We have all heard it: the admonition, usually delivered with some degree of snarling, to “just do it” . . . usually what someone else thinks we ought to be doing without necessarily doing it themselves or who have no trouble doing it. What, however, are you supposed to do when it simply isn’t possible to do the right thing — assuming, of course, that it is the right thing!
 |
| "Doing" requires "Ability for Doing" |
This zeros in on a critical aspect of social justice, what we might call the “secret of social justice” which gets to the very heart of the matter. That is, it is not sufficient to want to do the right thing. It must be possible to do the right thing. Pope Pius XI made this clear in § 71 of Quadragesimo Anno, his 1931 encyclical on the restructuring of the social order. Of course, this isn’t a “religious thing.” It’s a human thing and applies whichever faith or philosophy you follow, if any. In any event, as Pius XI said, using the wage system as his example,
In the first place, the worker must be paid a wage sufficient to support him and his family. . . . Every effort must therefore be made that fathers of families receive a wage large enough to meet ordinary family needs adequately. But if this cannot always be done under existing circumstances, social justice demands that changes be introduced as soon as possible whereby such a wage will be assured to every adult workingman.
 |
| Pope Pius XI |
The pope repeated this in §§ 52-53 of Divini Redemptoris, the follow-up to, or the second half of Quadragesimo Anno. As he said,
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. . . . 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.
 |
| Fr. William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. |
CESJ co-founder Father William J. Ferree, S.M., Ph.D. explained what Pius XI was saying by pointing out, “Now if we were to hand this quotation to a number of people, and ask each one of them what Social Justice demands in it, almost every one of them would answer, ‘A family wage.’” (Rev. William J. Ferree, Introduction to Social Justice. Arlington, Virginia, 1997, 9.) Continuing, Father Ferree stated,
They would all be wrong! Look again at the syntax of the sentence: the direct object of the predicate “demands” is the clause “that changes be introduced into the system.” The Pope’s teaching on the family wage is that it is due in commutative or strict justice to the individual worker; — what Social Justice demands is something specifically social: the reorganization of the system. For it is the whole system which is badly organized (“socially unjust”) when it withholds from the human beings whose lives are bound up in it, the power to “meet common domestic needs adequately.” (Ibid.; N.B., Fr. Ferree used older translations of QA and DR.)
The bottom line here is it is not enough to resolve to do the right thing as you say. An essential first step is to make it possible to do the right thing — which is particularly apposite these days when expedience and even whim govern so much of private and public life, and people feel forced to take the easy or quick way out, regardless of the harm to themselves, other individuals, groups, the environment, or the common good.
 |
| Louis O. Kelso |
Modern methods of finance feed into this and on it. Locked into what Louis O. Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler referred to as the “slavery of [past] savings, financial institutions and individual investors believe — erroneously — the only way to advance economically is to have a few very rich people or the State (or, as in Hilaire Belloc’s Servile State, a combination thereof) finance economic growth. The goal is to recoup the original investment as fast as possible and the Devil take the hindmost, then accumulate as much wealth as possible in as few hands as possible to finance future growth on terms increasingly unfavorable, even disastrous to ordinary people.
This has created a financial system and an economy which thrives on chaos and uncertainty to the advantage of a small private and public sector elite — often the same people — with most people relegated to a condition of utter dependency.
A possible solution can be found in what we call “the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism,” which is described in a short book written a few years ago at the behest of some Vatican officials to explain a proposal that received the endorsement of President Ronald Reagan and the encouragement of Pope St. John Paul II, Economic Personalism: Property, Power and Justice for Every Person, which is available as a free download from the CESJ website by clicking on the link.
CESJ is currently organizing an “Initiative on Economic Personalism” to bring word of the Just Third Way to a much broader audience. We expect to have some good news to report in the near future, so stay tuned!
#30#
