Man cannot be redeemed simply by creating a favourable economic environment, Pope Benedict declares in a major new encyclical published yesterday. Patsy McGarry, Religious Affairs Correspondent, reports.
Man cannot be redeemed by science, by materialism or by atheism, he says.
Karl Marx "forgot that man always remains man . . . he forgot man's freedom. He forgot that freedom always remains also freedom for evil," Pope Benedict has written in his second encyclical Spe Salvi (In Hope we are Saved).
The 78-page document on the theme of hope describes the failures of atheistic materialism to meet human need while highlighting how faith and hope do so.
Marx, he writes, "thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favourable economic environment."
Francis Bacon "and those who followed in the intellectual current of modernity that he inspired were wrong to believe that man would be redeemed through science. Such an expectation asks too much of science; this kind of hope is deceptive."
Science "can contribute greatly to making the world and mankind more human. Yet it can also destroy mankind and the world unless it is steered by forces that lie outside it," he says. "If technical progress is not matched by corresponding progress in man's ethical formation, in man's inner growth, then it is not progress at all, but a threat for man and for the world," he writes.
"Amid our growing knowledge of the structure of matter and in the light of ever more advanced inventions, we clearly see continuous progress towards an ever greater mastery of nature. Yet in the field of ethical awareness and moral decision-making, there is no similar possibility of accumulation for the simple reason that man's freedom is always new and he must always make his decisions anew," he says.
These decisions "can never simply be made for us in advance by others - if that were the case, we would no longer be free. Freedom presupposes that in fundamental decisions, every person and every generation is a new beginning." New generations may build on the moral treasury of the past "but they can also reject it, because it can never be self-evident in the same way as material inventions".
It was why the moral wellbeing of the world could "never be guaranteed simply through structures alone", he said. Man is not redeemed by science, "man is redeemed by love", he says.
Spe Salvi is available at www.vatican.va under Benedict XVI. Click on encyclicals.