With “Caritas in Veritate,” Pope Benedict XVI reminded the world of the need for all relationships — including economic relationships — to be conceived in and governed by love, according to speakers at DePaul University’s World Catholicism Week 2010. Two days of the April 20-23 conference were dedicated to “Tradition and Liberation: Charity in Truth and the New Face of Social Progress.” Over those days, speakers examined the encyclical released by Benedict in July 2009, considering how to implement the ideas contained in the letter. Archbishop Celestino Migliore, permanent observer of the Holy See to the United Nations, presented the opening address. Cardinal George was on hand to deliver the conference’s opening and closing remarks. “Jesus came on earth and lived among us to allow us to share in the culture of love that existed in the Trinity,” Archbishop Migliore’s address said. “He did not set up political systems or economic models.” The remarks were read by De- Paul Catholic Studies Professor Peter Casarella because the archbishop was suffering from a hoarse voice. The archbishop did take a few questions after his address was read. Living a culture of love For the last 2,000 years, Christians have been trying to live that culture of love in the changing contexts of society, he said. “Jesus said, ‘Love one another as I have loved you,’” Archbishop Migliore said. In practical terms, Christians followed that command by performing the corporal works of mercy, establishing hospitals, schools and universities and ministering to the hungry and poor. The first seven of the eight Millennium Goals approved by the United Nations mirror the corporal works of mercy, Migliore noted. The series of social encyclicals, including Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum” in 1891 and Paul VI’s “Populorum Progressio” leading up to “Caritas in Veritate,” reflect the church’s response to changes in society, not a change in the essential truth that God is love and humans must reflect that love in their relationships with one another. In the most recent encyclical, Pope Benedict made the point that “globalization makes us neighbors,” Archbishop Migliore said. “It does not make us brothers.” Following the archbishop’s talk, conference participants attended a number of different sessions on topics ranging from “Gratuitousness as a Question for Economic Theory,” microfinancing and developing housing infrastructure. ‘More just world order’ Cardinal Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, closed the two-day section of the conference on April 22 with a discussion of how the ideas contained in “Caritas in Veritate” can be used by believers and non-believers alike. “There is a need to articulate an alternate vision of human development,” said the cardinal, who until this year was archbishop of Cape Coast, Ghana. At the most recent Synod of Africa, the bishops agreed that “a new and more just world order is not only possible, but necessary.” Under existing conditions, the powerful take advantage of the poor, exploiting natural resources and setting up a debt repayment system that “literally kills children,” Cardinal Turkson said. “Is there no one out there able and willing to stop all these crimes against humanity? … We must promote solidarity rather than competition and conflict between workers and people of different nations.” Doing so means focusing relationships not only on profit and loss, but the people who are affected by them. “Charity and truth do not only lie at the heart of mission and ministry of Jesus,” Cardinal Turkson said. “They also correspond to and live at the center of the mission of the human person on earth. … We are constitutionally oriented toward trying to be more, always striving to approximate the image of God in which we are made.” Because God is love, that means living in an ever-greater community of love, even in the economic world. “The enterprise of business education and business practice must always be understood in the context of moral responsibility,” he said. “Every economic decision has a moral consequence. We are called to respect not only profit, but the moral condition of those who pursue it.”