Caritas in Veritate:

On Integral Human Development in Charity and Truth

By Pope Benedict XVI

(Ignatius Press, 157 pp., $14.95)

I.

Are we facing an economic crisis? I do not mean the crisis of the credit markets that has wiped trillions off the global balance sheet and plunged the world into recession. I mean a spiritual crisis, of which the crash is but a symptom. According to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, we are in the midst of a “late capitalist . . . countdown to social dissolution and the triumph of infinite exchangeability and timeless, atomized desire.” The only way to interrupt this countdown, he suggests, is for all of us to pattern our actions on divine love. A number of intellectuals--ranging from former Maoists such as Alain Badiou to dialectical materialists such as Slavoj Žižek--have made similar diagnoses, and proposed similar solutions. And to their company must now be added the pope.