This is for subscribers-only, but it’s worth it to stop at the library and take a look: an appreciation of Pope Benedict by Doloros Leckey in America magazine. An excerpt:

That Benedict chose to write about love in his first encyclical is completely in tune with the Rule, which is really about ways to grow in the love of Christ. Deus Caritas Est has given me much to mull over as I begin to realize how the particular love of my marriage, a marriage ended by death, is opening me to larger ways of loving. Much of that larger way I learned from my husband, whose commitment to social justice was located in philia. He saw real people behind the formulae and mortgages and governance needed for affordable housing. These so-called “strangers” were in some way his friends. So as I ponder the many faces of love, Benedict has shed some light on my own experience. I know firsthand that eros does not evaporate with the physical absence of one’s particular love. It continues to remind us of the joy of being alive within another reality, what seemed to me at first to be communio. Or is it agape? I don’t know. In any case Benedict writes that eros and agape can never be separated. I find that enormously consoling.

There has been some critique of Benedict’s treatment of social justice in Deus Caritas Est, particularly in terms of what is not there, with the unintended consequence of diverting believers’ energy from righting wrongs in our societal structures. (See, for example, Thomas J. Massaro, S.J., in America, 3/13.) I suppose that is a possibility. But when I look around my own community, Arlington, Va., an eight-minute drive to the White House, I see activist believers from many different churches who engage tirelessly with national issues as well as with concerns of our own “urban village.” Because of them Arlington has in place a living-wage law. The local government is responsive to affordable housing needs as an active partner with several nonprofit organizations. There is a free medical clinic one block from my home. Arlington has outreach workers to help with jobs and job training. Our citizens are watchful, caring and tireless.

Yet this major commitment to justice for all in our community and for creating governmental systems to address the problems is not enough. Every evening in my neighborhood park, the homeless of Arlington are fed from the back of a station wagon. A coalition of Christian churches enacts this work of mercy because, for whatever reasons, there are still people who remain on the streets. Across from that park is St. George’s Episcopal Church, where for 30 years a food pantry has operated. It is like a small grocery store. Five days a week, for two hours at midday, “clients” come for a supply of easily prepared food. I’ve been volunteering there once a month for the past year and a half. Last week I witnessed something new. A man collected his canned goods and then turned to my volunteer partner, who was standing by the door. He looked at us and said, “I need something else. I need a blessing.” Raima and I, two lay women (she a member of St. George’s and I a Catholic) paused. Then Raima asked him what kind of blessing he needed. “I need courage and strength,” he replied. Raima took his hands as two other clients stood perfectly still, sensing something different was at hand. I closed my eyes while prayer poured out of Raima for this imago Dei. He thanked her, he thanked me and quietly left, and we went on with our duties.

Raima and I talked about the blessing as we closed the pantry for the day. We noted that religious conversation rarely, if ever, occurs. She said she had never “blessed” anyone before. No matter. I witnessed that day caritas in action made possible by a humble openness to the Spirit. It reminded me that we all need blessings. I have a home, food, friends, meaningful work, a close and loving family, health. And yet, like that man, I too need something else. What might that be? “Love is the light—and in the end the only light…that can give us the courage needed to keep living and working,” writes Benedict (No. 39). Courage, indeed. I believe that. I also believe that St. Paul is dead right. Love never ends, and, as Benedict points out, it is all encompassing, from eros to agape.

Clearly what I am learning from Pope Benedict XVI is deeply personal. Yet the most personal encounters can and do move one from particular concrete experience to universal truth. It happens in poetry, in narrative theology and quintessentially in the Eucharist. And it happens in the witness of life, whether that be a pope’s life or that of a man without a home.