It seems like every time someone writes a blog or article about Pope Francis, it is all about how he is stepping on toes. Take this piece from Houston Catholic Worker. It covers quite a bit of ground, mainly in the social justice arena, ranging from war to economics to social inclusion. These are areas that Pope Francis is very strongly, emphatically, Franciscan about (despite being Jesuit.) I have never read the George Weigl book that the article compares Pope Francis to, but I am more interested in the Pope’s positions on these topics.
Social justice has been looming larger and larger on my radar as I get older. Whereas in my teen years my faith was mostly about understanding theology and metaphysics, in my early twenties it was about developing habits of virtue, and in my mid twenties it shifted to building a relationship with God, each successive stage has built upon the one before it.
My current burgeoning interest in social justice issues, I think, flows naturally from the desire for relationship with God. I want to love Him, and therefore I want to love other people that He loves. Just like one of my favorite things to do is throw a pizza party for friends and introduce people I love to other people I love, in the same way, I want to love the people that God loves.
I rather think this is more or less the foundation of Papa Francisco’s more “liberal” stance on these issues. He says, “The worship of the golden calf of old (cf. Ex 32:15-34) has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly humane goal. The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. We have begun a throw away culture.”
This is a natural extension of the notion that each and every human being is uniquely, irreplaceably, and unrepeatably a product of an eternal thought of the Triune Godhead. How could such a creature be used as a means to any end? How could that be a mere resource of production?
In speaking of war he says, “War is the suicide of humanity, because it kills the heart, it kills precisely that which is the message of the Lord: it kills love! Because war comes from hatred, from envy, from desire for power, and – we’ve seen it many times – it comes from that hunger for more power. So many times we’ve seen ‘the great ones of the earth want to solve’ local problems, economic problems, economic crises ‘with a war.’” “Why? Because, for them, money is more important than people! And war is just that: it is an act of faith in money, in idols, in idols of hatred, in the idol that leads to killing one’s brother, which leads to killing love.”
Again, the notion that the human person is willed by God for its own sake, inevitably leads to the conclusion that even one person, even a very small person, is more important than all the money, all the oil, all the land and all the power.
I do not think that this means that war is absolutely out in all circumstances. If I did I would quit my job tomorrow. However, having been on the inside of the lower end of pawns in that whole process for more than a decade, I have to agree that war as prosecuted by modern nations misses any semblance, other than accidental, of its true purpose by quite a margin. I see the true purpose of warfare, warriors, the use of force, as a short term preventative, to intervene in a bad situation to keep it from getting any worse, always in service to true peace. That means that the purpose of legitimate warfare is to stop violence long enough to create space for reconciliation, which requires the preservation of life and dignity for all individuals.
The more I think about it, the more I see social justice as arising from a personalistic ethic. Without the profound respect and love of Pope Francis for the individual person, especially the vulnerable and marginalized, those who need it and cannot repay it, all social and economic structures must inevitably devolve into impersonal bureaucracies which exist primarily in order to perpetuate their own existence.
Social justice, far from being an issue best left to lay people, is an intrinsic part of the life and worship of the individual, and therefore is definitely within the realm of moral guidance the clergy is responsible for. I love Papa Francisco and his ferocious, cheerful insistence on the truth and the gospel of Jesus in these much neglected areas. I trust the Holy Spirit knew what he was doing when He guided the College of Cardinals to choose him.
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