The Common Good Forum - December 15, 2010


No Apologies for Heeding God's Call of Social Justice

By Eric LeCompte,  Executive Director of Jubilee USA Network, a interfaith coalition of more than 75 Denominations, Catholic Institutions, Human Rights, Labor and Environmental organizations working for economic justice.


I was 18 and living and working at a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Rochester New York called St. Joseph's House of Hospitality. I had left my native Chicago with the intent of spending a year living the works of mercy. At the House we served lunch for about 150 people a day, housed a dozen homeless men and offered an AIDS hospice. These charitable works were vital for the people that we served. However, as the numbers of the hungry increased at our doors and I wrestled with the Gospels, I realized that addressing why so many were poor was a matter of justice. 

 

Living at St. Joe's was a good place to struggle with these questions; the house was part of the Catholic Worker movement that practiced the works of mercy and acted on the work of justice.

 

Justice is an action. Or at least, justice was an action for the Hebrew people. Justice is something to be actively sought after. It is even encoded into Hebrew law, "Justice, and only justice, you shall pursue..." (Deut 16:20). The prophets were even more insistent. Justice and righteousness walk hand in hand, and the Hebrew word, tsedeq, can refer to either. Jeremiah goes so far as to say that to do justice is to know the Lord (Jer 22:16). Micah 6:8 sums up the major themes of the 8th century prophets: Do justice (Amos), love kindness (Hosea), and walk humbly with your God (Isaiah).  All are actions.

 

We have lost the sense of justice as an activity. Instead the popularized version of justice is one of impartial decision making, often represented by balanced scales.  Justice brings to mind a court of law, not a way of life.

Political theory (and Catholic social teaching) speaks of three types of justice, commutative, distributive, and social. Commutative justice is concerned with fairness in transactions. Distributive justice is concerned with the final distribution of goods and services. Arguing that a contract is invalid because it was signed at gun point is an appeal to commutative justice principles, while arguing that it is unfair for the top one percent of people in the U.S. to control 42 percent of the wealth is an appeal to distributive justice. These two ideals of justice often are in tension with each other.  Proponents of distributive justice bemoan gross inequalities while proponents of commutative justice argue that acting to redistribute wealth would be a violation of commutative justice, that in most cases the wealth was fairly accumulated over a series of non-coercive transactions.

 

Social justice has been at the heart of a lot of recent debate, so it is worth looking at a clear definition from the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, "Social justice implies that persons have an obligation to be active and productive participants in the life of society and that society has a duty to enable them to participate in this way." The Bishops also refer to it as contributive justice, it is something that everyone is obligated to contribute to society.

 

The three types of justice are best understood as different angles from which to evaluate society. In a just society all three will be present.  The Bishops conclude, "Basic justice demands the establishment of minimum levels of participation in the life of the human community for all persons." A society that excludes or marginalizes people from partaking in the economic life of society is prima facie unjust.

 

This vision of justice is grounded in the Biblical theme of covenant. Covenant law is foundational for life together, "Far from being an arbitrary restriction on the life of the people, these codes made life in community possible." The Bishops continue, "Laws such as that for the Sabbath year when the land was left fallow (Ex 23:11; Lv 25:1-7) and for the year of release of debts (Dt 15:1-11) summoned people to respect the land as God's gift and reminded Israel that as a people freed by God from bondage they were to be concerned for the poor and oppressed in their midst. Every fiftieth year a jubilee was to be proclaimed as a year of 'liberty throughout the land' and property was to be restored to its original owners (Lv 25:8-17, cf. Is 61:1-2; Lk 4:18-19)."

 

These laws make life together possible by reintegrating people into society. It was beneficial not only for the poor who had become landless, but also for the rich who were becoming cut off from the rest of society (Isaiah 5:8). The justice of Jubilee is an active justice where individuals acknowledge their obligation to society, to the common good. It is a way of life that affirms right relationships both with God and with others.

 

Jubilee USA seeks to bring this idea of justice to the forefront of international economics. In championing international debt relief Jubilee seeks to do justice and open the doors for all people to participate meaningfully in the economic life of the world. God's justice is an ongoing process that we are to be actively engaged in.

 

Some media pundits berate our active pursuit of social justice.  What they don't understand is that social justice is God's practical call for dealing with the ills in our world. I will never apologize for working for social justice -- as a Christian its pursuit is a requirement.

Gender Equality 
By Susan Furey, Adjunct Professor at St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia and Cabrini College in Radnor, Pennsylvania.


Did you ever wonder who took the word "equal" out of equal rights?  Our national conversation generally isolates issues that matter most to women as "women's issues", when indeed women's issues are everyone's concern.  Political campaigns' targeted focus on reproductive rights as the main rallying point for women's votes misses the point.  It was Susan B. Anthony who said, "It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union."  She also makes the valid point, "It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine.... how much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex, to talk of male and female education and of male and female schools."  Early civil rights activists knew that education was the great equalizer and the key to advancement. This is precisely why one of the principal targets of desegregation was education. Today's civil rights issue is the equal right to education, no matter what your gender or what your zip code.


According to the organization Women Employed, whose mission is to improve the economic status of women and remove barriers to economic equity, education and training are key to women's economic advancement because it is a proven strategy for raising incomes. "Nearly 15 million women in the U.S. earn too little to cover basic living expenses for their families, despite working in full-time, year-round jobs.  A woman with a two-year associate's degree earns 28 percent more and a woman with a bachelor's degree earns 75 percent more than a woman with only a high school education." (womenemployed.org). As individuals, and as a nation, we have a moral responsibility to ensure that education can be the ladder out of poverty for women.


Also, critical to note, the United States trails behind the rest of the world with women elected to public office, ranking 84th in the number of women in our national legislature.  In a country where women comprise more than half of the U.S. workforce and half the population, it is obvious that we are here to stay in the public arena; not just out of protest but out of necessity.  As an example, U.S. women making 75 cents on the dollar in comparison to men in the same job, rightfully needs to change and balancing work/life realities is not just a woman's issue.  Nonetheless, this month, the Paycheck Fairness Act didn't make it through a cloture vote, so rededicating our efforts to gender equality is more important than ever. As masculinity scholar, Michael Kimmel asks "...the choice for men is how we will relate to this transformation; will the majority of us who are now somewhere between eager embrace and resigned acceptance see instead the opportunity for the 'enthusiastic embrace' of gender equality?"


The Center for American Progress, in partnership with Maria Shriver, introduced A Woman's Nation and despite its title, it's really about a future in which both men and women contribute equally. They are dedicated to "building a new landscape that works with women, where women and men are afforded the same opportunities and choices and realize their full potential."  As an example, using "work/life balance" as coded language for "working-mom stress" is not an accurate or balanced assessment.  As A Women's Nation points out, "Despite ample evidence that men are served by investing more time and energy outside the workplace and "coming out" as fathers while in it, there are very few men who are taking on this issue in a substantive, political way."


The current economic recession actually provides a great opportunity for human beings to realize that the different perspectives women and men bring to the table, to collectively dialogue and decide the directions our country -- and indeed the world -- are critical.   We have grown immune to the dismissive and sometimes disrespectful attitude toward women and the subsequent disservice to our country and its future.  We are at the tipping point for the economy, jobs, fair and balanced taxation, environment, health care, education, war, and most importantly gender equality, especially as it could positively affect everything else that has reached its current disastrous levels.  Nothing out of balance works well and now is the time to bring gender equality to a head; i.e., evolution with a push.


No matter what our challenges and problems, we can't solve them at the same level of thinking that created them. We need to start by really listening to one another, by creating dialogue that includes people in decision-making, where they belong; an understanding that includes people in conversations that affect them is essential to effective and efficient relationships and decision-making.  This approach engages, empowers, and enables citizens in deliberative dialogue to help shape civic discourse and public policy.  Why do this?  Never before in our national or global history has the need for civic dialogue been more prevalent. It is time for a new paradigm where we move beyond the "we vs. they" mentality. Just imagine a United States where we honestly aligned reality with the decades of platitudes about the need for diversity, inclusion, and equality.  We need to change the rules, roles, and relationships and we have to do it now!