ABOUT
The Veritas Amoris Project is an association of scholars that focuses on the truth of love as a key to understanding the mystery of God, the human person and the world, convinced that this perspective provides an integral and fruitful pastoral approach.
Three Pillars
Inspired by the teachings of St. John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the intellectual patrimony of the Project is based on three pillars:
=> a theology of the body,
=> a theology of love,
=> a pedagogy of love with special attention to human frailty
Exploring Karol Wojtyła’s Insights and Their Echo in the Samaritan Woman’s Story
The expression “truth of love” is inspired by the work of Karol Wojtyła / John Paul II, who dwells repeatedly on it, especially in his Love and Responsibility and in his Catecheses on Human Love in the Divine Plan:
“What does true love mean? It means a love in which the true essence of love is realized, the love that turns to the true (and not merely apparent) good in a true way, that is, the way that corresponds to the nature of the good”
(Love and Responsibility, Pauline, 66)
Paradigmatic for the Project’s content and method is Jesus’ dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well, in which Jesus “addressed her desire for true love” (Francis, Amoris Laetitia, 294). In this way, he has made her capable of a new kind of action; he regenerated her as a moral subject in the synergy of grace and virtue, leading her to convert and to announce the Gospel to her fellow villagers (cf. Jn 4:28-29).
Love & Truth
The perspective of the truth of love helps us to overcome the subjectivism of a love without truth, by which the only criterion for one’s action is the authenticity of one’s emotions. It also allows us to overcome the objectivism of a truth without love, which simply imposes external rules on human freedom. The old paradigm pits up
=> emotivism against intellectualism,
=> the subjective against the objective,
=> the internal conscience against the external law.
Instead, this new paradigm, in consonance with the foundational principles of the Catholic Tradition, proposes a logic of love that, in its very manifestation, carries within itself the criteria of its truth.
Response to Pandemic Challenges
This Project sees the light of day at a time when a pandemic has called intoquestion the secure cultural framework on which we have relied in recent decades. But in this way, precisely this experience can remind us of the fact that at the basis of the life of each person and of society as a whole there is an original gift. The pandemic makes the question about the truth of love urgent, inasmuch as it is a question about the relationships that sustain life and allow us to reach the fullness of the common good. The Veritas Amoris Project takes into account this concrete historical situation in order to highlight the primacy of God, who is the ultimate foundation of our social bonds, and to ask about the word that the Church is called to give to illuminate this situation.
