Evangelicals Call For Response to Caritas in Veritate

PRLog (Press Release) - Aug 19, 2009 -
HAMILTON, ON -- Today, evangelical academics, journalists, church leaders, activists and researchers from four continents released a statement responding to Caritas in Veritate, and encouraging evangelical engagement with the encyclical.

In his third encyclical, Caritas in Veritate (Love in Truth), Pope Benedict XVI invites deeper thinking about economic life, and in particular about economic development in the context of globalization.

“Doing the Truth in Love: An Evangelical Call for Response to Caritas in Veritate” is now available at www.doingthetruth.org. The statement calls on Christians everywhere, but especially evangelicals in the global North, to “read, wrestle with, and respond to Caritas in Veritate and its identification of the twin call of love and truth upon our lives as citizens, entrepreneurs, workers and, most fundamentally, as followers of Christ.”

The statement concludes, “With Caritas in Veritate, we commit ourselves not to be the “victims” of globalization, but to be its “protagonists”—to work for global solidarity, economic justice, and the common good, as norms that transcend and transform the motives of economic profit and technical progress. We call for serious dialogue among all Christians and with many others to make these goals practical realities.”

Coverage in major media outlets accompanied the launch of www.doingthetruth.org, beginning with a full-page advertisement in the September-October Books & Culture, and an online symposium at First Things.

The statement was endorsed and supported by three institutions: the Center for Public Justice (Washington, D.C.: www.cpjustice.org), Cardus (Hamilton, Ontario: www.cardus.ca) and the Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (Cambridge, U.K.: www.klice.co.uk).