Peter McVerry SJ outlines the basic principles of social justice – upholding the dignity of every human person especially where the structures of society impinge in a way that the person’s dignity and rights can not be exercised.
John is a homeless young man in Dublin; Ubo is a father of four children in Nigeria who watches his family each day crying for food which he cannot provide. What have John and Ubo got in common?
They both know that their situation is unnecessary – John is living on the streets of the second wealthiest country in the world, while Ubo knows that the world is producing more than enough food to feed everyone. However, while John sees that resources are available for many needs, including evoting machines and SSIA holders, (which John considers less urgent than providing people with a place to live), he gets the message that he is just not important enough for resources to be made available so that he could get a place of his own.
Ubo also sees that resources are available for many needs, such as armaments and wars, but he, too, gets the message that the world does not consider him important enough for resources to be made available, which would allow food to be distributed to his region, so that he and his family can eat.
Denial of dignity
All injustice is a denial of the dignity of the person. It is communicating the message to the victims of injustice that they are just not important enough for their needs to be attended to. The fundamental principle in the Church’s social teaching is the dignity of each and every human being as a child, loved by God with an infinite and unconditional love.
All injustice is a denial of that dignity. The Church believes that it has the duty, and the responsibility, to affirm that dignity and to condemn those situations where that dignity is being denied. The Church’s social teaching seeks to apply the value of the dignity of each person, created in the image of God and revealed by Jesus in the Gospel, to the different situations which life in our world presents.
In 1891, Pope Leo XIII challenged the business world of his time because in their treatment of workers – low wages insufficient to live a decent life, using workers as cogs in an economic machine – they were in effect denying workers the dignity to which they were entitled as human beings. The workers were creating wealth for others but they remained themselves in dire poverty.
His encyclical, Rerum Novarum, was widely criticized both by the business world and by many of his own bishops, who insisted that the Church had no right to interfere in what was purely business affairs. However, Leo XIII persisted, insisting that where the dignity of human beings was under threat, or being denied, the Church had, not only a right, but also a responsibility to interfere, in order to affirm that dignity.
Inspiration
In the years since 1891, the dignity of the person has been the inspiration for the Church’s teaching on violence, armaments, nuclear weapons, the environment, poverty and a range of issues that have been addressed in numerous encyclicals and other documents of the Church.
In recent decades, the issue of the Church and politics has been debated at length. As with Leo’s encyclical, there are many including politicians – who insist that the Church should stay out of politics. While most people will accept that the Church should not align itself with any particular political party, nevertheless where political decisions or policies – or the absence of them deny people in society their dignity as children of God, then the Church again has the duty, and the responsibility, to criticize and to make demands.
This applies to authoritarian dictatorships, whose violent repression of political opponents, and of leaders in grassroot movements striving for change, violates the dignity of those opposed to them. It equally applies in those democracies which allocate the resources available to them in a way that overlooks the basic needs of those who are poor or marginalized in their societies.
While the Church does not propose any particular economic, social or political system, it must challenge each system that exists to ensure that the dignity of every person must be respected in all the decisions which are made. The rights of everyone, including economic, social, political and cultural rights, which derive from their membership of the human race, must be protected and reinforced.
Respect for freedom
One of the key consequences of the dignity of the person is the inalienable right to freedom which each person has. Freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom from oppression, freedom from poverty demand conditions of an economic, social, political and cultural kind which make possible their full exercise. The Church has the responsibility, not only of calling for each person’s freedom to be respected and guaranteed, but of criticizing those structures and policies which inhibit or deny that freedom.
Another consequence of the dignity of the person is equality. All have the same right to be treated equally. Poverty, scorn, rejection or marginalization, caused by the attitudes and structures of national societies or of our world society, deny the equality of those who are poor or rejected.
The elderly who are abandoned, children who are unwanted, ethnic, religious or other minorities who are discriminated against, social groups who are prevented by poverty or by law from participating in the societies in which they live, all have the Church as their defender. For the Church to fail to stand up for them, to defend their right to equal treatment, would be a denial of its responsibility and its following of Jesus.
Focus for the Church
There is no area of public life to which the Church has no right to go. There is no such thing as purely economic, purely social or purely political policies or structures. Because these shape the way in which we all live, have consequences for our lives as human beings, and because they conform to, or deny, the dignity of human beings, they are very much the focus of the Church’s reflection and action.
As the document from that very important Synod of Bishops in 1971 declares: ‘Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation’ (Justice in the World, 197, para 6).
This article first appeared in The Messenger (December 2006), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
