This story from the secular press got me thinking:

Pope Benedict XVI said Wednesday in his first encyclical that the Roman Catholic Church has no desire to govern states or set public policy, but can’t remain silent when its charity is needed to ease suffering around the world.

In the long-awaited document "God is Love," Benedict explores the relationship between God’s love for mankind and the church’s works of charity, saying the two are intrinsically linked and the foundation of the Christian faith.

The 71-page encyclical, eagerly watched for clues about Benedict’s major concerns, characterizes his early pontificate as one in which he seeks to return to the basics of Christianity with a relatively uncontroversial meditation on love and the need for greater works of charity in an unjust world.

Even Vatican officials have expressed some surprise at the topic, considering Benedict was the Vatican’s chief doctrinal watchdog and could easily have delved into a more problematic issue such as bioethics in his first authoritative text.

In the encyclical, Benedict said the church’s work caring for widows, the sick and orphans was as much a part of its mission as celebrating the sacraments and spreading the Gospels. However, he stressed that the church’s charity workers must never use their work to proselytize or push a particular political ideology.

The subject of this encyclical didn’t come out of the clear blue – it’s a completion of something begun by JPII, but still, I can’t help but wonder if Benedict, after watching this Church for decades, has discerned that in the West, at least, the Church’s constant focus on interneal issues and problems over the past four decades has compromised its ability to fulfill its mission. If in all of our arguments and obsessions with restructuring and reforming ourself, we have slowly but surely forgotten the essentials of what we’re called to do: Not "Stay in and argue about whether blue is an appropriate liturgical color" but "Go forth an preach the Good News."

A topic oft discussed here.

But as I’m reading through this encyclical, that’s what I’m sensing – that the Pope wants to certainly retrieve the true sense of "love" from the ways in which the world twists it, but he also wants to refocus us, to get us thinking about who we are to be in the world, as the Body of Christ.