is no moralism: love for one’s neighbor is the fruit, the direct consequence of divine love, which reconciles man, the sinner, to Himself. In fact, in order to define it, the encyclical–against a certain interpretation in Christian tradition–takes up a primordial conception of human experience, eros, affirming that God’s love “can be certainly qualified as eros” (no. 9). So there is a positive view of the natural forces that inhabit the person, even though they have to be continually purified. The question of God remains at the center. The first part reserves for those who believe they know it some moving surprises and attractions.

In his intervention at the UN in 1965, Paul VI defined Christians as “experts in humanity…”
We have to rediscover what this means. The encyclical makes a distinction between justice and charity that is fundamental for our action in the world and even in the international organisms. It is clear that some organisms, some subjects in the Church, expose themselves in supporting questions of justice, but this does not exhaust the diaconal service that Christ entrusted to us.

In other words, justice is not enough?
Charity demands justice, but goes beyond it. At the conference on charity in which the encyclical was presented, Cardinal Roger Etchegaray gave this example: “A leper has the right to be treated, but has not the right to the kiss from St. Francis, and yet he needs this very much.” Treatment is justice, but a kiss, the “something more” that every man needs, is charity. We are experts in humanity, here or in Africa, or in the United Nations, because we live in this way–not because there is a law that says so, or because it is written in a protocol. In the encyclical, the Pope says, “There is no ordering of the State so just that it can eliminate the need for a service of love. Whoever wants to eliminate love is preparing to eliminate man as such”(no. 28 b).

So, in your view, what is the specific contribution that the Church can give today even in a context like the UN?
To affirm, as the encyclical does, that it is not possible to build a human society, to work for the rights of all, if there is not a basis for all this which is called God, if we don’t keep our eyes open towards God. This is the real challenge. And it has an enormous cultural importance. We live in a secularized world and in an ideology constantly tempted to forget God, as the episode of the Treaty of Lisbon shows, the attempt to give an institutional basis for the European Union. We have to learn the lesson from history of what the great French theologian, De Lubac, called “the drama of atheist humanism.” It is only in the encounter between God and man that is born a style of man-to-man relationship and a conception of man that is truly new.

At the UN, John Paul II said, “I come before you as a witness: a witness to human dignity, a witness to hope.” Thirteen years have passed, but the point remains the same.
The heart is the same as always. The Church pursues human dignity, it is at the service of man because it acknowledges man’s relationship with God. At the end of the Plenary Assembly we were received by the Pope, who reminded us that a charity worker is also a witness of life, of God’s love. “We can practice love,” he said, “because we have been created in the image and likeness of God to live in love, and in this way to bring God’s light into the world.”