The long-anticipated first encyclical from the Prada Pope is out. And surprisingly, it’s actually kind of warm and fuzzy.
Who knew that the Grand Inquisitor, the Pope who’s conducting a witch hunt against gays in the priesthood, would dedicate his first encyclical to love?
In the long-awaited document ”God is Love,” Benedict explores the relationship between God’s love for mankind and the church’s works of charity, saying the two are intrinsically linked and the foundation of the Christian faith.
The 71-page encyclical, eagerly watched for clues about Benedict’s major concerns, characterizes his early pontificate as one in which he seeks to return to the basics of Christianity with a relatively uncontroversial meditation on love and the need for greater works of charity in an unjust world.
Even Vatican officials have expressed some surprise at the topic, considering Benedict was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal watchdog and could easily have delved into a more problematic issue such as bioethics in his first authoritative text.
Now, I haven’t read the whole thing yet (it *is* 71 pages), but I already see plenty of clues as to what the Pope thinks of sex: in fact, the first section spends a lot of time discussing eros and the “debasement of the human body:”
Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting the body is deceptive. Eros, reduced to pure “sex”, has become a commodity, a mere “thing” to be bought and sold, or rather, man himself becomes a commodity. This is hardly man’s great “yes” to the body. On the contrary, he now considers his body and his sexuality as the purely material part of himself, to be used and exploited at will. Nor does he see it as an arena for the exercise of his freedom, but as a mere object that he attempts, as he pleases, to make both enjoyable and harmless. Here we are actually dealing with a debasement of the human body: no longer is it integrated into our overall existential freedom; no longer is it a vital expression of our whole being, but it is more or less relegated to the purely biological sphere. The apparent exaltation of the body can quickly turn into a hatred of bodiliness.
There’s a lot of food for thought there, and I’ll try to address it more thoroughly within the next few days. I do tend to look askance at meditations on sex and eros from the celibate priesthood, but it’s worth picking over.
In the meantime, this is also a fairly encouraging sign, from the Times article:
In the encyclical, Benedict said the church’s work caring for widows, the sick and orphans was as much a part of its mission as celebrating the sacraments and spreading the Gospels. However, he stressed that the church’s charity workers must never use their work to proselytize or push a particular political ideology.
”Love is free; it is not practiced as a way of achieving other ends,” he wrote.
PB puts the burden of creating a just society squarely on the shoulders of the state, not the church; the church’s role is to provide comfort and love, and to do so unconditionally.
Proselytization has always given me the heebie-jeebies. I was raised Catholic, and I always understood that we didn’t do that. I’ve since found out that there are evangelical Catholics; maybe we just didn’t do that in my milieu because it was considered tacky.
I was quite disappointed, though not surprised, when Popenstein was chosen. His actions and decrees since then, particularly with regard to his confusion of pedophilia and homosexuality, have certainly not endeared him to me. But I’ll take a closer look at this document.