Question 9.148

9.148 How are we to understand what Francis calls “reverence for truth”?

God is truth; through his Son, he intends to draw us toward this truth. Attachment to and love of the truth are the most authentic, the most righteous, and the noblest attitude that a man could ever want on this earth. Conversely, the absence of truth is man’s real poverty, for the rejection of the truth paralyzes and falsifies his activity. Thus, the man who is not in the truth of God finds himself a prisoner of his own ego. Without truth, we are strangers to ourselves, cut off from the depths of our being, cut off from God, prisoners in our own darkness.

In his encyclical Evangelii nuntiandi, Paul VI declared that evangelization is supposed to quench a thirst that could be summed up as a threefold search, for the truth about God, the truth about man, and the truth about the world (see EN 78). We are neither the authors nor the masters of the truth, but rather its stewards and servants. Reverence for the truth is the true spiritual worship that we must render to God.

In the Gospel of John, we find these extraordinary words: “Jesus then said to the Jews who had believed in him, ‘If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free’” (Jn 8:31-32).

By building his life on the truth, man becomes a rock, because God is love and truth. He never disappoints. Conversely, if mankind chooses to build on sand, it runs the risk of suffering major interior and external losses.

Furthermore, concerning the problem of fidelity to the truth, Francis writes: “Certainly, to understand properly the meaning of the central message of a text we need to relate it to the teaching of the entire Bible as handed on by the Church. This is an important principle of biblical interpretation which recognizes that the Holy Spirit has inspired not just a part of the Bible, but the Bible as a whole, and that in some areas people have grown in their understanding of God’s will on the basis of their personal experience. It also prevents erroneous or partial interpretations which would contradict other teachings of the same Scriptures. But it does not mean that we can weaken the distinct and specific emphasis of a text which we are called to preach. One of the defects of a tedious and ineffectual preaching is precisely its inability to transmit the intrinsic power of the text which has been proclaimed” (EG 148).