Denver, Colo., Jul 7, 2009 / 13:26 pm
The head of the Knights of Columbus, Carl Anderson, has responded to Pope Benedict’s newly-released encyclical, “Caritas in Veritate” (Love in Truth), by denouncing attempts to use it to further political agendas rather than viewing it from the Church’s comprehensive understanding of the human person.
In an interview with CNA on Tuesday morning, Carl Anderson, leader of the world’s largest lay Catholic organization, decried the “spin masters who will try to spin the encyclical in one direction or the other” and emphasized that “the Catholic reader should read the encyclical in its entirety” in order to understand the underlying ethical and anthropological foundations that guide it.
“What this encyclical makes very clear is that there is a consistent ethics in the Catholic Church because there is a consistent view of the human person,” Anderson told CNA, explaining that this consistency is seen in Pope Benedict’s assertion that social issues cannot be separated from life issues.
While the idea that we are “morally responsible for one another” as part of “one human family” is not new to Christianity, Anderson said that the Pope challenges us in this encyclical “to take this seriously as a fundamental understanding of what it means to be a Christian.”