Very often we look at our life as if it were the highway code, with an endless number of precepts and norms that must be strictly observed in order to avoid a fine. Faced with the vertigo of building a true interior life, it is very human to seek the tranquillity of clear rules, commandments that assure us we are on the right path. Perhaps this is characteristic of the first steps in the faith, when the catechesis of initiation supports us with simple scaffolding; but no one becomes a mature Christian merely by the fact that there exist clear and distinct norms.

Just as knowing by heart the signs and the regulations does not by itself guarantee being a good driver — capable of handling oneself with ease, intuiting danger or yielding the right of way naturally — this sterile moralism does not form a true believer either. The good driver is not the one who dodges the penalty out of fear, but the one who has integrated the art of driving until his journey flows.

Clinging exclusively to the cold norm leaves us, at best, as “well-motivated pseudo-Christians.” In order to break that vicious circle and get out of our normative entanglement, Pope Leo XIV recalled in his recent Sunday Angelus that key Gospel question: “Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?” Faced with the dead ends of formalism, Jesus’ answer places us once again before the two great pillars of the faith: to love God and to love one’s neighbour.

A personal relationship that is not an imposition

The Pope reminds us that “the Lord asks of us a personal relationship: the one and true God wants to be our God.” It is not a matter of fulfilling a regulation for the sake of fulfilling it, but of responding to an initiative of love that always precedes us, involving the whole person: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.” For that very reason, love of God cannot be lived as an oppressive burden, but as “the proper demand of man’s desire, which finds its fulfilment in communion with Him.”

Christ’s gaze upon one’s neighbour

Now then, a relationship so profound with God is never enclosed within the walls of the soul; that upward commitment overflows naturally towards others. Leo XIV rightly underlines that “from the intimate relationship with God we are able to look at ourselves and at our neighbour with the same gaze of Christ, according to his perspective.” That is where the shell is broken: “selfishness is overcome and even love for oneself becomes charity; our existence is directed towards the other and becomes a gift for the one who is at our side.” Cold rules no longer count; only self-giving counts.

The risk of moralism and the living force of love

When we forget that love is the centre and replace it with an interminable catalogue of empty obligations, religion withers. Rescuing the words of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, the Pope warns forcefully that “only love — she wrote — can make the members of the Church act; if this love were to be extinguished, the Gospel would no longer be proclaimed.” Without this authentic heartbeat, the consequences for the Christian life are devastating: “in fact, our faith would be deprived of its content, our good works would be reduced to moralism, our hope would be vain.”

A new heart for the great commandment

When a person truly assumes that life is governed by the impulse of self-giving and care for the other, something similar occurs to the one who already masters the steering wheel: the norms cease to be lived as a restriction imposed from outside and become the very grammar of his freedom. It is no longer a matter of calculating distances for fear of the points licence, but of looking at the road with the attention and generosity of one who knows that the journey is a shared path.

Faced with that sad moralism that stifles joy, the invitation of Leo XIV urges us to cast off artifices and set foot on firm ground. Let us not lose ourselves in bureaucratic labyrinths or in fines of conscience; rather let us ask for “the grace of a new heart, capable of welcoming and living the great commandment.” At the end of the road, the only thing that defines our route is knowing whether we have truly loved.