Lumen Fidei - page 75

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it, but consider creation as a gift for which we
are all indebted; it teaches us to create just forms
of government, in the realization that authority
comes from God and is meant for the service of
the common good. Faith likewise offers the pos-
sibility of forgiveness, which so often demands
time and effort, patience and commitment. For-
giveness is possible once we discover that good-
ness is always prior to and more powerful than
evil, and that the word with which God affirms
our life is deeper than our every denial. From a
purely anthropological standpoint, unity is supe-
rior to conflict; rather than avoiding conflict, we
need to confront it in an effort to resolve and
move beyond it, to make it a link in a chain, as
part of a progress towards unity.
When faith is weakened, the foundations of
humanity also risk being weakened, as the poet
T.S. Eliot warned: “Do you need to be told that
even those modest attainments / As you can
boast in the way of polite society / Will hard-
ly survive the Faith to which they owe their sig-
nificance?”48 If we remove faith in God from
our cities, mutual trust would be weakened, we
would remain united only by fear and our sta-
bility would be threatened. In the Letter to the
Hebrews we read that “God is not ashamed to be
called their God; indeed, he has prepared a city
for them” (Heb 11:16). Here the expression “is
48 “Choruses from The Rock”, in The Collected Poems and
Plays 1909-1950, New York, 1980, 106.