Building a civilisation of love
We conclude this series of 15 articles, which I hope gave us a bird’s eye view on the Church’s social teaching, with the notion of a “civilisation of love”. By her social teaching, the Church aims at incarnating the Gospel in the lives of people as a way of witnessing God’s Kingdom on earth. The Good News is that God loves us, and we too, ought to love others as God loves us. This is the civilisation of love.

Transitional shelters are built for those left homeless in Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. Sometimes disaster can lay the foundation for a “Civilisation of Love” (Photo:?Bob Roller/CNS)
But then, what is civilisation, and what is love?
Civilisation has been defined and understood in varied ways. In one view, it is the social process whereby societies achieve an advanced stage of development and organisation, regarding especially the means of livelihood.
The word civilisation is also used to contrast city life and rural life to the point that urban people with their access to modern facilities, like computers, consider those in villages as uncivilised.
Such a vision of civilisation is narrow and materialistic. That is why I appreciate Albert Schweitzer’s perspective of civilisation as “the sum total of all progress made by man in every sphere of action and from every point of view in so far as the progress helps towards the spiritual perfecting of individuals as the progress of all progress”.
Indeed, if civilisation is only about manipulating materials and improving our tools while we do nothing to perfect our ways of being, it is lamentably deficient. It would not be a “human civilisation”, but a “material civilisation”.
That is why Cardinal Sean O’Malley asserted, in his homily at last year’s funeral Mass for the Boston Marathon victims: “We must build a civilisation of love, or there will be no civilisation at all.”
True human civilisation ought to improve the quality of being and relations between persons.
And the meaning of love in this civilisation of love is the Christian love, agape — which is charitable, selfless, and unconditional.
It is the gratuitous love of God for humanity that should exist also among Christians. Where there is love, well-being for all is guaranteed.
The civilisation of love is a culture that makes “society more human, more worthy of the human person” (Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church [CSDC] 582).
The civilisation of love counteracts the current society—a civilisation of violence, injustice and death — which is characterised by lack of respect for human dignity, which is manifested in the reduction of a human person to an instrument of production, to be disposed of when no longer usable, daily killings in war and in terrorism, shameless discrimination and exclusion among different peoples, and material, scientific and technological advancement that is destructive to human beings.
The Christian life is a call to radical personal and social renewal, to recover the moral sense at the heart of human culture. Thus, the Church strives to create a better world worthy of the human person.
Christians, particularly the laity, are urged to act in such a way that “the power of the Gospel might shine forth in their daily social and family life” (CSDC 579). Because of such hope, even the most desperate situations, such as disasters or acts of violence, can be used as the building stones for a civilisation of love.
In the midst of suffering, solidity becomes natural; people ignore their differences and hurry to the aid of the other, as in the story of the Good Samaritan.
And here is the condition: “It is the relationship man has with God that determines his relationship with his fellow men and with his environments. This is why Christian culture has always recognised the creatures that surround man as also gifts of God to be nurtured and safeguarded with a sense of gratitude to the creator” (CSDC 464).
Again, in his homily, Cardinal O’Malley illustrated the civilisation of love: “The parable of the Good Samaritan is the story about helping one’s neighbour when that neighbour was from an enemy tribe, a foreign religion, a hostile group. The Samaritan cuts through centuries of antipathy by seeing in the Jewish man who had been beaten and left for dead not a stranger or an enemy, but a fellow human being who has a claim to his humanity and compassion.”
This civilisation of love has to be cultivated at a tender age, in a family, in school and at play. It falls on parents, teachers and coaches to shape the conscience of the young in the ways of love.
I conclude this series with an exhortation by a spiritual master, Thomas Merton: “Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God.”
This concludes Fr Chama’s series on the Church’s Social Teachings. Past articles in the series are at www.scross.co.za/category/perspectives/chama/
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