Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is
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It was my immense privilege and joy to find in Michael Novak a new neighbor when my family moved to Ave Maria, Florida, where a new university was springing up as a center of Catholic learning and culture. I conceived the project of gathering the various pieces he had written on social justice over the years, some chapters in books on Catholic social thought and democratic capitalism, and some occasional articles or pieces for invited lectures or speeches at award dinners. I urged him to pull this work together into a full and current statement of his argument addressed to a wider audience interested in social justice than might have discovered these disparate pieces produced over four decades.
He agreed, and as we worked together over the next two years, it became apparent that these pieces could not simply be collected with some light editing into a book of essays. There was too much overlap—the story of Novak’s family history as Slovak serfs and the new economic, political, and cultural freedoms they encountered in the New World, although compelling, could be told only once in the projected book.
More importantly, there was a need to expand the existing work into a comprehensive vision that situates social justice in a context of Catholic teaching, especially its social teaching as a whole, and also in the context of democratic capitalism and the American experience. This last point was especially important to understanding the profound contributions to Catholic social doctrine of Pius XI and John Paul II, who lived much of their lives and most of their reigns under the shadow of European fascism and communism. Catholic social teaching prior to John Paul II tended to be Eurocentric, ignoring or misunderstanding the American experience of economic, political, and cultural freedom, even in official documents. The American experiment was the first to lift a large majority of its poor (largely immigrants) out of poverty within a generation, and to keep on doing so. The United States was, as it were, the laboratory for how undeveloped peoples break through the chains of centuries of poverty. It was the first developing nation.
A WORD IS NECESSARY about the nature of Catholic social teaching itself, which is subject to two key distortions. The first is the problem Novak identified in a different but related context: namely, the tendency among the opponents of reform in the Second Vatican Council toward what he called “nonhistorical orthodoxy.” This tendency neglects history and contingency, as if Catholic social teaching constitutes a single and unchanging body of doctrine, in no need of development or adaptation to new circumstances.
This is not the way the popes themselves have read and interpreted the Church’s social teaching. Leo XIII initiated the series of papal social encyclicals by both affirming permanent principles and providing an analysis “of the new things” (Rerum Novarum) of his day. In commemorating Leo’s encyclical forty years after its publication, Pius XI, in Quadragesimo Anno (1931), both reaffirmed core principles of Catholic social teaching and offered his analysis of how conditions had changed. He reiterated the evil of socialism in all its forms, but now in the context of actual experience of Communism in Russia and the rise of National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy.
Commemorating the centennial of Rerum Novarum in 1991, John Paul II faced an even larger task of interpreting the signs of the times in light of the large historical changes wrought by the hypertrophy of the state under Nazism and Communism and the collapse of both. He had lived his entire adult life under the shadow of National Socialism or Communism, and he now faced the task of considering the alternatives, a question often asked of him by other survivors or former admirers of the Communist system. Answering them required a careful distinction between what is a permanent part of the Magisterium, the principles of Catholic social teaching that all popes have upheld, and what constitutes the fruits of a particular pope’s pastoral responsibility in his own time and place.
In his great encyclical Centesimus Annus (1991), John Paul II proposes a rereading of Rerum Novarum—a looking back, a looking around, and a looking forward. He reiterates those principles enunciated by Leo XIII which belong to the Church’s doctrinal patrimony, but he distinguishes his own analysis of recent events “in order to discern the new requirements of evangelization,” without passing definitive judgments, since doing so does not fall within his authority.
Insisting on this distinction between principles and their application in a specific historical context, John Paul follows the Council Fathers of Vatican II, who had emphasized the responsibility of the informed laity. The popes and the Church have no specific expertise in matters of economic or social policy but call on lay members who do to contribute to the discussion.
Treating Catholic social teaching as a “nonhistorical orthodoxy,” a body of doctrine independent of time and place, not subject to doctrinal development or rereading in the light of the “new things” of the time, can lead to a peculiar kind of clericalist rigidity. In place of serious and open discussion in light of core principles, too often it shuts down discussion, dismissing opponents as ignorant of the texts or heretical, and resorts to “proof-texting” by citing quotations from the papal documents out of context. Catholic scholar and blogger Andrew M. Haines offers an implicit rebuke of this tendency:
Simply put, the Church’s social teaching is valuable because it offers examples of how to think through the types of problems associated with making good social decisions. It is not valuable because it provides all the answers to every particular social question ever raised. Nor is it valuable because it instructs on the inviolable dignity of all human life. (Once again, that’s another kind of doctrine.) Instead, I venture, Catholic social teaching is a sort of praxis rather than simply a set of theories—a very public praxis, conducted by those whose teaching authority is well established. Certainly it is not a set of absolute propositions that hold true always and everywhere. This is the case even for strongly worded and oft-repeated themes, since the significance of terms—especially politico-economic ones—is wont to shift almost overnight.9
Novak and I approach Catholic social teaching and the light it casts on social justice in this same spirit. It is always a work in progress, not one in which basic principles are up for grabs or that helps score points in partisan battles of the day. Instead it challenges us to think through the problems we face and how this rich body of teaching—based on firm Christian principles and developed over millennia in light of the new things that have come and gone—may guide us in responding to the urgent social needs of our time.
The second, related distortion that bedevils much discussion of Catholic social teaching is the tendency to use it in a partisan way to support specific policies or programs that are under debate at a given moment. One constant of Christian teaching from the time of Christ on earth to the present is concern for the poor. All those who write on Catholic social teaching give this concern a central place. But the principle does not warrant a moral mandate to support any particular policy or party line on how best to help the poor.
Some writers on social justice, especially on the left, are particularly prone to this error. If the issue of the day is, say, raising the minimum wage or rejecting proposed cuts in Food Stamps (neither of which existed until the last century and neither of which is common even in the most generous welfare states today), it is not enough to express concern for the poor and then draw a direct line to the policy you favor. It is necessary to show that the favored policy actually helps the poor—as opposed to increasing unemployment, or undermining incentives to work of those with low incomes, or easing consciences while immorally burdening future generations with a mountain of debt. On all these and many other areas of policy debate related to social justice, faithful Catholics can and do disagree.
SINCE POLITICAL CATEGORIES often take on different and changing meanings in the United States, Michael Novak is sometimes mistaken for a libertarian or economic liberal (in the nineteenth-century, laissez-faire sense), or individualist (where the contrast is with collectivist or statist liberals). Together, we think it is worth clarifying our stance on
these issues, at the outset.
Social justice, as we define it, represents a decisive rejection of individualism and liberalism. The social encyclicals denounce the ideology of the atomistic, unencumbered, autonomous self, the freely choosing individual detached from culture, family, church, and community. That liberal or individualist view of the self and its expression in economic and social life rests on a relatively recent anthropology of the person that opposes centuries of classical and Catholic understanding from Aristotle to Aquinas. In this older tradition, accepted by all the popes, is a view of the person as irreducibly social, man as a political or social animal, reciprocally indebted from before birth and at every stage of life, even when some humans pridefully imagine they are nakedly independent. Indeed, our flourishing as humans depends on our developing certain social virtues and recognizing our dependence on and duty to others in our continued vulnerability.
Catholic social teaching and any understanding of social justice compatible with it reject the individualism in economics as well as in personal and sexual life that, say, Ayn Rand embraced. It is telling that John Paul II cited in both his Theology of the Body and Centesimus Annus that crucial passage from Vatican II’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, in which the Council Fathers affirm that God created man for his own good and that he “cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself.”10 Mutual gifting plays an indispensable social role in human life.
There are Catholic writers of the left and right who cite such considerations as evidence that the Church, and Catholic social teaching in particular, is unalterably and consistently opposed to capitalism. But the Church is committed to the defense of private property, as well as to the fundamental duty of Catholics as individuals and as a body to help the poor. Moreover, it is a significant fact that, beset as it is with cronyism and corruption, capitalism is the greatest tool of social advance and economic development ever known. In the last few decades alone, it has lifted hundreds of millions out of dire poverty.11
In John Paul II’s hands, this immense benefit to humanity is not simply a utilitarian or materialistic matter. The social dislocations and harsh conditions for workers and families that accompanied industrial development were a central concern of Leo XIII and subsequent Catholic social teaching. These social failures needed to be criticized in strong terms; they were never seen as an acceptable trade-off for economic growth.
Moreover, like the other popes, John Paul II rejects capitalism wherever the liberty and full development of the human person is impeded or injured:
If by “capitalism” is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative.12
Exploring these issues here, we distinguish capitalism as an economic system from the ideology that attached to it from its beginnings—what Patrick Deneen, for example, calls the “radical individualistic presuppositions of capitalism.”13 This individualist-liberal ideology, to the extent it finds practical expression in selfish behavior, ignores the needs of others and acts as if the individual lived, or could live, in splendid isolation from family and community, law and custom, tradition and culture. But this ideology is, we suggest, incompatible not only with human flourishing but also with a flourishing capitalist economy. Capitalism as an economic system cannot thrive when it is unbridled, unfettered, uncircumscribed by a strong juridical framework that is at its core ethical and religious. As an economic system, capitalism or the inventive economy requires and builds up the social virtues, and languishes in their absence. It presupposes in practice the moral norms, networks, institutions, and relationships that Robert Putnam defined as social capital.14 It requires freedom and order in the political and cultural spheres, not just the economic. It depends on trust, reciprocity, and the rule of law.15 In practice, the institutions of capitalism are social through and through—not individualistic.
Our book, then, is not a defense of unfettered capitalism or individualism against statism or collectivism in its various forms. Patrick Burke, working from a strong libertarian perspective, has written a thorough-going critique of the term social justice as commonly used.16 Like us, he sees social justice, rightly understood, as a personal virtue. But unlike us, he places blame for the term’s socialistic misuse squarely on the popes from Pius XI on. In the name of justice, Burke’s book makes a decisive break with Catholic social teaching, whereas ours is consistent with it. In common with the Catholic tradition that emphasizes the mediating structures or voluntary associations that comprise the “rich social life” of the associations,17 we reject any interpretive framework that understands political or policy choices or tendencies solely in terms of individualism or collectivism. The autonomous, unencumbered individual and the all-encompassing state are not mutually exclusive alternatives, but reinforce each other, to the detriment of the common good of all.
The first and most substantial part of this book, by Michael Novak, examines these issues in three sections. The first deals with definitions and contexts, reviewing the range of uses of the concept of social justice and its place within the larger context of Catholic social teaching. The second examines the contributions of five popes with regard to social justice: Leo XIII, Pius XI, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis. The third section of Novak’s part addresses both the special function of the theologian as social scout and explorer of new social terrain, and also some challenges to social justice, such as the role of sin in an adequate understanding of social justice.
We judged that if social justice is better understood as a virtue than a state of affairs, then it is necessary to show what that virtue looks like in practice and how seeing social justice this way casts light on how we should think about helping others. This is the subject of Part Two of the book. I had the task, as a lifelong social-work educator, of developing this aspect of the argument, and in my chapters I reflect on the following themes.
Conscience and the rights of conscience, held in the highest regard by the American founders, progressives, and people of faith, have come under increasing attack by today’s liberal elites. Those, including social workers, who once championed conscience and conscience rights as a defense against the overweening state, have now abandoned not only the protection of conscience but also any coherent understanding of the concept.
Marriage also needs consideration as an issue of social justice. Why? Because its disintegration and redefinition (above all among the poorest parts of the population but increasingly among the middle class, too) are linked to almost every social problem that social workers are called to address. Neither individuals nor the state can make marriage as attainable to many as it once was.
Another practical consideration stems from the fact that social justice is officially a core value of social work. But social work has become tied to the state, in funding and the strings attached to it and in the legal mandates it follows in areas like child welfare. How does the coercive power of the state that lies behind child protection square with the helping and empowering self-image of the profession? What does it mean to practice the virtue of social justice in this setting?
Finally, I dwell on some issues that arise from the fact that social work evolved out of attempts in the nineteenth century to organize charity, to make it more responsive to the needs of the individuals and families it served. In spite of these origins, the profession has sought to distance itself from its own history ever since. What is the relation of social justice to charity? Notwithstanding the centrality of charity as a theological virtue (caritas) and as the daily practice of helping the poor, it remains in both senses something of an embarrassment for professional social work. Unlike “justice,” charity appeals neither to social work’s professional practices (treatment, psychotherapy) nor
to its activist tendencies.
How then are we to understand the relation of charity to justice, and to social justice in particular? The last two chapters of Part Two try to disentangle the two senses of charity, and the relation of social justice to charity. Like all my chapters, they seek to address, however indirectly, the fundamental question at the heart of social work and all professional helping: What is the proper relation of formal to informal helping (or care and control), of the bureaucratic-professional state to the traditional ways long preceding the state, through which communities and families have addressed and resolved problems and conflicts? How do empowering and coercive aspects—common to all care and control, including the most informal parenting—relate to each other? How then do we understand social justice as the virtue of that large social space between individual and state, the flourishing of which is vital to the health of both?
Michael Novak and I have in mind as readers intelligent inquirers who are thoughtful citizens, often practitioners and not just scholars. Most will have some acquaintance with conventional uses of the concept of social justice, since the term has become ubiquitous in the political discussion of social and economic issues. We discuss these uses briefly, but hope to cast a brighter light on neglected aspects of these questions. The concept and the virtue of social justice have indispensable work to do.