Link Seen Between Love and Common Good

Link Seen Between Love and Common Good

Cardinal Caffarra Gives Address at John Paul II Institute

ROME, NOV. 6, 2006 (Zenit.org).- There is a direct relationship between the common good and the capacity to love, says the president of Rome's John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family.

"It is the capacity to love that makes the common good practicable," contended Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, archbishop of Bologna, in an address he gave at the opening of the academic year.

"Charity alone makes man capable of pursuing his own good, not at the expense of the other," he noted.

The cardinal expressed this conviction in view of the fact that "legislation in the West is changing its fundamental attitude in regard to the institution of marriage and the family, having moved from 'favor juris' to neutrality."

It is "a neutrality that generates the progressive equating with marriage of communities of life that until now were considered and treated as essentially different," said the cardinal.

Western countries' lack of support of marriage and the family is "the final outcome of the interpretation that the values of autonomy and equality have suffered, which are the basis of our Western society," said Cardinal Caffarra. This, in turn, is possible given "the negation that a human common good exists."

This is the case, despite the fact that a "common reference of values," which historically is that of the Christian tradition, is what has sustained the West's democratic functioning, he noted.

"Instead, these years we are witnessing an event the extent of which is not easy to calculate," the 68-year-old cardinal continued. "The common reference to the Judeo-Christian cultural matrix has been breaking up and eroding little by little."

No limits

"In the context of this disintegration and erosion," he said, "the pure doctrine of equality and autonomy" leads to what is already evident: "The state must consent to what is technically possible; the state must not prohibit what the individual prefers. It is not difficult to understand that this principle, applied to the letter, implies simply the destruction of all forms of sociability.

"A 'favor juris' can be granted to the institution of marriage only if in the conjugal relationship a goodness, a specific value is seen: a goodness, a value that fulfills, in its own way, the idea of the human common good, as such. What is more, it fulfills it to an eminent degree."

But, on the contrary, the "'favor juris' … has no strong justification if there is no recognition that the interpersonal relationship has in and for itself an intrinsic goodness of its own, … that it only offers usefulness to realize one's own idea of happiness."

He added: "The negation that a truth exists about the human common good leads to reducing political action to mere procedural action.

"In other words, either one believes that the end of political activity is the common good -- and then all experiences of such good must be protected, promoted and favored -- or one believes that a human common good does not exist, but only coexistence of private goods, and then there is nothing to do, on the part of the political authority other than to institute 'traffic rules' for individuals' race to their own happiness."

In this way, the cardinal contended, "the 'favor juris' which marriage enjoys remains or falls together with the idea of the common good."