HENRIQUE C. DE L. VAZ, S.J., A READER OF EMMANUEL MOUNIER

Abstract

In this article, I make a brief overview of how I came to know Mounier’s thinking and what I owe to Fr.Vaz in this respect, since my years at PUC, Rio de Janeiro (between 1958 and 1962). Fr. Vaz appreciated Mounier’s personalism regarding the imperative need for a Christian not to dissociate thinking from acting and separate faith and attendance at church from an effective commitment to greater social justice, a notion that Mounier had just developed. I also show that Mounier’s reflection was marked by an author of German descent, a naturalized French citizen, who had written about “engagement”. Fr Vaz’s ad­miration for Mounier has often been mentioned in my “Témoignages”, written in French, in which I refer to the personalist thought of one of the greatest Brazilian philosophers ever, if not the greatest, that is, Henrique Cláudio Lima Vaz. In the last part of this paper, I briefly discuss how we must further our present reflection on technoscience and its potential harms to both the Earth and humanity.­