A Nuptial Sacrament: The Eucharist and Marriage
Paper presented at the Fourth Truth of Love Conference “The [...]
The Veritas Amoris Project: The Reasons of a Proposal at the Service of the Church and Society
Very concisely, we would like to indicate two fundamental issues concerning the reasons inspiring the Veritas Amoris Project: the first point concerns the crisis situation in which we find ourselves; the second regards fruitful strategies that we deem necessary in this historical situation.
With One’s Life on the Line: Martyrdom and Christian Morality
In acting, we always experience ourselves as loving, i.e., we find that with every action, we will some good to someone, ourselves or others. In willing a good to someone, i.e., in choosing to act on his or her behalf, we testify to our love for him or her. Our actions are always symbolic. For good or ill, they are symbols of the love we bear. Through them, we either express or betray our love. Martyrs witness to this love to the end. They choose to die rather than to act in a way that would betray the one they love. Therefore, martyrdom is “the high point of the witness to moral truth” (Veritatis splendor n. 93) as here is also the fullness of love: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15:13).
The Body as Sacrament of Love: In My Flesh I Shall See God
The present reflection seeks to approach anew the horizon opened by Pope John Paul II’s perspective on the body as “sacrament.” What follows is an attempt to explicate the claim that the essential truth of the body revealed in its givenness is love. That is, the body, in the pope’s evocative words, is “a sign that efficaciously transmits in the visible world the invisible mystery hidden in God from eternity.” The goal is to show just how deeply the body is implicated in the mystery of human identity, action, and the eternal love offered to man by the mystery of God’s assuming of the human nature in the Son.
Christ’s Body as the Place of Truth and Love: A Response to José Granados
Granados’ focus upon bodily existence as allowing us to enter “the space of the truth” moves from the body as providing both physical and cognitive space to consideration of Jesus’ flesh as opening the ultimate Temple of God to humans. Clearly the Logos took a body in order to become the true Temple and draw all men inside himself as their true home. We enter Christ through an extension of his glorified body to live in the divinity that is inseparable from Him. His body has provided a new space for us to objectively participate in God through a true union of wills. Truth has led us into authentic union and higher life through love. The body is not an obstacle to the Spirit, but the very means of entering the Spirit in truth and not imagination.
The Body of Christ: The Ultimate Foundation and Full Realization of the Unity of Truth and Love
The second thesis of the Veritas Amoris Project seeks to explore how Christ brings with him the fulfilled unity of truth and love. If we believe that “only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light” (Gaudium et Spes 22), this applies as well to the truth of love as a key to understanding human life. What the truth of love is all about, takes on light only if we look at Christ. And, at the same time, the mystery of Christ can best be perceived if we start from the truth of love as the key to understanding man, the world and God. To explore this topic, I will first link Christ to the unity of truth and love (1). I will look then for the appropriate vantage point to perceive this unity in his person and work (2). Finally, I will focus on the Gospel of John to show the different ways in which Christ and the truth of love go together, since John has placed special emphasis on this connection (3).
The Logic of Love and the First-Person Perspective in Moral Theology. A Response to Livio Melina
That love is needed for moral discernment is a central thesis in Livio Melina’s paper. An old Latin proverb says, Ubi amor, ibi oculus – where love is, there is the eye. According to St. Thomas, the rightness of judgment can come to be in two ways: in one way, following the complete use of reason, in another way, because of a certain kinship (connaturalitas) with what one must judge at present. And this connaturality or kinship itself comes to be through love.
Man and Woman He Created Them: The Language of the Body, the Language of Love
What is our body? Who is our body? In the light of the John Paul II’s Catecheses on human love, one comes to see that the body is the epiphany of our person: made in the image of God, redeemed by Christ and called to find its full meaning in the total gift of self. And, as God never ceases to pour His love unto us, we thus receive, in Christ, a new measure of human love, that we were eternally destined to receive: to be capable of loving one another with the very same love of our Redeemer.
Wheresoever She Was There Was Eden—Introduction to Mark Twain’s “Diaries of Adam and Eve”
The two stories collected in "Diarios de Adán y Eva" by Mark Twain were written in 1893 and 1905 respectively. Although there is more than ten years difference in their composition, Twain thought it most appropriate to publish them together because of their obvious connections. This first occurred in 1906 in the collection of short stories entitled "The $30 000 Bequest." For Twain Eden is not a place but a person. As the author of the Letter to the Ephesians suggests, husband and wife are meant to be for each other signs of this Person, who is heaven (cf. Eph 5:31-32). Mark Twain stopped at the sign, seeking salvation in human love without connecting it to divine love. But in turning to the sign, he inevitably, perhaps in spite of himself, also touched the greater reality, for which the love of the two is a sacrament: an efficacious sign that already mysteriously contains the reality it signifies.
The Dynamism of Action and the Truth of Love
Exploring the experience of the dynamism of action from the perspective of the “first person,” we are able to discover the logic of love as the original source of our aspiration toward the good. In this way, we can see that the logic of love is at the same time the logic of the gift. The gift is given freely. It is at the root of our freedom. The gift stimulates our freedom, so as to bring it to its fulfillment by giving itself in turn. The truth about the good, expressed by the law and realized in the virtues, is therefore not a limitation, but rather the condition for an adequate response to the vocation of life itself, which is the vocation to love.