To describe love of neighbor Scripture uses a very wise and profound phrase: Love your neighbor as yourself. It does not demand any fantastic and unreal heroism…. No, it is as yourself…. People who are dissatisfied with themselves will not be really good to others. Those who do not accept themselves take exception to others. True love is fair: where it is leading us is to love oneself as one of the members of Christ’s body. Oneself like the others—becoming free of that false perspective with which we are all born, as if the world revolves around me and my ego. Through faith we must all learn a kind of Copernican revolution. Copernicus discovered that it was not the sun that went around the earth but that this earth along with the other planets revolved around the sun. We all begin by seeing ourselves as a tiny earth around which all the sons must turn. Faith teaches us to leave this error and to behave like brothers and sisters, joining together with all the others in the round dance of love around the one center that is God. Only if God exists, only if he becomes the center of my life, is this love my neighbor as myself possible. But if he exists, if he becomes my center, then it is also possible to reach this inward freedom of love.
POPE BENEDICT XVI
