Yesterday we
looked at what Pope Francis said in his Urbi
et Orbi address about the many problems that afflict modern society,
especially as they affect children. What
His Holiness said was necessary and salutary, of course, but he did not get
into a solution. That is understandable,
as you can’t do too much in a brief talk, but the impression many people no
doubt got was that an increase in goodwill and personal virtue would be
adequate.
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| Msgr. Knox: For the enthusiast, the ungodly have no rights. |
Unfortunately,
what with the widespread misunderstanding of social justice throughout the world,
many of the people who got the impression that individual virtue is sufficient
automatically make the assumption that what Pope Francis was mandating
(anything you like coming from the pope is a mandate, while anything you don’t
like is prudential) was that somebody other than themselves — the ungodly rich,
the ungodly politicians, the ungodly ungodly — must act directly on the problem
by divesting themselves of their ill-gotten wealth, power, and existence, or
they are damned to hell for all eternity.
As Msgr. Ronald Knox pointed out, the common opinion among “enthusiasts”
(ultrasupernaturalists), is that the ungodly have no rights that the godly need
respect if it gets in the way of what they want.
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| No, I'm not talking to the man behind the tree, but to YOU. |
This is
understandable, up to a point. Seeing
that individuals are often helpless to act to address social problems, many
people unacquainted with the principles of social justice naturally assume that
Pope Francis is talking to somebody else.
After all, what good does it do to tell someone who is helpless to do
anything, to do something? No, the pope
must mean that anyone with wealth, power, or whom I dislike is a criminal until
and unless (and even then) he or she does what the pope is mandating . . .
right? The rights of such people get in
the way of God’s Will, and can not only be ignored, but completely abolished.
Wrong. The key to understanding social justice is
that the rich, powerful, and those whom we regard as ungodly can be just as
helpless as anyone else when confronted with a social problem. There is also the problem that, like it or
not, the ungodly — or those we have deemed ungodly — not only have the same
natural rights as everyone else, they must be equally respected. The natural law is not based on opinion about
a deity’s will, but on human nature, which is the same for everyone. Even the ungodly are as fully human, and
human in the same way, as everyone else.
So, even the
ungodly can be helpless to address a social problem. As Pope Pius XI explained, using the problems
with the wage system as an example,
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| Pope Pius XI |
But social justice cannot be said to have
been satisfied as long as workingmen are denied a salary that will enable them
to secure proper sustenance for themselves and for their families; as long as
they are denied the opportunity of acquiring a modest fortune and forestalling
the plague of universal pauperism; as long as they cannot make suitable
provision through public or private insurance for old age, for periods of
illness and unemployment. In a word, to repeat what has been said in Our
Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno: “Then
only will the economic and social order be soundly established and attain its
ends, when it offers, to all and to each, all those goods which the wealth and
resources of nature, technical science and the corporate organization of social
affairs can give. These goods should be sufficient to supply all necessities
and reasonable comforts, and to uplift men to that higher standard of life
which, provided it be used with prudence, is not only not a hindrance but is of
singular help to virtue.”
It happens all too frequently, however,
under the salary system, that individual employers are helpless to ensure
justice. (Divini Redemptoris, §§ 52-53.)
“Now, that,” our
godly warrior of justice might say, “is a little less than helpful. First the pope says that workers must receive
a just wage, have the opportunity and means to acquire and possess capital, and
make provision for the future. Then he says the very thing he tells us
to do is impossible! That sounds like a
lot of doubletalk.”
That’s because it is
a lot of doubletalk — as is the insistence of many commentators that § 52
mentions only wages when it clearly argues in favor of widespread capital
ownership and making provision for the future.
That is, it’s doubletalk if you don’t finish reading the passage:
It happens all too frequently, however,
under the salary system, that individual employers are helpless to ensure
justice. unless, with a view to its
practice, they organize institutions the object of which is to prevent
competition incompatible with fair treatment for the workers. Where this is
true, it is the duty of contractors and employers to support and promote such
necessary organizations as normal instruments enabling them to fulfill their
obligations of justice. But the laborers too must be mindful of their duty to
love and deal fairly with their employers, and persuade themselves that there
is no better means of safeguarding their own interests. (Ibid.)
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| Fr. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
In other words,
when there are situations that need to be addressed, individual justice and
charity direct people to, well, act directly on the problem. That is, was, and always will be individual
virtue, not social virtue.
And social
virtue? Specifically, social
justice? That is another matter. As
Father Ferree explained in his pamphlet, Introduction
to Social Justice,
Here the two levels of justice are clearly
distinguished. On the level of commutative or individual justice the employer
is helpless, and note that this
happens “all too frequently.” Now evidently, if he is really helpless to do
full justice, he does not sin when out of sheer necessity he falls short of
justice. In individual justice the case is closed, for the employer can do
nothing about it; and the injustice must be allowed to continue out of sheer
inability to stop it.
Above this field of individual justice, however, there
is the whole field of Social Justice, and in this higher field the case is never closed. The “helplessness” of
individuals comes from the fact that the whole
industry is badly organized (“socially unjust”). Social Justice demands
that it be organized rightly for the
Common Good of all who depend upon it for their welfare and perfection.
Therefore employers have the duty — the rigid duty of Social Justice which they
cannot disregard without sin-to work together
(socially) to reorganize their industry. Once this reorganization (act of
Social Justice) has been accomplished by group (social) action, then the
employers will no longer be helpless in the field of individual justice, and
will be under obligation to meet their strict duties in this latter field. Rev. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D., Introduction to Social Justice. New York: The Paulist Press, 1948, 12.)
So, the response
in individual justice and individual charity is to meet needs directly, the
response in social justice and social charity is to get organized and
restructure the institutions of the system to make it possible for individual
justice and individual charity to function once again. That is completely different from the usual
understanding of papal teachings on social justice, which supposes that because
individuals are often helpless, the pope must be referring to all those people
against whom we have some kind of grudge or just dislike for whatever reason.
No,
responsibility for the system, the common good, is a personal responsibility of
each of us. Although we are individually
helpless to solve social problems, we become effective when we organize with
others and remove not the problems themselves, but the cause of the problems. That
is the difference between individual and social virtue.
The question then
becomes, Where do ordinary people, who are ordinarily powerless, get the power
to organize and act on the system? We’ll
look at that next week.
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