Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote, “What our Lord says to Judas, he says to the world today: You seemingly are very interested in social justice. Why are you not concerned about individual justice? You love your neighbor, why do you not love God? This is the attitude of the world today. We have swung away from a period in which we were concerned with individual sanctification to the neglect of the social order. Now we have gone to the extreme of being immersed with social justice, civil rights, and so forth, and we are not the least bit concerned about individual justice and the duty of paying honor and glory to God. If you march with a banner, if you protest, then your individual life may be impure, alcoholic, anything you please. That does not matter. Judas is the patron saint of those who divide that universal law of God: Love God and love neighbor.”
“Social justice” has taken on the status of an ideology in our culture. Adherence to this ideology allows us to commit (or participate in) any number of attrocities while remaining untroubled by our consciences. We participate in sin through: counsel, consent, provocation, praise or flattery, concealment, partaking, silence and the defense of the ill done. We can stand by and witness the taking of innocent life on a massive scale, turn a blind eye to the degredation of morality in our culture, watch the destruction of marriage, see our religious (and many other) freedoms restricted day by day but these things do not trouble some of us so long as we continue to support the ideology of social justice.
Of course, the greatest manifestation of this phenomenon can be seen in the participation of many in the public square. These well-meaning but ill-formed voters think they are doing good by supporting political candidates who conform to the social justice ideology while actively seeking the destruction of marriage, the destruction of innocent human life and the limitation of human freedom (including religious freedom).
Here at A Sensible Life, we work to explore authentic justice. Authentic justice, the distributive justice contained within the Catholic Church’s social teaching, grows from a root of gratuitousness, that is a free giving. This justice then is characterized by freedom and is opposed to the idea of imposing “social justice” by taxing some in order to aid others.
We must seek truth in all our public and private activities. And, of course, in order to seek truth in sincerity we must be prepared to love and live the fruits of our seeking. This preparedness we call FREEDOM. The pursuit of freedom itself entails some effort on our part. We must actively seek to free ourselves from attachments that restrict our ability to embrace truth – attachments to sin, to certain ways of life, to certain ways of thinking, to ourselves and our own thoughts and, particularly in this current culture, to ideologies. On December 19, Pope Benedict XVI wrote an op-ed for the Financial Times entitled “A time for Christians to engage with the world.” In it, he spoke of this importance of remaining authentically free: “Let Christians render to Caesar only what belongs to Caesar, not what belongs to God. Christians have at times throughout history been unable to comply with demands made by Caesar. From the emperor cult of ancient Rome to the totalitarian regimes of the past century, Caesar has tried to take the place of God. When Christians refuse to bow down before the false gods proposed today, it is not because of an antiquated worldview. Rather, it is because they are free from the constraints of ideology and inspired by such a noble vision of human destiny that they cannot collude with anything that undermines it.”
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