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VATICAN CITY, MAY 6, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI named Monsignor Michele Di Ruperto as secretary of the Congregations for Saints' Causes and elevated him to archbishop. He had been the undersecretary of that congregation since 1993.

On Saturday the Vatican press office announced that Monsignor Di Ruberto will replace Archbishop Edward Nowak, 67, who has been named the assessor of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher of Jerusalem and canon of St. Peter's Basilica.

Michele Di Ruperto was born in Pietra Montecorvino in 1934 and ordained a priest in 1957.

He holds a degree in canon law from the Pontifical Lateran University in Rome as well as a degree in jurisprudence from the University of Naples.

The prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes is Cardinal José Saraiva Martins, 75.

Code: ZE07050603

Date: 2007-05-06

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Last Updated: 19 February 2013

Lends Support to Prelates' Proposal as Summit Nears

VATICAN CITY, MAY 6, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI is supporting a campaign asking that poor nations' development be a priority on the agenda at the G-8 summit in Germany.

A group of 11 cardinals and bishops, together with other Catholic organizations, campaigned on behalf of poor countries, hoping that the June meeting of the Group of Eight countries will bring resolutions for greater aid and debt cancellation. The G-8 groups Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

The delegation of prelates, led by Honduran Cardinal Oscar Rodríguez Maradiaga, gave a report to the Pope on meetings they had held with heads of governments from Britain, Germany and Italy.

The report also included the proposal of sending a postcard to the government of each country to remind them of their promises to the poor.

Campaign tour

Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga recalled: "The Pope exhorted [German] Chancellor Merkel to put poverty at the center of the G-8 2007 summit, and we praise this initiative.

"We cannot accept that poor people die every day because they do not have shelter, basic medicines and potable water."

The delegation is part of a campaign called "Make Aid Work. The World Can't Wait," coordinated by Caritas Internationalis and an alliance of 15 Catholic organizations for the development of Europe and North America.

The campaign asks the governments of rich and poor countries to ensure that development assistance makes a difference for the poor.

Last Monday, the delegation met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. They then met with German President Horst Köhler and Chancellor Angela Merkel, and finally with Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi.

Little progress

A delegation statement expressed disappointment over the lack of progress on plans to aid developing countries.

It affirmed that it is the duty of the world's leaders to assume the responsibility of promoting the development of global solidarity.

It also asked for a continual effort to resolve ongoing debt crisis in a just and sustainable way, for measures against corruption, and for the keeping of promises to increase development assistance.

The delegation also met with the president of the Italian episcopal conference, Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who said that the whole Church in Italy will continue to dedicate itself to the campaign, asking the promoters to get every parish involved.

"This is not a matter of asking the G-8 to take on new tasks but rather of asking them to respect the ones they have already taken upon themselves -- transparency in international transactions, fighting corruption and controlling arms sales," Cardinal Rodríguez Maradiaga explained.

"In fact, poverty is growing instead of diminishing," he added, "and what we need are concrete actions, not just words."

According to the cardinal, the campaign "is also a new evangelization, because bringing the social doctrine of the Church to places we have visited is a good thing."

Code: ZE07050609

Date: 2007-05-06

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Departs for South America on Wednesday

VATICAN CITY, MAY 6, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI says that his trip to Brazil will be an effort to promote the Church's evangelization so that Latin America will more and more be "the continent of hope."

The Pope said today at his Regina Caeli address: "This is my first pastoral visit to Latin America and I am preparing myself spiritually to visit the continent where almost half the Catholics of the whole world, many of them young people, live."

"It is for this reason," he added, "that Latin America has been given the name 'continent of hope': It is a hope that has to do not only with the Church but with the whole of America and the entire world."

The Holy Father invited the faithful to pray for the May 9-14 "apostolic pilgrimage and, in particular, for the 5th General Conference of the Episcopate of Latin America and the Caribbean, so that all the Christians of those regions may see themselves as disciples and missionaries of Christ, the way, the truth and the life."

The Pontiff will open the conference, which begins next Sunday in the national shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida, in the Brazilian city of the same name, situated 170 kilometers (105 miles) from São Paulo.

Benedict XVI said that before the opening of the conference he will stop in the city of São Paulo to meet with the young people and bishops of Brazil and preside at the canonization of Frei Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvão.

"Many and multiple are the challenges of the present," the Pope said. "This is why it is important that Christians be formed to be a 'ferment' of good and a 'light' of holiness in our world."

Code: ZE07050607

Date: 2007-05-06

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"Faith Liberates Reason From Its Blind Spots"

VATICAN CITY, MAY 5, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is the text of an address from Dominican Father Augustine De Noia, the undersecretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

The address was given April 27 as part of the plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. It focused on "Deus Caritas Est."

* * *

Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences
XIII Plenary Session 27 April 2007,10:30-12:30

CHARITY AND JUSTICE IN THE RELATIONS AMONG PEOPLE AND NATIONS: THE ENCYCLICAL "DEUS CARITAS EST" OF POPE BENEDICT XVI

J. Augustine Di Noia, O.P.
Undersecretary, Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

It is an honor and a pleasure for me to address this distinguished pontifical academy at the start of your 13th plenary session, and to bring you the greetings of the Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, William J. Levada, who, with Archbishop Paul Josef Cordes and Cardinal Renato Martino, first presented Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" to the world at a press conference on Jan. 25, 2006, but who is unable to join you today.

It is a particular pleasure to share the podium with Archbishop Cordes who, as president of the Pontifical Council Cor Unum, plays a crucial and active role in securing the charity and justice in the relations among people and nations that is your topic in this session of the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences.

The focus of your discussion is the Holy Father's short but tightly argued first encyclical, ""Deus Caritas Est"." In its two parts, the encyclical makes two hugely important points. I should like first to state what I think these two points affirm, and then to suggest something of their significance within a social scientific perspective informed by the Catholic faith.

Eros and Agape: The Sanctification of Desire

As everyone who has read the encyclical will know, in his discussion of eros and agape, Pope Benedict insists on the unity of these two forms of love, as well as the continuity between them. He is particularly concerned to refute the widespread notion that the Christian faith separates these two loves, and even suppresses the one -- eros -- in favor of the other -- agape. On the contrary, asserts the encyclical, eros is ever reaching out towards its fulfillment in agape. The powerful dynamism of desire is itself a sign that human persons are made for and directed toward a love that never ends.

In order to clarify this immensely significant first point, allow me to turn for help to one of Pope Benedict's favorite authors, St. Augustine.

In his writings, and especially in his "Confessions," St. Augustine frequently invites his readers to consider the things that they have desired and the things that they desire now -- to consider, in effect, the experience of desire. When we have thought about things that we have desired very badly, and have worked very hard to possess, St. Augustine asks us to acknowledge that, in the end, we have often lost interest and become bored with these very things, and that we then move on to seeking other things.

For St. Augustine, this is most definitely not a cause for lament. On the contrary. In pondering the experience of desire, we learn something very important about ourselves: No good thing that we have wanted and even possessed can finally quench desire itself, because we are made for the uncreated Good which is God himself.

This means that the good things of this world -- and all the more so, the good of other persons -- far from being obstacles in our quest for ultimate happiness, point us to the Good itself which is their source and in which they share. If we do not love the good things of this world, how shall we be able to love their Maker?

The triune God, who made us for himself and who wants to share the communion of trinitarian love with us, uses the good things of this world to lead us to him who is, we could say, Goodness itself. The challenge -- and, sometimes, the tragedy -- of human existence is to desire and love the created good as if it were divine, to invest an absolute value in what cannot finally satisfy the human heart. That is what sin is. But rightly ordered desire and love of the good things of this world and the good of other persons is already a participation in the Good which is God himself.

These lessons from St. Augustine help us to grasp the point the Holy Father is making in the first part of "Deus Caritas Est" -- that eros is meant to lead us to agape, to the love of God and to the love of one another in God. Pope Benedict resists absolutely the misreading, sometimes perverse, that claims to see in Christian faith the suppression of the ordinary fulfillments of human earthly life, particularly human intimacy and love, in favor of a good beyond life.

On the contrary, for Christian faith the whole range of human desire -- or, to use more technical language, the inclination to the good embedded in the very structure of human existence -- finds it complete fulfillment in the love of the triune God, and nothing less. Although Pope Benedict does not use this expression in the encyclical, we might call this unity of and continuity between eros and agape "the sanctification of desire."

The Service of Charity: The Integral Human Good

The second principal point argued in "Deus Caritas Est," according to the reading I am suggesting today, is actually implicit in the first and is advanced in the second part of the encyclical.

This second point is captured brilliantly in a passage from paragraph 19 of the encyclical: "The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament …; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man's sufferings and his needs, including material needs. " This "the service of charity" is directed to the integral human good, a description of which is the substance, as we have seen, of the encyclical's first major point.

For, while it is true that no created good can satisfy the desires of the human heart, God nonetheless intends us to enjoy these created goods precisely as his gift to us, affording a participation in his own Goodness. These created goods are not rendered irrelevant or dispensable by the fact that they are not themselves ultimate or absolute. The ultimate good does not cancel out or exclude limited or subordinate goods: They retain their integrity and finality in their very ordering to the ultimate good.

Man does not live on bread alone, indeed, but he needs bread in order to live. Integral human fulfillment encompasses a range of created goods even as it necessarily entails a directedness, an inner tendency, toward the enjoyment of the uncreated Good who is God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who enjoy a communion of life into which we, created persons who are not God, are invited to share as their friends -- and nothing less.

This integral human good is the object of the Church's service of charity: the ultimate good and the intermediate or subordinate goods, the spiritual well-being and the material well-being, the goods of this earthly life and the good beyond life.

Again, Pope Benedict is concerned to refute the pernicious suggestion that, by affirming the priority and ultimacy of a good beyond earthly life, the Church overlooks the poverty and suffering of this world, or, worse, conspires with the "prinicipalities and powers" to maintain the unjust structures that are responsible for this human suffering.

On the contrary. The service of charity encompasses the whole range of the integral good of human beings. The encyclical explains at length how this service of charity has been exercised in Christian history and how it can be exercised in the present day. In the midst of this service, the Church keeps to the forefront that vision of the human good and human dignity that God himself has revealed and inscribed in the human heart from the very moment of the creation of the universe. "The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man" ("Deus Caritas Est," No. 19).

"Deus Caritas Est" in the Perspective of the Faith and the Social Sciences

What I have identified as the two major points of the encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" pose a range of challenges to the reflection of Catholics whose professional life is devoted to one or other of the social sciences. In this brief paper, I can only hint at some of the more significant of these challenges -- not only because of the richness of the encyclical's teaching, but also because of the diversity of the social sciences themselves.

For the most part, the program of this plenary session takes its inspiration from the second part of "Deus Caritas Est" in which the Holy Father has a great deal to say about the Catholic understanding of the service of charity and about the practical implications of this understanding for contemporary politics, society and culture. These issues are the bread and butter of social scientists like those who make up this distinguished academy.

To contribute to a robustly Christian engagement with these issues, social scientific inquiries informed by faith must take into account the truth about human nature which is in part already legible in the creation of men and women in God's image and is fully revealed in the contours of the face of Christ -- what the encyclical terms "the integral human good."

The contribution of the social sciences to Christian reflection on these issues thus needs to be framed within the context of the Church's generous tradition -- expressed with great clarity in Pope John Paul II's encyclical "Fides et Ratio" -- according to which the truth discovered in the sciences is in principle coherent with the truth contained in revelation.

The fundamental reason for this lies not in our ability to manipulate bodies of knowledge, but in the nature of truth itself which is one, and thus more radically, in the nature of God himself who is the author of the created order just as much as of the economy of salvation. The Catholic principle is that what is discovered to be true by human reason cannot contradict what is known to be true by faith. This principle forms the background for the important things that Pope Benedict XVI has to say about faith and reason in his discussion of politics in paragraph 28 of "Deus Caritas Est."

The Holy Father's observations here have a direct bearing on the contribution of the social sciences to Christian reflection on the service of charity, understood as an instance of the interface of faith and reason. As an encounter with the living God, faith opens up "new horizons extending beyond the sphere of reason." "But," continues Pope Benedict, faith "is also a purifying force for reason itself. From God's standpoint, faith liberates reason from its blind spots and therefore helps it to do its work more effectively and to see its proper object more clearly" ("Deus Caritas Est," No. 28).

In accord with the traditional Catholic principle, reason retains its integrity and proper finality, but faith contributes to its work by locating the objects of scientific inquiry on, so to speak, the widest possible conceptual map -- that provided by our awareness of the divine desire to share the communion of trinitarian life with creaturely persons, or, to use the terms of the encyclical, the integral human good.

With these principles firmly in place, it seems to me of the greatest possible importance for social scientists like yourselves to resist reductionist accounts of human nature and society, and relativistic accounts of moral reasoning and norms -- accounts which almost by definition obscure the wider horizons of faith about which Pope Benedict speaks in the encyclical.

Such accounts are by no means entailed by research in the social sciences, but often arise from pre-existing philosophical assumptions that come to influence and shape the conclusions of scholarship. This is not the place to trace the complex history of these connections and dependences.

But there is no reason why research that focuses on specific aspects of human behavior and interaction needs to deny the existence of the wider horizon which faith reveals to us. As Pope Benedict tellingly affirms in "Deus Caritas Est," "faith liberates reason from its blind spots."

What is not susceptible to observation and generalization within the limits of a particular social scientific discipline or model can nonetheless provide the context for a fuller understanding of the objects of social scientific inquiry.

I mention this point because the Church faces a huge challenge in the present day in her interaction with international agencies and national governments whose social policies have been influenced by reductionist social science. It can be demonstrated that an entirely secular anthropology -- in the sense of an alternative account of the meaning of human existence -- has, especially since the '90s, come to shape the programs and policies of many international organizations, including the United Nations.

In place of an earlier paradigm in which universal human rights and a common human nature played a normative role, the alternative anthropology espouses the socially constructed character of truth and reality, the priority of cultural diversity, the deconstruction of all moral norms, and priority of personal choice. Although the roots of this secular anthropology are philosophical, the social sciences have been the principal vehicle for its diffusion in modern western societies.

When the Church, in this environment, advances her vision of the integral human good, her interventions are frequently caricatured as retrogressive and intrusive. The alternative anthropology has so powerful a hold on the media, the international aid agencies, many NGOs, and other influential bodies that it is difficult to advance the Christian vision of the integral human good through dialogue, argument and counter-argument. The new anthropology is viewed, in effect, as self-evident and not in need of argument. This situation has created many practical problems that sometimes make it difficult for Catholic aid agencies even to function at the local, national, and even international levels.

Some years ago, when the then Cardinal Ratzinger was its prefect, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith invited about thirty Catholic university faculties across the world to sponsor consultations and symposia on the natural law and universal human values. It is significant that, now as Holy Father, he should state in "Deus Caritas Est" that "the Church's social teaching argues on the basis on reason and natural law, namely, on the basis of what is in accord with the nature of every human being" (No. 28). But it must be admitted that this newly emergent secular vision denies the applicability -- indeed, the knowability -- of any universal account of human nature and destiny.

It is urgent for social scientists whose practice of their disciplines does not in principle exclude some broad account of the integral human good to counter this secular anthropology and the social engineering programs inspired by it. The straightforward, and well-argued account of the Christian vision of the integral human good presented in "Deus Caritas Est" should facilitate the kind of discussion and argument which needs to take place. I cannot think of a better forum for this much-needed debate than the floor of this distinguished academy.

* * *

The encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" bears the date of Christmas 2005, the first Christmas of the pontificate of Pope Benedict XVI. This is significant. The only-begotten Son of God took on human nature in order that human persons might share in the divine life. It is this communion of life with creaturely persons that the triune God desires. "I wish in my first Encyclical to speak of the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others" ("Deus Caritas Est," No. 1).

St. Augustine somewhere remarks that it is very difficult for human beings to believe in this love. But we can see that no account of the human condition can be complete that neglects, excludes or denies that the integral human good is found only in the love of God revealed to us on the first Christmas in the Incarnate Word made flesh.

[Text adapted]

Code: ZE07050501

Date: 2007-05-05

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"Technology and Human Love Should Always Go Together"

VATICAN CITY, MAY 4, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Here is a Vatican translation of Benedict XVI's April 22 address during his visit to the San Matteo Polyclinic in Pavia, Italy.

* * *

PASTORAL VISIT TO VIGEVANO AND PAVIA (ITALY)

VISIT TO THE "SAN MATTEO" POLYCLINIC IN PAVIA

ADDRESS OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI
TO THE DIRECTORS, MEDICAL STAFF, THE SICK AND THEIR RELATIVES

"San Matteo" Polyclinic, Pavia
Sunday, 22 April 2007

Dear Brothers and Sisters,

The programme for my Pastoral Visit to Pavia could not have omitted a stop at the San Matteo Polyclinic to meet you, dear sick people, who come not only from the Province of Pavia but also from the whole of Italy.

I express my personal closeness and solidarity to each one of you as I also embrace in spirit the sick, the suffering, people in difficulty in your Diocese and all those who take loving care of them. I would like to reach out to you all with a word of encouragement and hope.

I address a respectful greeting to Mr Alberto Guglielmo, President of the Polyclinic, and I thank him for his cordial words that he has just addressed to me. My gratitude extends to the doctors, the nurses and all the personnel who work here daily.

I offer grateful thoughts to the Camillian Fathers who every day, with lively pastoral zeal, bring to the sick the comfort of the faith, as well as to the Sisters of Providence involved in generous service in keeping with the charism of St Luigi Scrosoppi, their Founder.

I express heartfelt thanks to the representative of the sick [who spoke prior to the Pope's Address] and I think with affection of their relatives who share moments of trepidation and trustful expectation with their loved ones.

A hospital is a place which in a certain way we might call "holy", where one experiences not only the frailty of human nature but also the enormous potential and resources of human ingenuity and technology at the service of life.

Human life! However often it is explored, this gift always remains a mystery.

I am aware that this hospital structure, your "San Matteo" Polyclinic, is well known in this City and in the rest of Italy, in particular for its pioneering surgery on several occasions. Here, you seek to alleviate suffering in the attempt to restore the person to complete health and this often happens, partly thanks to modern scientific discoveries; and here, truly comforting results are obtained.

I strongly hope that the necessary scientific and technological progress will constantly go hand in hand with the awareness that together with the good of the sick person, one is promoting those fundamental values, such as the respect for and defence of life in all its stages, on which the authentically human quality of coexistence depends.

Being here with you, it comes naturally to me to think of Jesus, who in the course of his earthly existence always showed special attention to the suffering, healing them and giving them the possibility of returning to a life of family and social relations which illness had compromised.

I am also thinking of the first Christian community, where, as we read in these days in the Acts of the Apostles, many cases of healing and miracles accompanied the Apostles' preaching.

The Church, following the example of her Lord, always expresses special preference for the suffering and, as the President said, sees Christ himself in the suffering and does not cease to offer to the sick the necessary technical assistance and human love, knowing that she is called to express Christ's love and concern for them and for those who care for them.

Technical progress, technology and human love should always go together!

Moreover, Jesus' words, "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me" (Mt 25:40;45), resonate with special timeliness in this place. In every person stricken with illness it is Jesus himself who waits for our love.

Suffering is of course repugnant to the human spirit; yet, it is true that when it is accepted with love and compassion and illumined by faith, it becomes a precious opportunity that mysteriously unites one to Christ the Redeemer, the Man of sorrows who on the Cross took upon himself human suffering and death.

With the sacrifice of his life, he redeemed human suffering and made it the fundamental means of salvation.

Dear sick people, entrust to the Lord the hardships and sorrows that you have to face and in his plan they will become a means of purification and redemption for the whole world.

Dear friends, I assure each and every one of you of my remembrance in prayer and, as I invoke Mary Most Holy, Salus infirmorum -- Health of the Sick -- so that she may protect you and your families, the directors, the doctors and the whole community of the Polyclinic, I impart to you all with affection a special Apostolic Blessing.

© Copyright 2007 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Code: ZE07050420

Date: 2007-05-04

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Interview With Professor Russell Hittinger

ROME, MAY 4, 2007 (Zenit.org).- Beyond mere policy, Catholic social doctrine seeks to clarify the proper order and harmony among societies, says a Catholic author and professor.

Russell Hittinger, the William K. Warren Professor of Catholic Studies and a research professor of law at the University of Tulsa, spoke Wednesday at the "Foundations of a Free Society" conference organized by the Acton Institute, held at the Pontifical Lateran University.

In this interview with ZENIT, Hittinger discusses the history of Catholic social doctrine, starting with Pope Leo XIII, up to Benedict XVI's most recent contribution to the body of knowledge in "Deus Caritas Est."

Hittinger's most recent book is "The First Grace: Rediscovering the Natural Law in a Post-Christian World."

Q: Can you explain the seminal role Pope Leo XIII played in shaping what we now know to be Catholic social doctrine?

Hittinger: Pope Pius XI [1922-1939] is the first Pope to speak of social doctrine as a unified body of teachings that develop by way of clarity and application.

In "Quadragesimo Anno," Pius XI said that he inherited a "doctrine" handed on from the time of Leo XIII. By any measure, it is a prodigious tradition.

Beginning in 1878 with the election of Leo XIII, Popes have issued more than 250 encyclicals and other teaching letters; roughly half are related, broadly, to issues of social thought and doctrine. No government, no political party, no encyclopedia or university has produced such a continuous and voluminous tradition of social thought.

Leo XIII himself wrote some 100 teaching letters.

Why did he write so many encyclicals? The short answer is the collapse of Catholic political Christendom and the rise of the new secularist states in the 19th century.

To be disinherited politically was a traumatic event for European Catholics. Leo XIII understood the need to respond in a measured and reasonable manner.

Throughout the world Catholics looked to the papacy to provide leadership lest Catholicism become divided by the new nation-states.

To his credit, Leo XIII rose to the occasion. Leo XIII saw that he needed to supply not only juridical but also intellectual leadership.

His teachings proved successful because he was ready to ascertain what is open or closed in the secular mind, and to use the right mixture of dialectics and systematics to move the latter toward the former.

He gave Catholics a sophisticated body of thought about social issues that transcended what could be called simple statements of "policy."

His efforts also proved successful because his lengthy pontificate was the seedbed for future Popes; hence emerged a remarkably well-structured, yet quickly evolving body of social doctrine.

Q: Pope John Paul II's encyclical "Centesimus Annus" was written on the 100th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's encyclical "Rerum Novarum." What elements from Leo XIII's encyclical are still relevant 100 years later? What developments in the encyclical were unique to John Paul II?

Hittinger: Like every subsequent Pope, John Paul II expressed his admiration and profound gratitude for the Leonine project. By my count, the world in which John Paul II came of age went through three deep changes.

First, after World War I: Nation-states were profoundly demoralized by the war, and this demoralization became fertile soil for the rise of totalitarian regimes that Leo XIII could have scarcely imagined.

Second, after World War II: Europe and her former colonies around the world undertook a painful and searching re-evaluation of their respective domestic orders, and the international order.

During these years, when Father Karol Wojtyla was a young priest, he saw the beginning of the human rights movement, the beginning of European Union, and both the hopes and disorders which followed upon decolonization.

Third, the revolution in Central and Eastern Europe that ended the Cold War: "Centesimus Annus" is John Paul II's grand narrative and philosophical analysis of all these changes.

To be sure, the Leonine principles are quite evident, but John Paul II deals with the crises of the 20th century.

I encourage people to read both encyclicals because the entire modern history of the Church is encompassed by the lives of Leo XIII and John Paul II.

The former was born in 1810, at the zenith of Napoleon's power, and the latter was born just a decade after Leo XIII's death, and brought the Church into the new millennium.

Q: Benedict XVI's encyclical "Deus Caritas Est" has elements of a social encyclical. In what ways does he follow "Centesimus Annus"? Does he bring a new perspective to Catholic social doctrine?

Hittinger: "Deus Caritas Est" perhaps does not break entirely new ground in social teaching. But it surely reiterates and makes more clear that the mission of the Church is not to be confused with the state and the other temporal instruments of social justice.

Benedict XVI was, of course, familiar with the problem, which surfaced acutely in certain strands of liberation theology. As the prefect of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had written clear and careful instructions on this subject.

From one point of view, the second half of "Deus Caritas Est" continues the standing magisterial admonitions about turning the Church into a mere instrument of politics and the quest for justice.

Beyond the specific questions surrounding liberation theology, however, Benedict XVI wanted to remind us that while the Church teaches and promotes social justice, Christ gave the Church a very specific mission in the order of charity.

The integrity of this mission must be protected. And at a minimum, this means not confusing it with the ordinary objects and ends of civil governance.

Q: You spoke recently at the Acton Institute event "The Foundations of the Free Society" in Rome. How is the exercise of virtue important in building a free and just society?

Hittinger: The natural, acquired virtues and the supernatural virtues are like spiritual muscles, disposing the intellect and the will to achieve their proper objects -- namely, the true and good.

Some levels of justice and love are achievable with a minimum of virtue, but such achievement will not last for long without it. Any one who has married and raised children understands this point. So, too, does any superior of a religious order or congregation.

The first stirrings of truth and love provide an initial thrust toward right order. But without virtue they will turn out to be like seeds thrown on rocky soil.

Today there is a tendency to believe that right order ensues merely from arranging a rational set of incentives, as though truth and love were the products of a system.

Whatever "system" contains real human persons -- polities, markets, education, families -- it cannot succeed without the internal perfections of its members.

Q: Additionally, at the Acton Institute event, your lecture was entitled: "Societies as Persons in Social Doctrine." You argued that societies can be defined as a person. What do you mean by this and what ramifications does it have for Catholic social doctrine?

Hittinger: It should be obvious that social teaching presupposes that there is such a thing as society.

Indeed, there are many different kinds of society. Some are natural, in the sense that human life is either impossible or very difficult without them. In the older tradition common to philosophers, theologians and jurists, the family and the polity counted as natural societies.

Other societies are voluntary, such as clubs, sodalities, faculties, corporations and so forth. The Church is a supernatural society, though it has aspects of both natural and voluntary societies.

In her social doctrine, the Church has repeatedly insisted that we must carefully note the different objects and ends and modes of unity of these societies.

How can we do justice if we don't appreciate these differences?

For example, how can we do justice to a matrimonial society if we treat it the same as a temporary economic partnership? How can we do justice to a religious congregation if we treat it no different than a chess club?

I call societies "persons" in a restricted but important sense. A society is the bearer of rights and responsibilities that are not reducible to the aggregation of its members. The rights-and-duties bearing unity called a "society" is a subject of moral appraisal.

In the moral sense of the term, a society can harm and be harmed. In "Centesimus Annus," No. 13, this is what John Paul II meant by the "subjectivity of society."

He simply meant that a society is something more than mere intersubjectivity; rather, it constitutes a "subject" in its own right. All of us belong to more than one society.

Catholic social doctrine seeks to clarify the proper order and harmony among societies.

Code: ZE07050411

Date: 2007-05-04