Pope Leo XIV says faith is inseparable from culture

Pope Leo XIV resumed his cycle of catechesis on the Second Vatican Council on Wednesday, October 28, devoting the general audience to the relationship between Christian faith and culture. Speaking to thousands of the faithful in St. Peter's Square, he reflected on how the Church understands and lives within the different cultural expressions of humanity, following the second chapter of the second part of the pastoral constitution Gaudium et spes.

The pope recalled that the Catholic Church has long accompanied the preaching of the Gospel by founding schools of every kind for human, cultural and spiritual formation on all five continents. The advance of knowledge, he said, raises ever deeper questions that prompt believers to give an account of their faith. Cultural expressions of every sort help open the human mind to the great questions about the meaning of existence, preparing the ground for the Gospel to be received.

The foundation of that relationship, the pope said, is the Incarnation. If the divine Word became flesh and dwelt among us, then faith too is an incarnate reality, inseparable from the culture in which it develops. "Faith is also called to become culture," the pope said, meaning that it must reach people where they live, through language, traditions, religious sense, art, poetry, thought and science. He quoted St. John Paul II: "A faith that does not become culture is a faith not fully accepted, not entirely thought out, not faithfully lived."

Faith can take flesh in any culture precisely because it is not identified exclusively with any one of them, the pope said. It dwells within cultures and shapes them from the inside according to the form of Jesus Christ, through charity, service and the filial recognition of God's fatherhood. In this way the Church finds in the various cultures what they contain of the good, the beautiful and the true, to embody and pass on the message of the Gospel.

On that basis, the pope said the Church promotes culture because it is a good in itself and a service to human beings in fulfilling their vocation. Gaudium et spes calls on the international community to ensure that no one is excluded from essential cultural goods, and to wipe out illiteracy and the lack of schooling. The Council states that those capable of pursuing higher studies should have the conditions they need to do so. The conciliar text also says it is everyone's duty to "see to it that the proper and necessary participation of women in cultural life is recognized and promoted."

The pope also took up the Council's call for a certain unity of knowledge, while acknowledging that present living conditions can make that difficult. Christians are the first called to work for that unity of wisdom, he said: having received from Revelation answers to the great questions of existence does not excuse them from rigorous intellectual and cultural formation. Growth in human and scientific knowledge should go hand in hand with a deeper grasp of the content of the faith, which has to be deepened continually as a person's life and level of study advance.

The pope recalled the Council's particular exhortation to theologians, encouraging them to work with those engaged in other disciplines. He quoted the conciliar text directly: "theological research, while deepening its grasp of revealed truth, should not lose contact with its own time, so that it can help those schooled in the various branches of knowledge to come to a fuller understanding of the faith."

The pope closed his catechesis with the warning found in Gaudium et spes itself: faith is not to be lived in opposition or hostility to the world and its cultural expressions. Reaching a mature and responsible synthesis between faith and culture is not a secondary option, he said, but "a necessary condition for persevering in the Christian vocation, but also an indispensable requirement for bearing witness to the faith before the world and communicating it to others credibly."