VATICAN: Young people may be alienated by the Pope's views on love, writes Paddy Agnew in Rome
Is there a risk that in his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est (God Is Love), released yesterday, Pope Benedict XVI is speaking not so much to the converted as to an older generation of the converted?
As someone who has lived and worked in the Holy See for the last 25 years, Pope Benedict knows better than anyone that the first encyclical of a pontificate is traditionally seen as laying down markers for what is to follow. In that context, he will have chosen his first theme, "love", with the utmost care.
Given his background as Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith - ie the Vatican's doctrinal watchdog - one might have expected Pope Benedict to opt for a more "hardline" or "theological" theme such as the relationship between truth and freedom, or the need for modern man to rediscover those objective truths about human life that have been implanted by God the Creator.
Intriguingly, he has opted for "love", thus choosing to do battle with the forces of the hedonistic, materialist West in precisely that area - human sexuality (eros) - where the Catholic Church's message is often perceived to be repressive, ill-informed and ludicrously irrelevant.
It may well be that the Pope opted to open his account on the issue of love because he wants to underline that Catholic teaching is not hostile to human love, but rather that it guides love to a higher level.
One of the themes which had already emerged from this pontificate prior to Deus Caritas Est is that Pope Benedict is keen to insist that church teachings are not merely a series of restrictive prohibitions. Rather, he wants to underline that the structures and rules governing Christian life are designed not to discourage and alienate but to help the faithful discover the true spirit of selfless Christian love.
Introducing the encyclical earlier this week, the Pope explained why he chose love as the theme. Speaking to a conference promoted by pontifical council Cor Unum, he said that the word "love" is "today so tarnished, so spoiled and so abused, that one is almost afraid to pronounce it with one's lips". Yet, he argued, the word cannot simply be abandoned, but instead must be purified so that it will regain "its original splendour" and lead mankind "on the right path". In that context, in the first section of the encyclical, the Pope is careful to strike a positive note when talking of the "love between man and woman, where body and soul are inseparably joined and human beings glimpse an apparently irresistible promise of happiness". He recounts how the Greeks considered eros as "a kind of intoxication, the overpowering of reason by divine madness which tears man away from his finite existence and enables him to experience supreme happiness".
So far, so good. It remains to be seen, however, just how many young people, at least in the West, will be alienated by his reminder that "Eros, reduced to pure sex, has become a commodity, a mere thing to be bought and sold". How many young people will simply see him as an out-of-touch old man, talking about something (sexuality) about which he knows nothing? Much of the teaching in this encyclical concerns the different dimensions of love. Pope Benedict wishes to explain how eros can be transformed into "agape" or spiritual love.
He wishes to point out that "love", in modern parlance, is far removed from the Christian notion of charity. Eros can transform itself into "caritas" or charity, an expression of love that "calls for a practical commitment here and now" to charitable works and acts.
When discussing the church's social doctrine, too, the Pope betrays his age when describing the "illusion" of Marxism which "had seen world revolution and its preliminaries as the panacea for the social problem". In contrast, he claims, in the today's globalised world, "the church's social doctrine has become a set of fundamental guidelines offering approaches that are valid even beyond the confines of the church". All very well, but the Berlin Wall fell 17 years ago; in the meantime, there is a whole generation out there for whom Marxism is about as relevant as galoshes on a sunny day.
If Deus Caritas Est is indicative of the direction in which this pontificate is moving, then one can conclude that, at best, Pope Benedict is headed down the road of compassionate conservatism while, at worse, he is merely treading water.