Slowly working my way through the encyclical

This passage struck me:

Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity[1], and intrinsic to it. Justice is the primary way of charity or, in Paul VI’s words, “the minimum measure” of it[2], an integral part of the love “in deed and in truth” (1 Jn 3:18), to which Saint John exhorts us. On the one hand, charity demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of individuals and peoples. It strives to build the earthly city according to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving[3]. The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships
of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God’s love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world.

Nice to see that Evangelical journals like Christianity Today are pondering the encyclical–and even doing so with the help of Catholic converts who speaka the lingo and can translate into Evangelicalese. It a very different world even from 20 years ago, let alone 40 when Evangelicals tooks seriously the fear that JFK would turn the US into a vassal state of the Vatican.

Also, there’s a Catholic roundtable on it here, FWIW.

I’ll keep reading. I’m a slow digester.