Meeting with Brazil's Men of Culture (1 July 1980)

On Tuesday, 1 July 1980, the Holy Father met with men of culture in Rio de Janeiro, where he spoke of true culture, which is humanizing, as opposed to false cultures, which are dehumanizing.

1. I am particularly pleased to be able to meet you, eminent men of culture of the Brazilian nation, and I cordially express to each of you my cordial greetings, my sincere appreciation and my profound respect. You well know how much and for what reasons the Church esteems and promotes, as far as it is responsible, every authentic form of culture and strives to enter into communion and dialogue with it.

The meeting place between Church and culture is the world, and in it man, who is a "being-in-the-world", subject of development for both, through word and grace of God on the part of the Church, through man himself, with all his spiritual and material resources, on the part of culture.

True culture is humanizing, while non-culture and false cultures are dehumanizing. For this reason, in the choice of culture, man plays his destiny.

The humanization, that is, the development of man takes place in all fields of reality in which man is situated and places himself: in his spirituality and corporeity, in the cosmos, in human and divine society. It is a matter of a harmonious development, in which all the sectors to which the human being belongs are involved with each other: culture concerns neither the spirit alone nor the body alone, nor the individuality alone, nor the sociality alone nor cosmicity alone. The reduction "ad unum" always gives rise to dehumanizing pseudo-cultures, in which man is angelic or materialized, dissociated or depersonalized. Culture must cultivate man and every man in the extension of an integral and plenary humanism, in which the whole man and all men are promoted in the fullness of every human dimension.

2. All the various forms of cultural promotion are rooted in the "culture of souls", according to Cicero's expression, the culture of thinking and of loving, through which man rises to his supreme dignity, which is that of thought , and is expressed in its most sublime donation, which is that of love.

The authentic "culture of animi" is the culture of freedom, which springs from the depths of the spirit, from lucidity of thought and from the generous disinterestedness of love. Outside of freedom there can be no culture. The true culture of a people, its full humanization, cannot develop in a regime of constraint: "Culture - says the conciliar constitution "Gaudium et Spes" ( Gaudium et Spes , 59) - springing from the reasonable and social nature of man, has an incessant need for the right freedom to develop and it must be recognized the legitimate possibility of autonomous exercise according to its own principles".

Culture must not be subjected to any constraints of power, either political or economic, but must be helped by both in all those forms of public and private initiative which conform to true humanism, tradition and the authentic spirit of every people.

The culture that is born free must also spread in a regime of freedom. The cultured man must propose his own culture, but he cannot impose it. Imposition contradicts culture, because it contradicts that process of free personal assimilation by thought and love, which is proper to the culture of the spirit. An imposed culture not only contrasts with man's freedom, but hinders the formation process of the same culture which in its complexity, from science to customs, arises from the collaboration of all men.

The Church claims in favor of culture, and therefore of man, both in the process of cultural development and in the act of its proposal, a freedom analogous to that requested in the conciliar declaration "Dignitatis Humanae" for religious freedom, founded essentially on the of the human person, known both through the word of God and through reason (cf. Dignitatis Humanae , 2).

In the very act that respects freedom, culture must promote it, that is, it must try to equip it with those virtues and customs that cooperate to form what Saint Augustine called the "libertas maior", freedom, that is, in its full development, freedom in a morally adult state, capable of autonomous choices with respect to the temptations coming from every form of disordered self-love. Integral culture includes moral formation, education in the virtues of individual, social and religious life. “There is no doubt - I said in my recent speech to UNESCO - that the first and fundamental cultural fact is the spiritually mature man, that is, the fully educated man, the man capable of educating himself and of educating his others. There is also no doubt that the first and fundamental dimension of culture is sound morality: Allocutio ad Unesco habita, die 2 June 1980: Teachings of John Paul II , III,1 [1980] 1645).

3. Culture, the formation of man in all his faculties and expressions, is not only the promotion of thinking and doing, but it is also the formation of conscience. Due to the imperfect or null education of the conscience, knowledge alone can give rise to a proud purely terrestrial humanism: doing and enjoying can give rise to false cultures of an extremely productive uncontrolled, to the advantage of national power or private consumerism, with the consequence of ominous dangers of war and very serious economic crises.

The promotion of knowledge is indispensable, but it is insufficient when it is not accompanied by moral culture.

The "culture of souls" must promote instruction and education together, it must educate man in the knowledge of reality, but must also educate man to be a man in the integrity of his being and his relationships. Now, man cannot be fully himself, he cannot fully realize his humanity, if he does not recognize and experience the transcendence of his own being over the world and his relationship with God. the promotion of his humanity, but also the opening of his humanity to God. Making culture is giving man, every man and the community of men, a human and divine dimension, it is offering and communicating to man that humanity and that divinity that flows from the perfect man, from the redeemer of man, Jesus Christ.

In the work of culture, God made a covenant with man, he himself became a cultural operator for man's development. “Dei agricultura estis”, exclaims Saint Paul! “You are God's field” (1 Cor 3:9). Do not be afraid, gentlemen, open the doors of your spirit, of your society, of your cultural institutions, to the action of God, who is a friend of man and works in man and for man, so that he may grow in his humanity and in his divinity, being, and kingship over the world.

In the covenant established between God and man through human culture, the latter must imitate God in his infinite love.

Cultural work is a work of love, a work that proceeds from that social love, the need for which I recalled in my first encyclical "Redemptor Hominis" (cf. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis , 16). There is a lack of social love when, due to a lack of esteem for others, one does not respect the plurality of legitimate cultures, but wants to impose one's own culture, which is neither unique nor exclusive, on economically and politically weaker populations. Let us recall what the Council says: "Many economically poorer nations, but richer in wisdom, can give significant help to the others on this point". ( Gaudium et Spes , 15).

4. The cultural unity of a country as geographically vast as yours, in which numerous traditions and various historical processes have amalgamated, does not arise from a reduction to the uniqueness of culture, but from a plurality unified by mutual respect, by the recognition of cultural peculiarities, from the dialogue that enriches each other with values ​​and experiences.

5. I think I am fulfilling an elementary duty of justice, if I recall at this point the cultural work, unpretentious but exemplary, which was that of the Church in this country.

In this work we find all the aspects of culture mentioned so far. In fact, from the earliest years, through its missionaries, the Church began to transmit to the aborigines, together with the evangelical revelation, the knowledge of things; not only with literacy and education, but also with the effort to perfect the basic elements of indigenous culture, without distorting or adulterating them. Through the centuries, through the missions among the Indians and the inhabitants of the innermost parts of the country, through schools and universities, through hospitals and shelters, through its means of social communication, the Church continues to make a valid contribution to the cultural work .

Considering culture in its broadest sense, we must say of Brazil what the Puebla document says of Latin America: the Church has historically found itself at the root of the culture of this country.

6. A work that respects the original culture of a people, allows its development and diffusion, facilitates its dialogue with other cultures, is that of literacy. We read in the “Populorum Progressio”: “An illiterate is an undernourished spirit. Knowing how to read and write, acquiring professional training means regaining self-confidence and discovering that one can progress together with others” (Paul VI, Populorum Progressio , 35).

Alongside this and other forms of undernourishment of the spirit, it is necessary to consider the serious state of depression in which entire populations find themselves due to their economic conditions. The economically richest and most industrially developed peoples have generated consumerism, which is at the origin of increasingly accentuated imbalances between populations of the same state. I spoke about it in the encyclical "Redemptor Hominis" (cf. John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis , 16).

Social love enlivened by charity must remedy these situations. Build together, gentlemen, a civilization of truth and love, create a culture which promotes man ever more and facilitates his evangelization, which helps him to grow in his human and divine dimension, to recognize the value of his being, the meaning of his existence, to know and love Christ, in whom God has fully revealed himself to every man and every people.

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