A faith that ignores culture remains unfinished. This was the starting point for Leo XIV at today’s general audience in St Peter’s Square, devoted to the second chapter of the second part of Gaudium et Spes in his series of catecheses on the documents of the Second Vatican Council. The premise is historical: the Church has always accompanied the preaching of the Gospel with schools of every kind, and medieval universities were born “from the heart of the Church”, making “a decisive contribution to the development of Western civilization”. The growth of knowledge raises ever deeper questions and prompts believers to give an account of their faith, while the many expressions of culture open minds to the meaning of the world and of human existence, preparing them to receive the Gospel.
Rooted in the Incarnation, at home in every culture
“The relationship between faith and culture finds its primary foundation in the Incarnation,” the Pope explained: if the Word became flesh, then faith too is “an incarnate reality, interwoven with the culture in which it is immersed”. From this follows the decisive step: faith “is also required to become culture, that is, to reach the person in their living environment, made up of human words, traditions, religious meaning, art and poetry, thought and science”. Leo XIV recalled a phrase dear to St John Paul II, addressed in 1982 to the Ecclesial Movement for Cultural Commitment: “a faith that does not become culture is a faith not fully accepted, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived”. Faith dwells within cultures, “shaping them from within according to the ‘form’ of Jesus Christ”, the Pontiff said, through charity, service and the filial recognition of God’s fatherhood. The exchange runs both ways: the Church draws from the various cultures “all that is good, beautiful and true”, and her communion with them, the conciliar Constitution recalls, is “to their enrichment and the enrichment of the Church herself”. From theology, the reflection then turns to rights. The Church promotes culture “because it is a good in itself, a service to the human being”. For this reason the Council urges the international community to overcome illiteracy and the lack of education, and states “boldly”, Leo XIV stressed, that all those capable of higher education must be able to pursue it in practice. Among the duties it sets out is to “acknowledge and favour the proper and necessary participation of women in the cultural life”.
Unity of knowledge and innovation that serves the person
The last step concerns the fragmentation of knowledge. Gaudium et Spes calls for teaching to be directed “towards a certain unity of knowledge”, and Christians, the Pope observed, “are the first who must strive to bring about this unity of wisdom, first and foremost within themselves”: having received from Revelation the answers to the great questions of existence does not exempt them “from patient intellectual and cultural formation”. Theologians are asked to collaborate with those versed in other disciplines, without losing touch with their own time. What emerges is a way of living the faith without any spirit of “opposition or hostility towards the world”. Achieving “a mature and responsible synthesis between faith and culture”, the Pontiff concluded, “is, in fact, a necessary condition for persevering in the Christian vocation, as well as an essential requirement for bearing witness to the faith before the world and communicating it to others in a credible manner”. The same criterion had emerged shortly before, in a different setting. In the room adjacent to the Paul VI Audience Hall, Leo XIV received the executives of Mercedes-Benz for the exhibition “A Century of the Popemobile”, which marks a partnership that began in 1930, when Pius XI received the first Mercedes-Benz automobile. Over the decades, he noted, the Popemobile “has evolved from a means of transportation into an instrument of encounter”. Recalling the first fully electric model, presented to Francis ahead of the Jubilee of Hope, and his predecessor’s call for “making mobility truly sustainable and accessible”, the Pope left the company with the key message of the morning: “I encourage you to continue placing technological innovation at the service of human dignity, care for creation and the common good.”