Almost two months after his election, it is now certain that the first objective that Pope Leo entrusts to the Church is “to return to the foundation of our faith,” to the original “kerigma,” to the proclamation of Jesus Christ to men, “renewing and sharing” the mission of the apostles: “What we have seen and heard, we proclaim now to you” (1 Jn 1:3).
“This is the first major commitment that motivates all the others,” Leo told the bishops of the Italian episcopal conference, whom he received in audience on June 17.
But with a second indispensable priority, which he formulates as follows:
“Then there are the challenges that call into question respect for the dignity of the human person. Artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, data economy and social media are profoundly transforming our perception and our experience of life. In this scenario, human dignity risks becoming diminished or forgotten, substituted by functions, automatism, simulations. But the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery. Allow me, then, to express a wish: that the journey of the Churches in Italy may include, in real symbiosis with the centrality of Jesus, the anthropological vision as an essential tool of pastoral discernment. Without lively reflection on the human being – in its corporeality, its vulnerability, its thirst for the infinite and capacity for bonding – ethics is reduced to a code and faith risks becoming disembodied.”
One must go back to the magisterium of Benedict XVI and John Paul II – and to the Italian episcopal conference of those years, led by Cardinal Camillo Ruini – to rediscover a like centrality given to the “anthropological vision.”
But that is not all. Receiving in audience a few days later, on June 21, a large delegation of politicians from all over the world, on the occasion of the Jubilee of Governments, Pope Leo asked them to “not exclude a priori any consideration of the transcendent in decision-making processes” and, indeed, to “seek an element that unites everyone,” namely that “natural law, written not by human hands, but acknowledged as valid in all times and places, and finding its most plausible and convincing argument in nature itself.”
“In the words of Cicero,” the pope added, “already an authoritative exponent of this law in antiquity,” as seen in De Re Publica (III, 22):
“Natural law is right reason, in accordance with nature, universal, constant and eternal, which with its commands, invites us to do what is right and with its prohibitions deters us from evil… No change may be made to this law, nor may any part of it be removed, nor can it be abolished altogether; neither by the Senate nor by the people, can we free ourselves from it, nor is it necessary to seek its commentator or interpreter. And there shall be no law in Rome, none in Athens, none now, none later; but one eternal and unchanging law shall govern all peoples at all times.”
Here too one must go back to Benedict XVI and his predecessors to find a like “indispensable reference” to “natural law” as “the compass by which to take our bearings in legislating and acting, particularly on the delicate and pressing ethical issues that, today more than in the past, regard personal life and privacy.”
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the United Nations in 1948, Leo added, was also a reflection of this “cultural heritage” of humanity, in defense of the “human person in his or her inviolable integrity” and “at the foundation of the quest for truth.”
*
“Anthropological vision” and “natural law” thus return to being in all evidence, with Pope Leo, key elements of the Church’s mission in the world.
What is less known is that both of these cornerstones have been the subject of two important recent study documents issued by the Holy See: the first published in 2009 by the International Theological Commission with the title: “In Search of a Universal Ethic: A New Look at the Natural Law;” and the second published in 2019 by the Pontifical Biblical Commission with the title: “What is Man? An Itinerary of Biblical Anthropology.”
The first of these two documents was planned and written in the early years of Joseph Ratzinger’s pontificate and corresponds in full to his theological, philosophical, and historical vision, with a careful reconstruction of the birth, development, and controversies that have accompanied the journey of the “natural law” in the story of humanity and in the different religious and cultural contexts, from the origins until today.
The second was instead produced during the pontificate of Pope Francis by a commission of talented biblical scholars coordinated by the Jesuit Pietro Bovati, but curiously it was in fact ignored by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, much less offered to the general public. Even today it is available from the Vatican web archive only in Italian, Spanish, Polish, and Korean, despite being a text of compelling reading, which to define what man is according to the Sacred Scriptures takes as its foundation the wonderful account of creation of Genesis 2–3 and retraces its reappearances and thematic developments first in the books of the Torah and then in the prophets and in the wisdom writings, with particular attention to the Psalms, to finally arrive at its fulfillment in the Gospels and in the writings of the apostles.
Leo XIV has not yet cited either document, but he certainly knows and appreciates both, seeing the centrality he accords to the themes to which they are dedicated.
That on natural law can be read on the website of the Holy See in the main languages. While from that on biblical anthropology – of impressive dimensions, equal to a book of over 350 pages – are reproduced below three brief but illuminating passages.
They are three examples of innovative biblical exegesis on the creation of man and woman and on original sin, lined up by the biblical scholar Pietro Bovati in an introductory article to the document published in “La Civiltà Cattolica” on February 1, 2020.
In the illustration above, the creation of man in the mosaics of the basilica of Monreale, from the 12th century.
*
What is man, and woman, in the account of creation
by Pietro Bovati S.J.
We mention some innovative contributions from the document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission. For example, there is a traditional interpretation of Genesis 2:21–23 which states that woman was created after the man (male), on the basis of one of his “ribs.” The document carefully examines the terminology of the biblical narrator (such as where the translation of the Hebrew term “sela” with “rib” is criticized) and an alternative reading of the event is suggested:
“Up to v. 20 the narrator speaks of ‘adam’ aside from any sexual connotation; the generic nature of the presentation requires us to give up imagining the precise configuration of this being, least of all resorting to the monstrous form of the androgyne. We are in fact invited to submit ourselves with ‘adam’ to an experience of not-knowing, so as to discover, by revelation, what the marvelous prodigy wrought by God is (cf. Genesis 15:12; Job 33:15). No one actually knows the mystery of his own origin. This phase of not-seeing is symbolically represented by the act of the Creator, who ‘brought a torpor upon ‘adam,’ who fell asleep’ (v. 21): the slumber does not have the function of total anesthesia to allow for a painless operation, but rather evokes the manifestation of an unimaginable event, that by which from a single being (‘adam’) God forms two, man (‘is’) and woman (‘issah’). And this not only to indicate their radical similarity, but to suggest that their difference urges us to discover the spiritual good of (mutual) recognition, the principle of communion of love and an appeal to become ‘one flesh’ (v. 24). It is not the solitude of the male, but that of the human being that is assisted, through the creation of man and woman” (no. 153).
Another example. The problematic aspect inherent in the “ban” [on eating from one tree in the garden] is carefully treated in the exegetical commentary on Genesis 2:16–17, so as not to favor the idea that God arbitrarily opposes human desire. In reality the Creator manifests his liberality by making available to the creature “all the trees of the garden” (Genesis 1:11–12; 2:8–9). And yet:
“On the totality of the offer there is placed a limit: God asks man to refrain from eating the fruit of a single tree, situated next to the tree of life (Genesis 2:9), but quite distinct from it. The ban is always a limitation placed on the desire to have everything, on that lust (once called ‘concupiscence’) which man feels like an innate drive for fullness. Consenting to such a lust is the equivalent of mentally making the reality of the giver disappear; it therefore eliminates God, but at the same time also determines the end of man, who lives because he is a gift from God. Only by respecting the command, which constitutes a sort of barrier to the unequivocal unfolding of one’s own will, does man recognize the Creator, whose reality is invisible, but whose presence is signaled in particular by the forbidden tree. Forbidden not out of jealousy, but out of love, to save man from the folly of omnipotence” (no. 274).
Yet another example. The fact that the snake addressed the woman instead of the man (as it is narrated in Genesis 3) is often interpreted as a ploy of the tempter who would have chosen to attack the more vulnerable, more easily deceived person. However, it can be recalled that the female figure is in the Bible the privileged image of (human) wisdom:
“If we take this perspective, the encounter of Genesis 3 does not take place between a very astute being and a foolish one, but on the contrary between two manifestations of wisdom, and the ‘temptation’ is grafted precisely onto the high quality of the human being, who in the desire to ‘know’ runs the risk of sinning through pride, pretending to be God, instead of recognizing himself as a son, who receives everything from the Creator and Father” (no. 298).
(Translated by Matthew Sherry: traduttore@hotmail.com)
————
Sandro Magister is past “vaticanista” of the Italian weekly L’Espresso.
The latest articles in English of his blog Settimo Cielo are on this page.
But the full archive of Settimo Cielo in English, from 2017 to today, is accessible.
As is the complete index of the blog www.chiesa, which preceded it.