A Sensible Life

Tag: justice

  • “Social Justice” Ideology Opposed to Moral Living

    “Social Justice” Ideology Opposed to Moral Living

    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.”

  • Hope

    Hope

    I have been reflecting upon the Christian theological virtue of Hope in the last couple of weeks. This reflection has led me to a greater level of peace than I have been experiencing for the last months – perhaps the last few years…

    Christmas time is a great time to focus on the virtue of hope but the fact that I began reflecting on this virtue came more by chance than from a deliberate or thoughtful act of my will during this time (though it is likely, however, that God’s will had something to do with it). Flying back from a business trip in New York, I decided to pick up where I had left off several months ago in a little book by Father Jacques Philippe entitled Interior Freedom. By way of a side note, I highly recommend this and several other short treatises by the good Father Philippe, readily available at “fine booksellers everywhere” (not necessarily the mass retailers…). I picked up where I had left off the last time I read the book – in the middle of a chapter on the interplay between the theological virtues. Upon reading and reflection, I found I had been neglecting the virtue of hope!

    After quoting St. John (1 John 3: 1-3), Father Philippe writes, “This astonishing statement is perfectly in line with the great prophetic vision of the Old Testament, where pure-hearted people are not so much those free of all faults and all wounds, as those who put all their hope in God and are certain his promises will be fulfilled.” So we can live an intense purity, a joyful lightness; even when we may feel burdened by our own shortcomings and, quite frankly, by some of the ugliness and sorrow we see in the world around us. We can still be light, you see, because God’s promise transcends this world. In fact, hope provides our sole means of maintaining joy (and we are called always to maintain our joy) in the face of the tragic acts of violence that result in the suffering most recently experienced in Newtown Connecticut but also on September 11, 2001, in the Oklahoma City bombing, in Columbine, in the too frequent acts of mass violence we have experienced in this country and around the world but also in those individual violences executed against the most innocent among us, the unborn.

    As I said earlier, Christmas time is a great time to focus on Hope but in reality every feast of the Church, every celebration of the birth, life, suffering, death, resurrection of Our Lord has at its core a message of hope. Every Christian celebration (of Our Lord or of his mother or of the saints whose lives reflected his goodness) serves to increase in us this divine hope, this unwavering trust in the goodness of God and in the goodness of his will, the goodness of what he wishes for each one of us, the goodness of what he desires for those who have died in the violence of human anger or in the violence of natural disaster, the goodness he can and does bring even out of evil (whether or not we can see or comprehend it), the goodness of our ultimate end with Him…

    Hope brings divine perspective to every event, act, word, thought of our lives. Hope purifies our every act, word, thought. Hope turns our focus from a preoccupation with self to a preoccupation with all that which is other than self, principally to the good envisioned by God for all souls (including our own).

    As with any virtue an excellent way to increase hope, to strengthen it, is to practice it. However, hope being a theological virtue, we must count on God’s gratuitous goodness to plant this gift in us. Let us pray for this gift for ourselves and for our brothers and sisters and let us practice it without ceasing! May this virtue burn brilliantly in us, may it increase our lightness to the point that we might fly with the angels, for G. K. Chesterton once wrote that “angels fly because they take themselves lightly.”

    I will work on taking myself lightly and I will work on taking world affairs lightly. That is not to say I will ignore the affairs of the world or the affairs of the public square. In my reflections on Hope, I found myself faced with the temptation to chuck the public square the direction of whose affairs I had found so disturbing in recent months. If Hope directs us to ultimate ends, I argued, why focus on the bothersome affairs of this world at all? The answer to that question, of course, is charity. Though we trust in the ultimate goodness God, we must not leave the working of good to God alone. Charity calls us to action. Lest hope lead us to rely solely on the efforts of God, charity leads us to active participation in God’s works, both temporal and supernatural. The Second Vatican Council reminds us of our role in participating with God in the perfection of that which he has placed in our care, according to the gifts He has given each of us; the Holy Spirit makes of us “free men , who are ready to put aside love of self and integrate earthly resources into human life, in order to reach out to that future day when mankind itself will become an offering accepted by God” (Gaudium et Spes, Chapter III).

    So, in addition to those efforts directed toward my family, friends and work, I will continue my efforts to bring goodness and truth into the public square and my efforts to live justice and to form others in authentic Catholic social teaching. A Sensible Life will rally on, stronger than before in the sure hope of God’s goodness.

  • Letter to Women: A Word Regarding the Real War on Women

    Letter to Women: A Word Regarding the Real War on Women

    In the 2012 presidential election cycle one of the parties (need I name names?) continues to accuse the other of waging a war on women. I recently came across an unbelievably insightful letter written by the superior of a community of Catholic religious sisters wherein the author, Sr. Anne Marie Walsh, SOLT, discusses the real war on women. The real war on women is not the one described by the Democratic Party:  the “war on women” in which the “right” of women to kill their babies is under attack and the “war on women” wherein the “antagonist” wants to withhold federal funding for contraceptives and sterilization.

    Sr. Anne Marie writes movingly of the gift that women are to our culture and she describes the real war on women:

    “There’s another country where women have been victimized by a powerful propaganda that has brought them to be ashamed of their bodies and the meaning of their bodies. Because of this propaganda, they have sterilized themselves in great numbers and had 50 million of their babies killed in the last 40 years.”

    This country is the United States of America, a country wherein a dangerously high number of citizens are coming to believe the lie “that women cannot have control of their destiny unless they can get rid of actually what makes them women.”

    “The current propaganda has been just as lethal to women and children in the US as anything that goes on in any country in Asia or Africa or Latin America. Any man (or woman) who encourages a woman to think that access to sterilization and abortion will make her equal to men, has rejected her womanhood, and therefore has rejected her as a real person.”

    Sr. Anne Marie’s letter is full of hope and optimism and serves as a call to women and men to take heart and work to rid our culture of the deceptions perpetrated against women so that “the feminine genius can then be unleashed for the building up of a true civilization of life and love.”

    Please read Sr. Ann Marie’s full letter here. I have most assuredly not adequately conveyed the importance and wisdom of her words.

  • Mitt Romney the Social Justice Candidate

    Mitt Romney the Social Justice Candidate

    A few days ago I published an article explaining why Catholics and others of good will have a moral obligation to vote for Mitt Romney. The crux of my argument centered around the non-negotiable moral issues that are in play in this election as they never have been before.

    I enjoyed the healthy give and take resulting from that last article.

    That article dealt with moral imperatives. Now I would like to write about an issue of prudential judgment. However, I believe the argument in favor of Romney in this case is just as clear, if not as imperative. If you care seriously about living authentic Catholic social teaching and social justice in the United States of America then you must vote for Mitt Romney.

    Romney is a distributist. That is, he believes in a distributed economy wherein the primary economic engine is small business – an economy of multitudes of independent businesses whose capital is provided by innumerable individuals and whose laborers are not separated from investors by multiple layers of bureaucracy. Business owners are close to their workers, close to their business partners and close to their customers. This creates an economy of relationship, an economy in which the providers of capital and the providers of labor work together and share equitably the rewards of the production that results from their collaboration. This is an economy whose participants understand that they best serve each other and the best serve their own interests by cooperating with each other. This is an economy living solidarity. This is the sort of economy that made America great and it is the sort of economy to which Mitt Romney wants to return.

    Let me bring to your attention several quotes from Mitt Romney of comments made during the presidential debate on Tuesday, October 16 (emphasis added):

    “Fifty-four percent of America’s workers work in businesses that are taxed as individuals. So when you bring those rates down, those small businesses are able to keep more money and hire more people.”

    And…

    “My five-point plan does it: energy independence for North America in five years; opening up more trade, particularly in Latin America, cracking down on China when they cheat; getting us to a balanced budget; fixing our training programs for our workers; and finally, championing small business. I want to help small businesses grow and thrive. I know how to make that happen. I spent my life in the private sector. I know why jobs come and why they go.”

    And in response to a request to point out how his positions differ from those of President Bush…

    “And then let’s take the last one, championing small business. Our party has been focused on big business too long. I came through small business. I understand how hard it is to start a small business. That’s why everything I’ll do is designed to help small businesses grow and add jobs. I want to keep their taxes down on small business. I want regulators to see their job as encouraging small enterprise, not crushing it.

    And the thing I find most troubling about “Obamacare” – well, it’s a long list, but one of the things I find most troubling is that when you go out and talk to small businesses and ask them what they think about it, they tell you it keeps them from hiring more people.

    My priority is jobs. I know how to make that happen. And President Bush had a very different path for a very different time. My path is designed in getting small businesses to grow and hire people.”

    Our current president has an abysmal record when it comes to the economy and small business. One of the reasons for this is his failure to understand and support small business. He believes government creates jobys. He is wrong and his policies have stymied growth in small business, have discouraged individuals from investing in small business and have set up road blocks to individuals who want to embark on their own small business ventures.

    By getting government out of the way, Romney will turn small business loose. This will lead to more jobs, less poverty, greater freedom and a renewed sense of responsibility among private citizens. Consequently we will see a flowering of authentic social justice, a social justice focused on bettering the condition of all rather than what we see as the focus of the current administration, a promotion of strife between social and economic classes policies directed a pulling some groups down in order to “level the playing field.” The fruits of authentic social justice are solidarity and communio. We certainly are not seeing these fruits now.

  • Gratuitousness

    Gratuitousness

    The post-enlightenment world in which we live tells us that man is essentially an individual animal; that he is on this earth to serve his own needs and desires and to act to ensure his survival and that of his progeny.  His relationship and interaction with others takes the form of a series of social contracts.  These social contracts impose certain duties upon him and give him certain rights.  However, he does not give freely, he does so with the hope (or rather, the expectation) that he will receive something in return.

    Christianity and the Catholic Church vehemently reject this notion of man in isolation self-interestedly seeking his own advantage and engaging with others only to the extent that (a) his forced to do so or (b) such engagement serves his purposes.  We are called to a radically different approach to our life in the world.  As Pope Benedict states in Caritas in Veritate, “the earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God’s love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world.”

    So we if we are to engage in this earthly city in a fully human way, in a manner that lifts us above the nature of other animals, we are to live gratuitously.  This principle of gratuitousness lies at the heart of all understanding of man’s relationship with man and hence must underlie all discussion of the manner in which we create and execute those institutions and ideas that give form to man’s interconnectedness with man:  families, communities, economic systems, systems of governance.

    What does it mean to live gratuitously?  Simply said, to live gratuitously is to give freely, according to the needs of others and according to our ability and responsibility to give.  This gratuitous living, then, requires a life of reflection; a life spent seeking to understand others, their needs, desires, hopes and fears and also seeking to understand ourselves our own capabilities and responsibilities.  Interestingly, as one seeks to understand and live this idea of gratuitous giving, one begins to see a corollary human trait, trust.  As we empty ourselves in the care of others we come to realize our dependence upon others for our needs.  So, in this way of living I am called both to give freely and to receive freely.  My relationship with my fellow man becomes one of mutual self-giving.  This life of relationship differs fundamentally from the enlightened notion expressed at the beginning of this piece, the notion of isolated individuals entering into social contracts.

    The exploration of how we should live this idea of gratuitousness serves as one of the main themes of A Sensible Life.  Our current economic and political realities are rife with examples of how we are not living gratuitously.  With a little digging we can find some examples of things we are doing well.