Caritas Corner: The Uncomfortable Challenge of Justice

By Andy Barton

What do we owe to the poor?

That question underlies much of our current political and social discourse. We ask it — perhaps subconsciously — when we encounter someone on a street corner asking for money, when we drive through struggling neighborhoods, or when we read about the human impact of government shutdowns or freezes on benefit payments. How we answer the question of what we owe our poor reveals something profound about our understanding of charity and justice.

In the Catholic tradition, the word justice has a specific and demanding definition. It is not simply the punishment of wrongdoers or the enforcement of law. It is the condition of right relationship between people and within society. Catholic Social Teaching articulates this through the principle of preferential option for the poor and the idea that the moral health of a society is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable members. It is a thread, woven through Scripture from the prophets of the Old Testament to the Beatitudes.

Importantly, Catholic teaching does not speak of justice as a naturally occurring state but rather the ideal for which members of society ought to strive.  The prophet Isaiah states this clearly: “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” (Is 1:17) This distinction matters enormously today and points to an important difference between justice and charity.

Giving a couple dollars to someone on a corner or donating cans of soup to a food bank are acts of charity. Acts of charity can be meaningful for those receiving them because they respond to immediate suffering, yet they do very little to alleviate that suffering in the long run.  These acts of charity do something for the giver as well. They help fulfill a sense of satisfaction at having done our part. They are transactions that allow us to move on to the next item in our lives.

Justice demands that we ask why the poor are suffering in the first place and then that we work to alleviate those causes.   This is an uneasy paradigm.  It opens our eyes to the possibility that the comforts we pursue for ourselves could be part of the structure that makes poverty persistent. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting a better home, better schools for our children and better neighborhoods; however, there is a danger that this becomes a pursuit of luxury that makes us indifferent to, or even dependent upon, the disadvantage of others.

St. Thomas Aquinas wrote of justice as a habit and a virtue, implying that it does not come naturally. What comes naturally is the instinct to protect what is ours. Justice requires the harder, more deliberate act of asking what belongs to our neighbor, and whether we are holding it. It must be cultivated against the grain of our self-interest.
This is the invitation that justice extends to us both as Catholics and as citizens. It is comfortable to respond to poverty with pity. It is harder to respond with the kind of solidarity that requires us to examine the structures that perpetuate it. 

In his apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium,” Pope Francis writes: “I want a Church that is poor and for the poor . . . They have much to teach us. Not only do they share in the sensus fidei, but in their difficulties they know the suffering Christ. We need to let ourselves be evangelized by them.”

Our response to poverty must be more than generosity.  It must be just. Justice, by its theological nature, costs those who are prosperous something on behalf of those who are vulnerable. It means advocating for wages that allow families to live with dignity, for housing policies that do not price the working poor out of their communities, and for the kind of civic commitment to the common good that does not evaporate when it becomes personally or politically inconvenient.

Christ did not only heal the sick. He challenged the systems and society that left them sick in the first place. In Him, charity and justice are mutually inclusive. They are critical halves of the same act of love, offered both freely and at a price.  We owe the poor care enough to let that love cost us something.