Question 2.38

2.38 What did your daily work consist of in the Cor unum council?

My mission was to be able to express as well as possible the compassion and the spiritual and material closeness of the Church for people who are suffering from all the most difficult trials in this world. As I traveled to the most afflicted countries in our time, I very quickly understood that the greatest misery is not necessarily material poverty. The most profound misery is the lack of God. He can be absent because people are too much imprisoned in their materialism and profoundly desperate; they have abandoned him or reject him. Often there is a hunger for bread, but also a hunger for God.

Cor unum, as a representative of the charity of the successor of Peter, was systematically present at all the sites of war, natural catastrophes, famines, and epidemics. Often, behind these immeasurable tragedies, there is an abandonment of God by men. And so Cor unum always tried to bring emergency material aid, without forgetting divine consolation. Charity is service to man, but it is not possible to serve mankind without telling people about God. In this respect, the Church will never be able to conduct work comparable to some humanitarian organizations that are often guided and dominated by ideologies.

In his encyclical Deus caritas est, Benedict XVI correctly recalls that “Christian charitable activity must be independent of parties and ideologies. It is not a means of changing the world ideologically, and it is not at the service of worldly stratagems, but it is a way of making present here and now the love which man always needs” (DCE 31). And the source of this love is God himself. We must reflect theologically on charity so as to prevent Catholic charitable agencies from falling into secularism.

The nature of the Church is in the love of God, and the charity of the Church is in the first place the charity of God.

True charity is neither almsgiving nor humanistic solidarity nor a form of philanthropy: charity is the expression of God and an extension of Christ’s presence in our world. Charity is not an ad hoc function but the inmost nature of the Church, intima Ecclesiae natura.

It urges us to evangelize; to put it simply, the Church reveals the Love of God. Often the absence of God is the deepest root of human suffering. And so the Church gives the Love of God to all. Consequently, a Christian cannot perform acts of charity only for his brethren in Christ, but must do so for all men without any distinction.