Truth is not a threat to tolerance, Spanish archbishop says

May 23, 2008 / 18:16 pm

As the Spanish government escalates its efforts to impose secularism on the country, Cardinal Agustin Garcia-Gasco of Valencia, responded this week by saying, “Truth is not a threat to the tolerance of legitimate diversity” nor “does it lead to intolerance of one’s neighbor.”

 

In his weekly pastoral letter, the cardinal pointed out that the truth “is not the property of any one human being,” and warned that “setting up moral relativism as an unquestionable dogma is a contradiction.”

 

“On the contrary, every human being can come to know the truth and unhesitatingly uphold the essential moral categories of what is just and unjust,” he said.

 

After emphasizing that “each human being has absolute dignity merely by the fact of being one,” the cardinal stated, “The Church proclaims that all men and women have a soul and are made in the image and likeness of God, even when their behavior does not conform to that identity.  There is an innate dignity in the human being that cannot be relativized by anyone.”

 

“The mission of the Church is committed to the search for truth.  Benedict XVI said as much during his recent visit to the people of North America,” he recalled.  In his letter, the cardinal also underlined that when the Church “makes use of divine wisdom, she projects light about who God is and who man is.”

 

“Materialism seeks to liberate man from God and from the moral law,” he continued, “but in the end, it enslaves him with the drug of absurd consumerism and the ‘laws of the market,’ which become true dogmas more important than the human being or even than our communities.”

 

“A society respectful of human dignity should combine truth and tolerance.  Expelling truth from social life leads to intolerance: in human disputes, when the truth is not acknowledged, only brute force imposed by whomever is most powerful wins.  Justice and peace are two sides of the same coin.  When lies and injustice are imposed by any strong-arm or demagogic regime, peace is in jeopardy.  The thirst for justice is a human necessity that cannot be contravened,” the cardinal said.

 

“Ideologies that deny the truth, that relativize human acts, end up imposing tyranny on their subjects and reveal their pretensions of tolerance to be empty words,” the Spanish cardinal warned.