I am taking a break from my series-writing today (and, perhaps, in the days to come) to jot down a few reflections on the important events of the past week. While much has been made (by some) about Obama’s gift to Benedict, I am more intrigued by the gifts that Benedict chose to bestow on Obama (copies of Dignitatis Personae and Caritas in Veritatis).
First of all, he gave him books. The magisterial meaning of such a gift is important to note. From the outset, it is clear that Benedict means to teach Obama something. However, we might pay close attention to Benedict’s charitable pedagogy.
Many make too much, I think, of the obligation of the Pope to meet with heads of state on behalf of Vatican City. This obligation is true, yet, we ought not think that the Pope—especially one as professorial as this one—is somehow just doing his pontifical duty, in some reluctant state of disinterest. Benedict, in this encounter, is remarkably magisterial in the weak, Socratic sense: the teacher who teaches by giving.
Plus, given the delayed production of his most recent encyclical, Benedict has proven that he is not a purely bureaucratic pontiff nor a detached academic (a name I get called quite often). Instead, by delaying his encyclical (much to my own impatient chagrin) to be sure to understand the situation on the ground in real geopolitcal terms, Benedict shows us that he understands the world as the one we live in today. So, this presidential visit was not a photo-op. Espcially with the giving of books to Obama, it becomes a lesson steeped in charity and goodwill—with textbooks.
Now, when we look to the particular books Benedict gave Obama we find more meaning and insight, I think. These books, after all, are not “books;” they are encyclicals. And their choice is an apt summary of a Catholic social teaching.
With Dignitatis Personae, Benedict is clearly teaching Obama what it means to be a person. Given this meaning of personhood, it follows that Benedict is deeply concerned about the positions that Obama hold that are heterodox to that view. He is also doing more: Benedict is teaching Obama why the next gift is important.
The opening line of the next encyclical (the second gift), hot off the press, is this: “Charity in truth… is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of every person and of all humanity.” This principle of charity, of course, is rooted in the Truth of Deus Caritas Est. Yet such a claim is not only a matter of disciplinary theology, it also creates a rigorous standard for socio-economic analysis.
This line of analysis, that never moves away from the basic notion of the dignity of the human person, rooted in the imagus Dei, offers Obama a gift that again challenges him to re-concieve not only what it means to be a person, but, what it means to exist as persons together, in a State.
This basic instruction is to begin anew with the question of what a “public” is, exactly, from the starting point of what a person is. Given the demands of our times—times when both the person and the public have been eroded into instrumental objects—Benedict begins his instruction—to follow in the pages of the texts he gives—by, well, giving them to Obama. Giving them, that is, in charity and with a full recognition of the dignity of Obama (and his wife and children), not as a head of state, pure and simple, but as human person.
The gift of insight is only instructive insofar as it begin in love. This is the greatest gift of all: Love.
Benedict’s selected gifts, together, reveal the politics of charity in action. They challenge us to conversion—constant, restless conversion—and, yet, that call to convert is not a demand, but a gift of love.
The public nature of these gifts, rooted in the Gift of gifts, makes Benedict’s gifts not only for Obama. The Pope is not only teaching the President a thing or two. He is teaching us, he is teaching me: how to give, how to teach, how to love.
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