Pope Benedict XVI's "Caritas in Veritate": A Challenge to Business Ethics

genre, it is rooted in concrete experience and so has more common ground with the practicalities of business activities that might at first appear. A second clarification: Catholic Social Teaching does not “have technical solutions to offer,” 4 nor pretend to provide an alternative ‘Vaticanomics’ or a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. 5 The Church has lived as part of every variety of economy, some easily, some in conflict, but the church always sees its role as challenging the society in which it finds itself to be its best self. The People of God wish to engage, not replace, the economic structures in which we concretely find ourselves. Caritas in Veritate – Love in Truth Pope Benedict’s conceptual framework is captured in the title of the Encyclical, whose translation into English, I feel, is more appropriately ‘Love’ in Truth than the more common ‘Charity’ in Truth. For Benedict, love is not extraordinary saintly virtue, much less romantic feeling. From the first paragraph of the encyclical, Benedict describes love as “the principle driving force in every person and all humanity,” 6 “through which we have our being.” 7 For Benedict, humanity’s very existence is the result of relationship, of our interconnectedness and interdependence on one another and on God. Furthermore, love “is the principle not only of micro-relationships (with friends, with family members or within small groups) but also of macro-relationships (social, economic and political ones). 8 Now, the heart of that relationship is the “astonishing experience of gift,” 9 of the gratuitous nature of all of the relationships on which our very lives depend. This is in contrast to the view of our lives as independent, and self-made, in which “Sometimes modern man (sic) is wrongly convinced that he is the sole author of himself, his life and society” whereas actually we human beings are “made for gift.” 10 This view of our human nature is not simply a spiritual statement, but quite practical. As we will see later, for example, Benedict will argue that this understanding of human life actually underlies the functioning of something as practical as the market. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this fundamental principle, and its contrast to our contemporary “utilitarian and 4 Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 9. 5 Oslington, “Pope Benedict’s Greed Free Capitalism,” 1. 6 Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate, no. 1.