Notre Dame Law School NDLScholarship Journal Articles Publications 2007 Church, State, and the Practice of Love Richard W. Garnett Notre Dame Law School,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship Part of the First Amendment Commons, and the Religion Law Commons Recommended Citation Richard W. Garnett, Church, State, and the Practice of Love, 52 Vill. L. Rev. 281 (2007). Available at: https://scholarship.law.nd.edu/law_faculty_scholarship/345 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Publications at NDLScholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal Articles by an authorized administrator of NDLScholarship. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. 2007] CHURCH, STATE, AND THE PRACTICE OF LOVE RICHARD W. GARNETr* OD is love."' In his first encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est, Pope %-.XBenedict XVI speaks movingly of "the love which God lavishes upon us and which we in turn must share with others."2 This love, he proposes, is the key to the "heart of the Christian faith," namely, "the Christian image of God and the resulting image of mankind and its destiny."'3 That is, that "God is love" is not only the truth about God, it also carries and illuminates the truth about us. This love, Benedict explains, is also the essence of the Church. The Church, the Pope explains, is a "community of love," a community whose "entire activity ...is an expression of a love that seeks the integral good of man[; that] seeks his evangelization through Word and Sacrament[; and that] seeks to promote man in the various arenas of life and human activ- 4 ity." Accordingly, he explores in his encyclical letter not only the "love which God mysteriously and gratuitously offers to man,"5 but also, and relatedly, the "ecclesial exercise" 6 and "organized practice '7 of love, by and through the Church.