Religion & Law

Over at the America magazine blog, Austen Ivereigh takes issue with George Weigel's system for parsing Caritas in Veritate, and surmises that there might have been at least one other major influence in the drafting: Chiara Lubich, the founder of the Focolare Movement.  He points out three parallels in the discussion of fraternity and gift, in the "economy of communion," and in the link between poverty and isolation.  I'd like to suggest a fourth, which might contain all the rest, and which might even help us push beyond our liberal-conservative debate: the Trinity as a social model.  

54.  The theme of development can be identified with the inclusion-in-relation of all individuals and peoples within the one community of the human family, built in solidarity on the basis of the fundamental values of justice and peace. This perspective is illuminated in a striking way by the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity within the one divine Substance. The Trinity is absolute unity insofar as the three divine Persons are pure relationality. The reciprocal transparency among the divine Persons is total and the bond between each of them complete, since they constitute a unique and absolute unity. God desires to incorporate us into this reality of communion as well: ?that they may be one even as we are one? (Jn 17:22). The Church is a sign and instrument of this unity. Relationships between human beings throughout history cannot but be enriched by reference to this divine model. In particular, in the light of the revealed mystery of the Trinity, we understand that true openness does not mean loss of individual identity but profound interpenetration.

Or as Lubich put it: ?Jesus shows us that I am myself, not when I close myself off from the other, but rather when I give myself, when out of love I lose myself in the other. . . . In the relationship of the three divine Persons, each one is love, each on is completely, by not being: because each one is, perichoretically, in the other Person, in eternal self giving.?  (Lubich, Essential Writings, 211-212).

The Trinity as a ?social model? has been common parlance in the circles of Focolare scholars for several years now, and these conversations have served as the foundation for much of my own work and scholarship (eg, Toward a Trinitarian Theory of Products Liability). 

Much of the work so far has been published in Italian, but there?s a new book just out in English by Thomas J. Norris (an Irish priest and professor of systematic theology), The Trinity: Life of God, Hope for Humanity?Towards a Theology of Communion(2009), which also includes a chapter on the connection between the Trinitarian model and the Economy of Communion.

It might be interesting to explore further whether the life of the Trinity as set out in number 54 might be something of a literary key for the entire encyclical?for example, it might be the paradigm which helps us to make sense of the discussion of the need for ?gratuitousness? in economic life; and of the importance of safeguarding individual and cultural identities while at the same time helping people and peoples to forge bonds of communion with each other and across borders.