Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Lumen Fidei: Lighting Our Way in the Year of Faith
Lumen Fidei: Lighting Our Way in the Year of Faith
Jul 6, 2025 5:49 PM

It felt a little like the conclave week all over again inside the Vatican Press Office. Journalists cornering other journalists. Educated guesses and bets. Raised eyebrows of suspicion and plenty of pencil wagging, not to mention the nervous knees bouncing iPads and notepads in the foyer.

Journalists gather in Sala Stampa, the Vatican’s Press Office, to ments on Lumen Fidei from curial experts

While we were not waiting for black or white plumes of smoke to rise from the Sistine Chapel’s chimney, we were anxious to get an embargoed copy of Pope Francis’s encyclical, Lumen Fidei, and hear some of the most expert curial ment on the release of a much anticipated papal encyclical.

Lumen Fidei – “The Light of Faith” – was released to the public this afternoon, July 5. The encyclical, Francis’s very first, is the last of a trilogy of magisterial writings begun by Benedict XVI on the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity.

It is masterfully written, both syntactically accurate and semantically clear. And it was published midway through the Year of Faith, which Benedict XVI had proposed and officiallyinauguratedtoward the end of his pontificate, so that we may all renew mitment to a basic understanding of our Christian theological and cultural heritage.

Lumen Fidei is the “four-handed” encyclical, as some local Italians have likened to call it. It was sketched and begun by Benedict, but later finished and polished by Francis. Given this unique circumstance in papal publishing, one might have expected a confusing encyclical — both stylistically anddoctrinally — from two popes that appear so different to the public eye.And yet as the prefect of the Doctrine of the Faith – Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müeller – told us at the press conference: “The encyclical is not [the result] of patchwork. It is a work of true unity”. Indeed, you might say that in this encyclical we enjoy the best writing practices of both popes all in one encyclical: the theological depth of the Professor Pope (Benedict) and the editorial simplicity of Parish Priest Pope (Francis).

One interesting question regarding the potential influence of the encyclical came from one of the Italian press corps in attendance. He asked the curial menting on the text if the Light of Faith had any forward thinking or progressively “illuminating” agenda to help shape political or socio-economic reform during these economic and political dark days, with perhaps some bent toward liberation theology or other liberalinterpretationof our faith. He had wondered aloud whether the Vatican’s own newspaper Osservatore Romano had made an intentional decision to publish a multi-page spread on the liberal Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner during the very same week of the presentation of Francis’s Lumen Fidei.

Cardinal Mueller quickly shot this suggestion down, saying that this first of all was not a social encyclical and politically-economically orientated, like John Paul II’sCentesimus Annus, and did not reference any Marxist thinking or the condemned liberation theology which had set much of the tone for progressive economic and political reforms in Central and South American Catholic countries in the 1970s and 1980s (misconstruing the classical Catholic anthropology and human flourishing in Marxist materialist terms).

In fact, the Cardinal said, we should be mindful of pursuing utopian visions -Christian or secular — of perfectly working politics and economic systems, while appreciating the role in which our faith plays in the face of evil: “even though Lumen Fidei [as Catholic teaching ] gives us light in these dark times,…we would not have any faith or Christianfulfillmentwithout this very darkness.”

It is almost as if Cardinal Mueller had already read our Rome director’s (Kishore Jayabalan) press release on the new encyclical, urging a realistic understanding of what Catholic theology and the papal magisterial writings might offer in terms of Christian “enlightened” thinking:

With Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis has continued the efforts of Pope Benedict Xvi to propose a type of ‘Christian Enlightenment,’ which, in its own charitable way, sets out to puncture three secularist myths about the world:

1) that we can think of a universal human family, i.e. that we are all brothers and sisters, without some reference to God the Father and Creator, 2) that there is mon good without reference to Jesus Christ, who brought salvation to all and to whom all human activity can be directed, and 3) that any recognition of truth leads to totalitarianism, when the opposite is true.

The ‘dictatorship of relativism’ denies any objective truth and relies on power and force, while the acceptance of Truth by faith makes us humble and appeals to reason to know more.Although the encyclical is the work of two popes, it reminds us that the Church’s Magisterium forms a coherent, continuous whole.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Secular Universities in Decline?
In his New York Times column this week, Peter Steinfels has an insightful analysis of an intriguing and provocative new book by C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University. Those who study the history of American academia are familiar with the story of the secularization of universities as recounted expertly by Christian scholars such as George Marsden (The Soul of the American University) and James Burtchaell (The Dying of the Light), who decry the shunting of religion from...
Beyond Black and White: New Realities of Race In America – BUMPED: Video now available
Anthony Bradley delivers his remarks last Wednesday The 2006 Acton Lecture Series continued today with Anthony Bradley’s presentation of Beyond Black and White: New Realities of Race In America. Mr. Bradley is an Acton research fellow and assistant professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri. His lecture describes the new market trends which reflect the changing demographics in America. With a decline in population amongst whites, a stagnated black population, and the ever-increasing...
More on Secularism and Universities
Just a brief note addition to Kevin’s post: the free article from May’s Touchstone magazine is Terence O. Moore’s feature, “Not Harvard Bound.” A key quote: The elite schools no mand the reverence and deference of red-state America. The parents and students of “flyover country” are starting to put their money where their morals are or where they believe truth is. There’s a discussion of Moore’s article at Touchstone‘s reader discussion site, Treaders. HT: Mere Comments ...
Original Sin
Headline: It’s a Sin to Fly, Says Church Actually, "It’s a Sin to Fly, Screams Headline" would be more appropriate. Here’s what the Church (or rather, the Bishop of London) actually says: “Making selfish choices such as flying on holiday or buying a large car are a symptom of sin. Sin is not just a restricted list of moral mistakes. It is living a life turned in on itself where people ignore the consequences of their actions.” I think there’s...
Seek Dignity? Then, “You Gotta Shake Your MoneyMaker”
The Super MoneyMaker Pressure Pump No, we’re not talking about Elmore James’ Blues hit covered by the likes of George Thorogood, Fleetwood Mac and The Black Crowes nor its racy subject matter. Rather, it’s how members of the other oldest profession in Kenya and Tanzania power the irrigation pumps that extend both their growing season and range of crops. This foot-powered move beyond subsistence farming to much more profitable harvests, such as vegetables, is facilitated by the aptly named MoneyMaker series...
Environmental News Roundup
Juliet Eilperin, “Bush Pollution Curbs Are Rated Equal to Clinton’s: Science Panel Says Proposed Cap-and-Trade System Will Help Clean Air,” Washington Post, July 24, 2006: The report from the National Academy of Sciences, released yesterday, represents the latest effort to assess how best to reduce air pollution estimated to cause as many as 24,000 premature deaths each year. The panel concluded that an earlier Bush plan would have allowed pollution to increase over a dozen years, but it found that...
Potty-Mouthed President
The amount of media attention over the past week’s devoted to President Bush’s utterance of a “naughty” word has been incredible. Maureen Dowd uses it as just one more bit of proof supporting her depiction of the president as a frat-boy, who “has enshrined his immaturity and insularity, turning every environment he inhabits — no matter how decorous or serious — into fortable frat house.” She writes, “No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of...
Taking Games Seriously
An article in yesterday’s NYT, “Saving the World, One Video Game at a Time,” by Clive Thompson, gives a good overview of the current trend in the video game industry, especially by nonprofits and activist groups, to create “serious games,” a movement which “has some serious brain power behind it. It is a partnership between advocates and nonprofit groups that are searching for new ways to reach young people, and tech-savvy academics keen to explore video games’ educational potential.” “What...
Federal Funding for the Humanities
Hunter Baker, blogging at his new home on the American Spectator Blog (recently added to our blogroll), responds to a post by James G. Poulos, which emphasizes President Bush’s “proposed emphasis on math and science education, to the patent detriment of the humanities.” Says Baker, “Although I am a faithful disciple of the humanities, I often fort in the fact that the majority of students won’t have much exposure to the offerings on hand. Better they remain busy with their...
Connect the Energy Dots…
Today’s NYT editorializes: “a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil supply while holding only 3 percent of the reserves will never be able to drill its way to lower oil prices, much less oil independence.” You’ll often hear plaint that Americans use more than their fair share of the world’s oil. We’re addicted to it, some say. After all, so goes the reasoning, we have less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population, but we “consume...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved