Question 5.91

5.91 How should we view the authentic connection between Christianity and morality? Benedict XVI thought that the two should not be confused, at the risk of distorting the nature of each. Do you agree with this analysis?

ROBERT CARDINAL SARAH

Yes, in Deus caritas est, Benedict XVI writes that at the origin of being Christian there is not an ethical decision, a philosophical or moral idea, but an encounter with an event, a Person. This man who comes to us, Christ, gives life a new prospect and, thereby, its decisive orientation.

Benedict XVI thus repeated an idea of the theologian Romano Guardini, for whom Christianity is not the result of an intellectual experience but an event that comes from outside to meet me. Christianity is Someone bursting into my life. This movement also implies the historicity of Christianity, which is based on facts and not on an insight into the depths of my own interior world.

Taking as examples the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Trinity, Romano Guardini correctly writes that we will not discover the three Divine Persons by appealing to our intellect.

Saint John Chrysostom says in his Homilies on Saint Matthew: “We see that Jesus came from us and our human nature and that he was born of a Virgin Mother. But we do not understand how this prodigy could have happened. Let us not weary ourselves in trying to discover it but, rather, humbly accept what God has revealed to us, without curiously investigating what God keeps hidden from us.”

For many cultures, Christianity is a scandal and foolishness: “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles” (1 Cor 1:22-23). This statement by the apostle Paul shows the extent to which our religion is essentially bound up with a person who comes to us to appeal to our hearts and to give us a new orientation that will upset our whole world view.

Although Christianity cannot be reduced to morality, it nevertheless has moral consequences; love and faith give to the life of a man a new orientation, depth, and breadth. Man leaves the darkness of his past life. His life is enlightened by the light that is Christ. He lives by Christ’s life. From now on he can walk only in the company of Jesus, who is light, truth, and life. After his encounter with Jesus, a real Christian changes his conduct.

In the same way, a society imbued with a Christian spirit advances with a new ambition that is entirely unlike the precepts of a pagan society. From this perspective, I am very fond of the Letter to Diognetus: “The Christians. . . are in the flesh, but they do not live according to the flesh. They pass their days on earth, but they are citizens of heaven. They obey the prescribed laws, and at the same time surpass the laws by their lives”, because they faithfully follow Jesus Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life.

Yes, Christianity is summed up in a person who comes to reveal and offer his love: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). This is certainly not about “moralism” but about “morality”. The first moral precept is love of God and of neighbor, is it not? The fulfillment of the Law, Saint Paul says, is love (Rom 13:10).

Love is the very being of God: “You see the Trinity when you see charity”, Saint Augustine wrote. If we discover love, our conduct in relation to good and evil will be different. In certain eras of the Church, there was a sort of an antiseptic fixation on moral questions. That trend could not produce good fruits because it obscured the true character of revelation, the radical irruption of God.

The Church has sometimes been brushed aside because of a narrow moralism that some clerics promoted. How many of the faithful had the sense that they were not understood, that they were sometimes even rejected? When Christ comes into a life, he unsettles it and transforms it from top to bottom. He gives it a new orientation and new ethical points of reference; baptism is a break [with the past] in the form of a covenant, and not a moral pact! Authentic moral conduct is the reflection of the One whom I have received in my heart, and he is defined by his love, perfection, sanctity, and goodness.

Pope Francis rightly refuses to give a pervasive place to moral questions, without minimizing them, however. He considers that the most important encounter is with Christ and his Gospel; the Holy Father acts like Benedict XVI, who tried to distinguish morality from the essence of Christianity. During his visit to Saint Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, in February 2000, John Paul II himself explained that the path marked out by the divine Law is not a moral police ordinance, but the mind of God. God’s Law, promulgated by Moses, contains the major principles, the absolutely necessary conditions for the spiritual survival of men. All the prohibitions that it contains are a safeguard to prevent man from falling over the brink of evil into the abyss of sin and death.

A life enlightened by love of God does not need to take shelter behind moralizing barriers that are often the expression of unspoken fears. Morality is fundamentally a consequence of the Christian faith.