The Priest at Prayer, June 30

The Third Part - Vices and Virtues

FRATERNAL CHARITY (or the Love of One's Neighbor)

First Meditation - Nature of Fraternal Charity

I. How far should our love go - that love which enshrines everything contained in God's law? God has been pleased to give us the answer in a most striking manner. He, Whom no one has seen in this life, con­descended to show Himself through the medium of manifold and awe-inspiring apparitions to His ancient People, as if to establish a tangible right to their wholehearted allegiance; and at length revealed Himself in Person, became Man, and held converse with mortal man, so as to be able to say to us:

He that seeth me, seeth the Father also.

We are face to face with God when we look upon Christ, and anyone who says he believes in God and loves God but at the same time refuses to acknowledge wd love Christ is to be accounted a liar.

Well now, according to the Apostle of Love, it is impossible to love God or Christ without having love for one's neighbour:

"If a man boasts of loving God, while he hates his own brother, he is a liar."(I John iv, 20)

and the same Apostle adduces this apparently strange reason:

"He has seen his brother, and has no love for him; what love can he have for the God he has never seen?" (id.)

The love we have for our neighbour, therefore, is the hallmark and gauge of our love for God. And, on the contrary, without this love for our neighbour our love for God is false. There is falsehood and delusion and vain observance - religio vana - in that so-called love and worship of God, in those devotions and prayers of ours, if we lean on them and think to find in them support for despising and judging rashly and slandering or criticising with venom and mercilessly hurting our neighbour by crushing him in his weaknesses or ignoring him callously in his griefs and losses, no matter what his race, his nationality, his position, or even his morals and beliefs.

Has my supposed piety ever been a sort of buskin and toga like those of the old Roman Patrician, in which I felt authorised to strut about with a leering glance at my neighbour and to exclaim with Horace: "Odi profanum vulgus et arceo" - I loathe the common herd and I keep my distance? If so, my piety was a pietism execrated by God and by Christ.

II. There is something mysterious and attractive about every man, about human nature, which would seem to captivate God Himself, enamouring Him, so to speak, in such a manner that it elicits from Him acts of the most generous loving-kindness; Self-belittlement, abase­ment, sacrifice, dedication in body, soul and Divinity to the lofty enterprise, the only enterprise worthy of God, of winning over at all costs the love of the human heart. God so loved the world! (John iii, 16)

Not a single human being exists who cannot exclaim with absolute truth, whatever his caste or condition:

"I know and I believe in the love God has for me." (I John iv, 16)

It is a belief exclusively Catholic. Other cults and sects reject it, it offends them; their spirit of contradiction and denial rather prompts them to ask with the Psalmist:

What is man, O God, that thou shouldst keep him in remembrance?

But how can I, who believe in the love God has for man, refuse to love whom God has loved so exceedingly?

And why should I wonder, Lord, that Thou art so ­exacting in demanding of me, with threats of lightning Wrath, that I too love my fellow men out of regard for Thy incomprehensible love?

III. In this precept God shows Himself exacting: Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself (Matt. xix, 8). Self­-love is the standard and a high one it is. He could have chosen another standard, for instance the things a man is fondest of, his wife, his children, his mother. No, "as thyself". In the human heart is lodged no affection more widespread, more profound, more unquenchable and ready to serve than the love of self. If we analyse our­selves carefully, if we take apart this complicated machinery of human nature, we shall find that our whole being, our whole life, with all its variety of phenomena and manifestations, with all its long list of appetites and tendencies, comes down to but one thing: that boundless, limitless love we have for ourselves. Accord­ing to that model, then, I am commanded by My Lord and God to love others: thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.

And that there might be no mistake about it, God, in His ten commandments, has devoted seven of them to the various works of love towards my neighbour; three for Himself, seven for man. So jealous is He of the honour and welfare of the children of Adam that He does not leave a single human value without a wall of defence, without the shield and flashing sword of a divine precept: Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not steal, etc., etc.

Resolutions
I shall try to purify my love for my neighbour of all its dross and base metal. It is not a Christian love if its foundation is my selfishness or sensuality, no matter how fervent and self-denying it may appear on the surface.

Nor is that honorable and noble human love, which rests merely on the wisdom or virtue or generous qualities of a fellow man, to be accounted Christian; it can be made Christian, but of itself it falls far short.

The driving force behind true Christian charity towards all men - for it embraces everyone without any possible exception - is the supreme fact that they were created by God, endowed with an immortal soul, made into God's image and likeness, raised to the supernatural level, and are destined for eternal happiness through the redeeming Blood of Jesus Christ. Christian love is based on motives inspired by Christian faith, nothing less.

I shall, therefore, try to bring myself to love my neighbour precisely for these motives, rejecting as worthless any other motive which cancels out the former, and subordinating those other human motives that are naturally honourable and good to the higher motives of faith.
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Adapted from The Priest at Prayer
by Fr. Eugenio Escribano, C.M. (© 1954)
Translated by B.T. Buckley, C.M.

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Please pray for our priests and pray for vocations to the priesthood!