Brief Synopsis of Caritas in Veritate

I would summarize the new encyclical with one quote of our Lord from the encyclical indicating man's essential need for God (78):

"Apart from me you can do nothing." (Jn 15:5)

Man needs Christ in order to know the one true God (to see God in the face) and thereby know his own true identity as the image and likeness of God and to know his purpose of perfection in the world and to have the desire and the strength to pursue it authentically. For the economy to be right man must be right because all the essential economic actions are acts of men in correspondence with the acts of God.

We human beings must be grateful to God who has given us every good thing and principally our own human greatness, and our gratitude to Him is the greatest and only true ultimate motive of responsibility for our own actions and relationships with God and in marriage and in the family and with others and with the environment and with all peoples and among nations and even in matters of money and commerce and investment and security. The center of man's gratitude and responsibility to God is manifested in willful obedience and dependence on His mighty hand: i.e. the moral life and the interior life. Because...

"A humanism which excludes God is an inhuman humanism." (78)

I'll quote from the end of the sixth chapter of the encyclical, on the limits of technology, which illustrates the need that the men of our age have for a personal relationship with God, and that it is only the personal holiness of individual men and women that will make our world a just world.

"76 One aspect of the contemporary technological mindset is the tendency to consider the problems and emotions of the interior life from a purely psychological point of view, even to the point of neurological reductionism. In this way man's interiority is emptied of its meaning and gradually our awareness of the human soul's ontological depths, as probed by the saints, is lost. The question of development is closely bound up with our understanding of the human soul, insofar as we often reduce the self to the psyche and confuse the soul's heath with emotional well-being. These over-simplifications stem from a profound failure to understand the spiritual life, and they obscure the fact that the development of individuals and peoples depends partly on the resolution of problems of a spiritual nature. Development must include not just material growth but also spiritual growth, since the human person is a 'unity of body and soul,' (Gaudium et Spes, 14) born of God's creative love and destined for eternal life. The human being develops when he grows in the spirit, when his soul comes to know itself and the truths that God has implanted deep within, when he enters into dialogue with himself and his Creator. When he is far away from God, man is unsettled and ill at ease. Social and psychological alienation and the many neuroses that afflict affluent societies are attributable in part to spiritual factors. A prosperous society, highly developed in material terms but weighing heavily on the soul, is not of itself conducive to authentic development. The new forms of slavery to drugs and the lack of hope into which so many people fall can be explained not only in sociological and psychological terms but also in essentially spiritual terms. The emptiness in which the soul feels abandoned, despite the availability of countless therapies for body and psyche, leads to suffering. There cannot be holistic development and universal common good unless people's spiritual and moral welfare is taken into account, considered in their totality as body and soul.

"77 The supremacy of technology tends to prevent people from recognizing anything that cannot be explained in terms of matter alone. Yet everyone experiences the many immaterial and spiritual dimensions of life. Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it [e.g. Helen Keller's quantum leap insight to understanding: "w-a-t-e-r"]. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us. We should never cease to marvel at these things. In all knowledge and in every act of love the human soul experiences something 'over and above,' which seems very much like a gift that we receive, or a height to which we are raised. The development of individuals and peoples is likewise located on a height, if we consider the spiritual dimension that must be present if such development is to be authentic. It requires new eyes and a new heart, capable of rising above a materialistic vision of human events, capable of glimpsing in development the 'beyond' that technology cannot give. By following this path, it is possible to pursue the integral human development that takes its direction from the driving force of charity in truth [i.e. from God Himself]."

Our present worldwide economic crisis is a crisis of saints!