Light On Dark Water

The Social Justice Challenge

One of the unhappy effects of the attack from within the
Church itself on Catholic doctrine is a tendency for the
orthodox to be almost as much occupied with preserving the faith
as with practicing it. I think it is becoming possible for us to
move past this, now that the flood of heterodoxy seems to
have reached its crest and begun to recede. Its most visible
spokesmen have been reduced to anger and irrelevance, of which
the news that Fr. Richard McBrien is serving as a consultant to
the movie version of The DaVinci Code seems a good
indicator.

Those of us who take the central teachings of the Church as
they have been understood for centuries, and look for no
doctrinal revolution, should be able now to turn our attention
outward, toward evangelization primarily, but also (and maybe
inseparably) toward social justice.

I use this term with some hesitation. For many or most
religious traditionalists, and for the often-overlapping group of
political conservatives, the term “social justice”
has long been tainted. The former have fought the attempt to put
it in place of salvation as the object of religion, and the
latter have seen it—correctly for the most part—as a
synonym for socialism. But it’s a good succinct term for
something which must always be a concern for Christians. The
obligation upon each of us to practice charity and justice in all
our personal dealings is perfectly clear. No one can read the
Gospel and believe that he can be saved without these.

But popes going back at least to Leo XIII have insisted that
Catholics have an obligation to work for the correction of
injustices and evils outside our personal sphere. To say so does
not mean that specific measures are prescribed, and we need to
broaden our concept of social justice beyond its socialist
connotations. I would like to think that current economic
tendencies might create an opening for more people to consider
the distributist idea more seriously, though this may be wishful
thinking.

We also need to extend the idea of social justice further
into non-economic considerations. Many of what we normally speak
of as “social issues” can be seen as questions of
justice; abortion is the obvious one, but there are, for
instance, several kinds of injustice involved in pornography.
It’s odd that “social issues” and “social
justice” should have such distinct and separate
connotations, the one having to do with questions of public
morality and the place of religion, the other mostly concerned
with the distribution of wealth and privilege. The distinction is
useful up to a point, but the two are branches of one tree, and
the time is opportune for us to treat them that way.

I read Pope Benedict’s first encyclical as pointing us
in this direction, as implying that with our own house in some
decent degree of order we must simultaneously renew our
acquaintance with one of the elemental and most cherished truths
given to the Church—the principle that God is
love—and take more seriously the obligations to the world
which that truth imposes upon us.

It’s time also to recognize the contributions of many of
those “social justice people” whom we have tended to
dismiss, and to get ourselves out of the reactive syndrome of
disregarding the problems they point out because we suspect that
they are doing so to advance a cause with which we disagree. We
don’t have to accept their doctrine, either religious or
political: I concluded some time ago that anyone still
sympathetic to Communism can be credited at best with either good
intentions or good political sense, but not both. But we can
agree with them that the problems—third world poverty, for
instance—are real and serious, and that much of their work
deserves support. I can think of several people active in direct
aid to the poor who have political and religious beliefs which I
consider very mistaken, but who are in a much better position
than I to answer the questions at the end of Matthew 25.