Photo: Wikimedia Commons: Pope Benedict XVI in Berlin 2011.jpg
CV NEWS FEED // The Veritas Amoris Project has just published a never-before-seen text of Pope Benedict XVI addressing some of the fundamental crises of our day.
The newly published text, titled “The Christian Image of Man,” is the final part of a handwritten work that Pope Benedict asked to have published only after his death. The retired pontiff wrote it between Christmas and Epiphany 2019-2020, entrusting it to Fr. Livio Melina, former head of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family. Fr. Melina and Fr. José Granados co-edited the third volume of the Italian journal for the Veritas Amoris Project, “La verità dell’amore, Tracce per un cammino.”
The Veritas Amoris Project was founded in 2019 by Frs. Melina and Granados, who were both professors of dogmatic and moral theology at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. The Institute was gutted in 2019, and scholars and theologians faithful to the vision of John Paul II on marriage, family, and the moral life were expelled.
In the introduction to the newly published text of Pope Benedict, Fr. Melina writes that the late Pontiff “considered that measure unjust and unacceptable, and sought by various means to get those responsible to reconsider.”
Between August 2019 and January 2020, the emeritus Pope met with Fr. Melina seven times in his residence within the Vatican to discuss the Veritas Amoris Project, which seeks to continue something of what was originally envisioned for the Institute for Marriage and Family.
Explaining that the project’s purpose is to address the growing crisis of the family and the consequences of this crisis for proclaiming the faith, Fr. Melina writes that “the loss of a truth of love today runs parallel to the difficulty of proclaiming and living the faith.”
With regard to the themes of human love, marriage and the family, what has rightly been called an anthropological ‘deregulation’ is currently underway, that is, the attempt to reinvent, according to each individual’s own lights, the meaning of sexual difference, of what it means to be a man or woman, the meaning of the word “family.”
Capturing the project’s underlying inspiration, Fr. Melina writes, “What moves us is the beauty of God’s plan for marriage and the family and the splendor of the Christian faith in love.”
Fr. Melina explains that Pope Benedict, during his years as pontiff, himself addressed the crisis in the family. In 2012, in his last Christmas address to the Roman curia, the Pope spoke of the current “attack on the authentic form of the family.”
In that address, he forcefully declared, “Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation.”
“Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him,” he continued.
When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.
In the newly published text, Pope Benedict warns that the rise of gender ideology and the creation of life in a lab have their roots in both Marxism and an extreme liberalism that now seeks to determine human nature itself.
“But only in the historical moment put in disarray by two world wars, with Marxism and liberalism becoming dramatically more extreme, were two new movements set in motion that brought the idea of freedom to a radicalism previously unimaginable,” Pope Benedict wrote.
In fact, it is now denied that man, as a free being, is in some way bound to a nature that determines the space of his freedom. Man now no longer has a nature, but “makes” himself. No more does there exist a nature of man: it is he himself who decides what he is, male or female. It is man himself who produces man, and so determines the destiny of a being that no longer comes from the hands of a creator God, but from the laboratory of human inventions.
Highlighting the consequences of the attempt to destroy familial relationships for understanding the faith, Fr. Melina writes, “If we lose the experience of being a son and daughter, brother and sister, husband and wife, father and mother, then the natural basis that language has for speaking about God will also be destroyed: God, after all, has revealed himself as the spouse of Israel, whom we invoke as our Father, who has sent us Jesus, his Son and our brother, and who has given us the Church as mother.”
