Developing the seminal theology of Pope Paul VI: toward a civilization of love in the confident hope of the Gospel of Life.

• Author: Bulzacchelli, Richard H.
• Position: The Foundation of Human Rights: Catholic Contributions, part 2

In his Regina Coeli Address for Pentecost Sunday, May 17, 1970, Pope Paul VI introduced the world to the phrase "civilization of love," grounding that image in the mystery of the day's feast. (1) Though this Address is quite short, it represents a kernel of theological reflection that has formed the foundation of later considerations. It builds, clearly, upon an already well-defined trajectory of thought, both magisterial and merely theological, so that while what Pope Paul VI says, in this brief and largely forgotten Address, is not altogether new, his words had their own far-reaching effects. Under Pope John Paul II, Pope Paul VI's reflection on Pentecost 1970 would lead to the concept of "The Gospel of Life," which would frame the language of the Church's moral teaching and her understanding of human rights for the foreseeable future. It would be impossible to treat all the documents within which the phrase "civilization of love" appears in magisterial writings, so thoroughly infused has the magisterial tradition become with Pope Paul VI's insight. (2) The very factor, however, that would render such a project impossible also renders it unnecessary, since the phrase has become so much a part of the Church's patrimony as to find itself repeatedly on the lips of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI. We do not need to demonstrate the influence of Pope Paul VI's phrase, but we would be served by an examination of its theological content and the historical context within which it first came to be used. Doing so would serve an important hermeneutical purpose, helping us to recall with greater clarity, and perhaps simplicity, what the pastors of the Church, in recent magisterial interventions, have sought to accomplish. Without going into details, we can frame the whole context of the Church's teaching in the terms of an anthropological datum, rooted in the promise of the eschaton.

It is significant that Pope Paul VI's Address was given on Pentecost Sunday, a day that commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit in the upper room. From a typological point of view--a view Pope Paul VI acknowledges in his Address--this scene represents an inversion of the story of the Tower of Babel. (3) Indeed, the Roman Lectionary juxtaposes these two passages on the day's feast. An alternative account of the Fall, the story of Babel describes an attempt on the part of humanity to appropriate the divine Life--the life of grace--which can only come to us as a gift. (4) Grace is an effect of Love, and Love cannot be appropriated. It is a gift to be received by the beloved, and can be acquired in no other way. The story of Babel reminds us that the turn toward an appropriative engagement with the divine necessarily means a corresponding turn toward an appropriative engagement with other human beings. It is a movement away from communion and into alienation, because it is a referencing of the Other to the Self, rather than a referencing of the Self to the Other. So, as the Tower collapses--as we necessarily fail in our attempt to appropriate the divine Life--the world's common language, culture, and communion, is reduced to ruins, and each withdraws into himself, alone, and abandoned, leading to a history of intercultural and international conflict.

By contrast, the story of Pentecost shows the Holy Spirit--the "Lord and giver of Life" (5)--descending of his own accord upon a people open to his initiative and ready to receive. They have introduced no preconceived expectations to bar the way to God's initiative, and have stepped outside of themselves to make room for God's presence within them. (6) Now, the purifying fire of God's love alights upon them as upon the bush on Mt. Horeb, (7) setting the disciples ablaze with the divine Life, and leaving them unharmed. (8) It is in this context that the apostles are able to bridge the gap of alienation forged at Babel, when they speak in their own tongue and communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers. (9)

The basis of this mystery, as Pope Paul VI rightly points out, is that the Apostles are communicating to the crowds in the language of Love--the language of giving and receiving, which alone allows for communion between persons. Pope Paul VI is concerned, here, with much more than merely secular matters, even as he insists that these matters bear upon the secular world. Indeed, there can be no question of reducing this passage to a mere allegory in which the only real issue is the horizontal relations between human beings, because the whole reference of the story is the foundational relationship between the human person and God. At Babel, it was the closing of the human heart to God's love that led to the dissolution of the human family; and in the story of Pentecost, it is the opening of the human heart to God's love that restores the human family. The apostolic circle, moreover, is bound together, again, precisely by the gift of the divine Love. They are Twelve because, in them, the sons of Israel--the twelve tribes of Jacob--are restored to oneness. Twelve, in other words, is the number of universality or, to use later terminology, "catholicity"--and it has these qualities precisely because it represents the love that lies at the root of the promise of covenantal inheritance. (10)

It is against this background of meaning that Pope Paul VI speaks on Pentecost, 1970. "Although to some it may seem strange," he says:

Pentecost is an event that also involves the secular world. For it gave rise to a new sociology--one which penetrates the values of the spirit, which forms our hierarchy of values, and which confronts us with the truth, and with the ultimate destiny of humanity. It is this which has given us our belief in the dignity of the human person, and our civil customs, and which above all leads us to resolutely rise above all divisions and conflicts between humans, and to form humanity into a single family of the children of God, free and fraternal. We recall the symbolism at the beginning of this amazing story, of the miracle of many different languages being made comprehensible to everyone by the Spirit. It is the civilization of love and of peace which Pentecost has inaugurated--and we are all aware how much today the world still needs love and peace! (11) Pope Paul VI had assumed the chair of Peter in the midst of the Second Vatican Council--a council convened at a time when the Second World War was still fresh in everyone's mind, and Europe was still recovering from its devastation. The first half of the twentieth century had been among the most violent periods of human history, and the continuing presence, and expansion, of totalitarian regimes offered no reprieve from the threat of war. At the root of the unspeakable violence that framed the twentieth century experience lay a conception of the human person that left God out of account, or attempted to co-opt him in the service of a purely secular agenda. (12) Pope Paul VI understood this fact, and attempted to offer the solution by reminding the world of the meaning of Pentecost. It was the task of the Church, he thought, to lead the way to peace in the world, not by overpowering all enemies through the use of force or the coercive power of civil laws, but by the exercise of her own most fundamental charism--the preaching of the Gospel.

Two years prior to Pope Paul VI's Address, Joseph Ratzinger, who had been a peritus at the Second Vatican Council, had published his ground-breaking book, Introduction to Christianity. (13) In that text, he explicated in detail the theological foundations of Pope Paul VI's later Pentecost Address. It is not enough, according to Ratzinger, merely to assert that Christ leads the cosmos to its end; we must insist, instead, that in and through Christ, the cosmos does what the cosmos is intended to do--it becomes what it is intended to become. Ratzinger explicitly credits Tielhard de Chardin with, a fundamentally correct reading of St. Paul, even if a bit overly biological in its emphasis. (14) According to this view, Christ is understood, not as a mere superaddition to a cosmos understandable on purely natural terms, but as the one in whom the cosmos finally reaches its true goal. Those familiar with the bitter conflict between Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. and Henri de Lubac, S.J.15 will recognize, immediately, on which side of this divide Ratzinger stands. "[I]n the last analysis," he writes:

[O]ne cannot make a clear distinction between "natural" and "supernatural": the basic dialogue which first makes man into man moves over without a break into the dialogue of grace known as Jesus Christ. How could it be otherwise if Christ actually is the "second Adam", the real fulfillment of that infinite longing which ascends from the first Adam--from man in general? (16) With the human person, a creature has emerged from within the cosmic frame, capable of thinking the thought of God, and thus, responding to God--of turning back to him again. But, with Christ, finally, there appears a human being who is so totally the man for God as to be man, for God, and, thus, to be God as man. This event is the central content of the eschatological promise that now becomes the new reference point for the whole cosmic reality. The return of creation to God occurs in and through this one man--the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII.] (Eschatos Adam)--Jesus Christ. Pope Paul VI's Address had consisted of a reminder that this eschatological promise is predicated on love, and not dominance, and that the task that lies before the human person must be shaped by this recognition if the dignity of the...