From the Editor's Desk
Love, then, consists in this:
Not that we have loved God,
but that he has loved us
and has sent his Son as an offering for our sins.
Beloved,
if God has loved us so,
we must have the same love for one another. . . .
Our love is brought to perfection in this,
that we should have confidence on the day of judgment;
for our relation to this world is just like his.
Love has no room for fear;
rather, perfect love casts out all fear.
1 John 4:10–11, 17–18
Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the
reactionary decisions by the U.S. administration to intervene militarily first
in Afghanistan and then in Iraq—decisions opposed by Pope John Paul II, most of
the world’s bishops and religious leaders, as well as by many military
advisers—the index of fear has risen sharply worldwide. Four months later the
Boston Globe initiated a series of articles detailing the results of
investigations into clergy sexual abuse. These articles opened the gates to a
flood of such reports from around the
At the same time, the Church witnessed the decline and death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI. The former, although very popular, was experienced by many theologians as heavy-handed toward those who exercised critical thinking and expressed alternative views. The latter, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, was estimated by many—fairly or not—to be the executor of John Paul II’s authoritarian style. When his name was announced from the papal balcony on April 19, 2005, as the new pope, many theologians gasped out of fear that what many had experienced as undue constraint during the long reign of John Paul II would continue unabated.
One of the first indications that this suspicion might be misguided came on September 24, 2005, when Benedict XVI spent several cordial hours with censured theologian Hans Küng at Castel Gondolfo—an audience that Küng had repeatedly petitioned with John Paul II over 25 years but was never granted. There were other indications. Already as head of the CDF, Cardinal Ratzinger had earned among bishops who met with him during their ad limina visits the reputation as a warm and genuine person who was really able to listen to them. At the October Synod on the Eucharist, Benedict changed the rules to allow an hour each day for unprecedented free discussion, and at the March consistory he sought advice from the cardinals on administrative and pastoral issues.
Most recently, the direction that Benedict wants to set for his papacy is clearly indicated by his first encyclical, Deus caritas est. Of all the possible subjects he could have chosen for his first formal address to the whole Church, it is highly significant that he chose this one, whose title comes from 1 John 4:8. Writing in the epideictic style of the Johannine letter and of the Vatican II documents (on which, see John O’Malley, “Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?” Theological Studies 67.1 [2006]), the pope seems to want to refresh the Church by refreshing our image, reminding us that, as “God is love,” so is God’s Church, and that out of this image arises our mandate for mission to one another and to the world.
It has been a very long time since we have had the opportunity to read a reigning pope’s first encyclical. In getting to know a person, first impressions are important, but they can prove ultimately mistaken. When a pope issues his first encyclical, however, one can fairly expect that he wants first impressions to be lasting, that his first letter is meant to be programmatic and to indicate where he desires to lead the Church.
My first editorial (March 2006 issue) expressed the hope that theologians would revisit “the big questions” and creatively address them for postmodern audiences. Little did I think that among the first to discourse on the biggest question of all would be the Church’s primary pastor, and yet, how fitting! So when I came to my first reading of Deus caritas est, the title itself lifted my spirits. I was wondering what illuminating and edifying words the new pope would say to a people living in withering fear, shame, and grief. I had great expectations. They were not disappointed. Indeed, I was thrilled and profoundly consoled.
Part one of the letter is a remarkably rich theological and christological anthropology. Appropriately taking his cue from what revelation tells us of the nature of God, Benedict explains that we, as images of God, share that very same nature: love which finds its perfection in a harmonization of eros and agapē. Whatever else Benedict will choose to say in future allocutions and letters to Catholics and, for that matter, to people of good will everywhere, he begins as a good systematic theologian must: with his understanding of the nature of the human person. And a magnanimous understanding it is. He could hardly have begun his first formal teaching as the Church’s primary pastor better than by reminding us of our innate nobility and of the behavior that should follow from it. As such, his words are a salutary antidote to the fear and shame that have been visited upon us, and an antidote that—we hope and pray—will lead to an authentic appropriation of the nature that is ours in the triune God.
David G. Schultenover, S.J.
Editor in Chief