The doomsayers are chiming in unanimously: South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s fall from grace last week is yet another blow to the pro-family, traditional values core that feels shut out by the party in power, increasingly abandoned by the GOP and desperate in its search for new leadership.
The politics of the matter aside, even the most casual observer of the Sanford drama, from his bizarre disappearance overseas to his admitted affair with an Argentinean woman, can conclude that things are bad – for the man himself and his family, for his state and for his political party, but also in a larger sense for our society. Cynics might disregard Sanford’s philandering as a sad norm in today’s politics, adding to the growing list of Spitzer, Edwards, Ensign and more, but that in itself is alarming as Americans come to expect less and less from the characters of their elected leaders.
Add that to our total disenchantment with the financial industry and the greed-and-hubris-filled executive decisions that helped to topple it, and American optimism in our country – much less the old vision of a “city on a hill” – isn’t exactly at an all-time high. (Even President Obama’s approval ratings have begun to come down as more voters disagree with his handling of the economy and deficit spending.)
It’s perfect timing, really, for Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate.” While a major focus of the document is on the global economy, the pope will certainly be insistent on what is required to transform society overall.
The Apostle Paul “tells us (that) the world cannot be renewed without new human beings,” Pope Benedict said over the weekend in a preview of the encyclical. “Only if there are new human beings will there be a new world, a renewed and better world.”
The pope has said before that lying at the heart of the economic crisis aren’t faulty regulations or bad financial systems but original sin.
Asking “does original sin really exist?” Pope Benedict said yes, because “reason – even ours – is darkened; we see this every day. Because egoism, the root of greed, is to want the whole world for myself. It exists in all of us.”
Even Gov. Sanford, in his rambling, self-flagellating remarks at his press conference last week (“It was like watching a man light himself on fire,” wrote John Dickerson on Slate), alluded to something similar.
“I am here because if you were to look at God's laws, they are in every instance designed to protect people from themselves,” he said while apologizing to his friends and family. “I think that that is the bottom line with God's law. … That sin is in fact grounded in this notion of what is it that I want, as opposed to somebody else.”
At vespers last Sunday, Pope Benedict called this “the way of thinking of the old man … directed toward possessions, well-being, influence, success, fame and so on,” when “‘I’ remains the precise center of the world.”
“We have to learn to think in a more profound manner,” the pope stressed – a manner that is based on faith, and in being transformed as a “new person” by Christ’s love.
From the financial meltdown of 2008 to yet another politician’s plummet into the nation’s ridicule, we have certainly seen the destructive effects of greed and selfishness on every level of our society.
Earlier this year, Pope Benedict remarked that “Justice cannot be created in the world solely with good economic models, which are necessary. Justice is realized only if there are just people.”
And if the title of his new encyclical is any clue, his remedy is love – “the test of truth,” he said Sunday. “Ever more we must be measured by this criterion, that truth becomes love and that love makes us truthful.”
“To open hearts to justice and charity,” Pope Benedict has said before, “is to lead to God.”
For today’s society, it’s a step well worth taking.
-- Elizabeth Ela, Headline Bistro editor
