Love and Truth

Love and Truth (Amour et Vérité, 2011), by Jean Borella, is the revised and recast second edition of a book first published in France in 1979 under the title La charité profanée (The Desecration of Charity). The original idea for this book sprang from the author's bewilderment and dismay at seeing, in the immediate aftermath of the Second Vatican Council, theologians and other Church members call into question or reject some of the fundamental dogmas of the Christian faith, all in the name of a love for humanity! By that time, of course, humanitarian ideology had already made worrisome inroads, having already for two centuries and more extended its unrelenting sway over minds (though sometimes justifiably so). But when it incited both clergy and laity to break with the faith of the Creed itself, this was beyond bearing. Jean Borella shows how at the core of this "rage" for love then (and still now) animating a Church in the throes of revolution, there festered an illusion-indeed, a perversion-of charity in its inmost essence. But not only this: he likewise shows that to relinquish custody of truth to the keeping of a materialist science would be to ignore the limits and errors of this science, and above all to grow calloused to the doctrinal splendors of the loftiest theological and metaphysical science. Hence the necessity, when dealing with the created world and human beings, to present a concept-new in form if not in its depths-that offers faithful Christians fertile ground to put down roots again. A vast undertaking, yes, but one that has led Borella to discern the strayings of modern man, and to his quest to rediscover beneath that perversion the unique Light shining in the darkness which represents the authentic meaning of Christian charity. Christ has said: only knowledge of the Truth will set us free... and free to love.