In this light I was reminded last week about an important tie between the so-called "post-liberals" and the Christological-centered renewal of Roman Catholicism that continues in Benedict XVI from John Paul II. It is little noticed that James A. DiNoia (for the American theological scene), also known as J. Augustine DiNoia, O.P. was a graduate of Yale in the late '80's or early '90s and is now the third ranking official in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, having arrived in Rome recruited by Cardinal Ratzinger in 2002.

This came to mind because Father DiNoia gave an excellent plenary address to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (http://www.catholic.org/featured/headline.php?ID=4340&wf=rsscol) in which he emphasized aspects from Benedict XVI's Deus Caritas Est. He emphasizes what he sees as the two major points from the encyclical. He reminds the group that the Encyclical finds its origins deeply within the Augustinian tradition -- in language echoing de Lubac's retrieval of the single supernatural end for humanity in God: "for Christian faith the whole range of human desire -- or, to use more technical language, the inclination to the good embedded in the very structure of human existence -- finds it complete fulfillment in the love of the triune God, and nothing less. Although Pope Benedict does not use this expression in the encyclical, we might call this unity of and continuity between eros and agape 'the sanctification of desire.'"

Di Noia continues this reading of the Encyclical. "This second point is captured brilliantly in a passage from paragraph 19 of the encyclical: 'The entire activity of the Church is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man: it seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament …; and it seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activity. Love is therefore the service that the Church carries out in order to attend constantly to man's sufferings and his needs, including material needs.'" He explicates this a little more: "Man does not live on bread alone, indeed, but he needs bread in order to live. Integral human fulfillment encompasses a range of created goods even as it necessarily entails a directedness, an inner tendency, toward the enjoyment of the uncreated Good who is God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who enjoy a communion of life into which we, created persons who are not God, are invited to share as their friends -- and nothing less. This integral human good is the object of the Church's service of charity: the ultimate good and the intermediate or subordinate goods, the spiritual well-being and the material well-being, the goods of this earthly life and the good beyond life."

Di Noia takes the implications of this for Christian social scientific thought. He writes, "In accord with the traditional Catholic principle, reason retains its integrity and proper finality, but faith contributes to its work by locating the objects of scientific inquiry on, so to speak, the widest possible conceptual map -- that provided by our awareness of the divine desire to share the communion of trinitarian life with creaturely persons, or, to use the terms of the encyclical, the integral human good." The Christian social scientist must then learn to think liberated from secular, reductionistic social scientific methods that see the good only within creation -- and thereby lose the human good. He argues, " the alternative anthropology espouses the socially constructed character of truth and reality, the priority of cultural diversity, the deconstruction of all moral norms, and priority of personal choice" -- in other words, what MacIntyre would call 'emotivism'.

He notes that this provides a problem for the church's engagement in such situations -- problems that we have found at times at Mid-City, for instance, in the refusal of the church's pastors to be present as pastors in the clinic run by the "Health-Faith Alliance." Di Noia writes, "When the Church, in this environment, advances her vision of the integral human good, her interventions are frequently caricatured as retrogressive and intrusive. The alternative anthropology has so powerful a hold on the media, the international aid agencies, many NGOs, and other influential bodies that it is difficult to advance the Christian vision of the integral human good through dialogue, argument and counter-argument. The new anthropology is viewed, in effect, as self-evident and not in need of argument. This situation has created many practical problems that sometimes make it difficult for Catholic aid agencies even to function at the local, national, and even international levels."

He concludes, "It is urgent for social scientists whose practice of their disciplines does not in principle exclude some broad account of the integral human good to counter this secular anthropology and the social engineering programs inspired by it. The straightforward, and well-argued account of the Christian vision of the integral human good presented in "Deus Caritas Est" should facilitate the kind of discussion and argument which needs to take place."

It is interesting to look at the thought of the agenda at Mid-City and in post-liberalism in this light. It is the retrieval of a simple and profound message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, of an evangelic, catholic, and orthodox Christianity, that can pull catholic evangelicals, evangelical catholics, and post-liberal Protestants towards a common visible unity of the body of Christ in the world: "Integral human fulfillment encompasses a range of created goods even as it necessarily entails a directedness, an inner tendency, toward the enjoyment of the uncreated Good who is God himself, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit who enjoy a communion of life into which we, created persons who are not God, are invited to share as their friends -- and nothing less. This integral human good is the object of the Church's service of charity."