Love and truth are intertwined, according to Father Timothy Radcliffe, the former master of the Dominican Order and a prolific author and speaker. Radcliffe offered the Caritas in Veritas Lecture at Dominican University in River Forest Sept. 30 and took Caritas in Veritas — the motto of the university — as his topic. “We can see in our experience that you can’t really love a person without knowing them,” Radcliffe said a few hours before his talk. “And you can’t really know them without loving them.” That goes as well for the relationship of an academic to his or her topic, said Radcliffe, who lives at Blackfriars Hall in Oxford, England. “You have to fall in love whether you are studying ducks or molecules,” said Radcliffe. “You have to open yourself to what you’re studying. If you’re always thinking of something in terms of what it can do for you, you don’t respect it.” The topic also fits with Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, which discussed social justice in terms of the world economic situation. The church’s social justice principles, which were discussed in the encyclical, have sparked interest in some unusual quarters, Radcliffe said, including bankers and other denizens of the financial world in the City of London. “These are people who are looking for a moral vision,” he said, noting that Tony Blair, Great Britain’s former prime minister, became Catholic after leaving office and that David Cameron, the current prime minister, has raised ideas that fit in with the church’s tradition of moral teaching. That might be one reason why the response to Pope Benedict during his four-day visit to Great Britain in September was more positive than expected, given a streak of anti-Catholicism in British culture. Before the pope arrived, Radcliffe said, opponents of his visit created a cartoonish image of a snarling Rottweiler. Instead, the pontiff appeared as a gentle pastor, offering a “moral compass.” The church hurts itself when it forgets the need for gentleness and love when it shares the truth, Radcliffe said. Whether the church does a good job of showing the world what love and truth are can’t be answered simply. “With 1.2 billion Catholics in the world, I suspect that sometimes we do and sometimes we don’t,” Radcliffe said. But where the institutional church tends to generate ill-will, it is with using “hard words,” Radcliffe said, something he talks about when he speaks to priests. “You can challenge people,” he said. “You must challenge people. But you can do it without using mean, accusatory words.” Instead, he speaks of the church’s emphasis on virtue, its conception of human rights as based on the needs of the community rather than the individual and its message of hope. “Our trust is in the fact that God became one of us, shared our lives and our weakness,” Radcliffe said. “He came that we might be vigorous and strong. … Christianity is inclusive, because we are the Body of Christ. Our trust is that God can work through us.”