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Good evening,

I was recommended to this portal to express my doubts regarding faith. I also saw that the questions are published on the site unless you request to keep the email private. In general I would prefer it to remain private.

I try to explain my questions here, which in the last two weeks have become very insistent and are creating a certain internal suffering to me because I find them unsolvable. I’ll introduce myself quickly first because it may be useful. I am a philosophy student close to graduating with a master’s degree. I grew up in a moderately Christian environment, my parents always wanted me to attend the oratory and catechism. Around the age of 17, I left that environment due to rejection. At the time, as happens to many young people, I encountered Nietzsche’s philosophy which made my veins and wrists tremble. From there the internal conflict began. However, I have always been searching. Which is why I enrolled in philosophy. The search for God has always been important to me. Something that I have never considered trivial despite the secularist environment that surrounded me (in a philosophy faculty at a university, believers can be counted on the fingers of one hand). Like almost everyone, I was searching for the purpose, the meaning of existence. (…).

Lately I have been developing more and more political sensitivity. Partly because I am passionate about the topic, partly because this passion is noticed externally. I get a lot of feedback from third parties on this path. “Why don’t you get into politics?”. (…). But I don’t see how a politician can avoid risking his soul. On the one hand, the politician seems to me to be the man most worthy of respect (I mean an authentic statesman, not a comedian of contemporary party’s nihilism) because he is a figure from the margins. He finds himself on the edge of the community, neither inside nor outside. The head of state is indeed at the service of the community (nation?), but at the same time to serve the homeland he must make decisions that are often poorly reconciled with caritas. Force is not caritas, but politics often requires its use. Is it a question of measuring the strength or abandoning it completely? (…).

The intervention is an act of force, where is caritas in an act of force? I think that this problem of the politician is unavoidable and unsolvable. Hence my suffering. (…).

My anguish increases if I think about the awareness I have of sin because, having read the compendium of the catechism, I know the difference between mortal and venial sin. The main distinction is the adherence of one’s conscience to the evil act. But then how can a soldier save himself from hell? How on earth can a foreign minister avoid damnation? A head of the secret service? (…).

So I find myself not knowing what to do. I am afraid of not dying in bliss, and of relegating myself to an eternity of abandonment by God. (…).

Thank you very much for your availability, kindly offered on this portal.

Kind regards,

Stefano

Risposta del sacerdote

Caro Stefano,
1. sabato scorso, 28 gennaio, abbiamo celebrato la festa di San Tommaso d’Aquino, il quale in pieno medioevo quando qualcuno nella la Chiesa rivendicava l’autorità del Papa su quella temporale, ha distinto i due ambiti.
La Chiesa ha come obiettivo la salus aeterna animarum, mentre la società civile ha come suo obiettivo la promozione del bene comune.
L’ambito della Chiesa è quello della carità, quello della società civile è la giustizia.

Priest’s answer

Dear Stefano,

1. Last Saturday, January 28, we celebrated the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, who in the Middle Ages, when someone in the Church claimed the Pope’s authority over the temporal one, distinguished the two areas.

The Church has as its objective the salus aeterna animarum, while civil society has as its objective the promotion of the common good.

The sphere of the Church is that of charity, that of civil society is justice.

2. Saint Thomas often reminds us that Caritas does not supplant justice, but presupposes it, purifies it and elevates it.

First of all, Caritas presupposes it.

Precisely for this reason it may happen that justice must use force to promote and defend the common good, as when a people, a nation, is invaded by another people.

3. Justice is not opposed to charity, on the contrary, but is, as Paul VI said, its minimum measure.

We can say that Caritas begins with justice and is not truly justice without its full realization.

4. Therefore charity does not replace justice, but requires it, according to the well-known statement of St. Thomas universally accepted within the Church: “gratia non destruit, sed perficit naturam” (grace or caritas does not destroy and does not replace nature, but perfects it).

It cannot perfect it except by presupposing it.

5. Pius XI, in Divini Redemptoris, said in very strong terms: “Charity will never be true charity if it does not always take justice into account…

A “charity” which deprives the workingman of the salary to which he has a strict title in justice, is not charity at all, but only its empty name and hollow semblance.

The wage-earner is not to receive as alms what is his due in justice. And let no one attempt with trifling charitable donations to exempt himself from the great duties imposed by justice. Nor does the worker need to seek as alms what is due to him in justice; nor can he be tempted to exempt himself from the great duties imposed by justice with small gifts of mercy” (DR 49).

6. And Pius XII: “To be authentic and true, charity must always take into account the justice to be established and not be content with masking disorders and insufficiencies of an unjust condition” (Letter to the President of the Social Week in France, 1952). T-N

7. At the same time it cannot be forgotten that due to original sin many weaknesses are congenital to human nature and that justice is often tempted by egocentric retreats. And which, even when it is applied, sometimes does not go beyond cold calculation, while in order to be virtuous, it requires to be animated by love.

The strict rigor of justice, expressed in the law of retaliation, is not sufficient to regulate human relationships.

Giorgio La Pira said that if society proceeded only with the criterion of eye for eye, tooth for tooth (Ex 21,24) we would all be blind and toothless by now!

8. A supplement of love is then necessary, given by God with charity.

It has as its object God, loved in himself and for himself.

It also has as its object the love of one’s neighbor loved for the sake of God and in view of God.

In this way human love is strengthened by the love of God and is oriented towards establishing a perfect order, which protects the rights of all and in particular of the weakest.

9. Justice alone, which is the minimum form of love, is not perfect if it is not integrated by grace, by Caritas.

Much less it can provide and remedy everything.

Saint Augustine rightly said: “Non vivunt bene filii hominum, nisi effecti filii Dei” (“the children of men do not live well if they are not made children of God”, Contra Ep. Pelag. 1, 1. n. 5) . T-N.

In fact, one becomes virtuous, indeed, fully virtuous only if justice is integrated with charity.

10. Here, therefore, is what must be kept in mind: justice and charity are not opposed, but imply each other.

Which is why it is possible to be a saint even in politics, as was particularly the case with Giorgio La Pira, whose cause for beatification continues.

I bless you, I congratulate you on your beautiful reflection which unfortunately I had to cut and I remember you in prayer.

Father Angelo