Changing Our World: Economic Justice
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- Created on Monday, 21 November 2011 17:34
Guest post by Dr. Bernard Evans, professor at St John's University and former member of JRLC's Executive Board. Cross-posted courtesy of the St Cloud Visitor. You can find the original post here.
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Selfishness, collective greed, massive hoarding of goods! Injustices that lead to violence! Sounds like the refrain of Wall Street occupiers? Perhaps, but these statements are coming from the Vatican.
A recent document from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace addresses many of the economic issues that fuel the spread of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the United States and abroad. Protesters cry out against the greed and selfishness exhibited by many U.S. economic institutions like banks and oil companies. They decry the growing disparity between the very rich and everyone else in this society where the top 1 % control nearly 40 % of the wealth. They call for a return to representative democracy where elected officials respond to ordinary citizens rather than to the rich and powerful whose campaign contributions and high paid lobbyists determine what pieces of legislation become law.
The Pontifical Council’s visionary and challenging statement addresses many of these concerns in the context of the global economic crisis. One of its most interesting – and likely controversial – assertions is the need for government to exercise a greater role in regulating and guiding economies. It encourages the establishment of a world political authority, “a supranational Authority,” invested with sufficient power and resources to regulate the global economy in a way that serves the universal common good.
This Catholic document does not refer to the rich as ‘job creators.’ Nor does it anywhere suggest that people protesting economic injustices are promoting class warfare. What it does address is the morally unacceptable disparity that continues to grow between the very wealthy and everyone else. It also warns that this expanding economic divide is a cause of impending tension and conflict. “Today the modern means of communication make these great economic, social and cultural inequalities obvious to everyone, rich and poor alike, giving rise to tensions and to massive migratory movements.” This warning has been issued repeatedly in Catholic social teaching.
The 1971 World Synod of Bishops’ document, Justice in the World spoke of a new awareness among people throughout the world – an awareness that “shakes them out of any fatalistic resignation and which spurs them on to liberate themselves and to be responsible for their own destiny. Movements among men are seen which express hope in a better world and a will to change whatever has become intolerable.” (4) These social documents of the Catholic Church observe with approval the passionate desires of people everywhere to change economic and political structures that no longer serve the majority of citizens.
This is not a call for conflict, tension and violence among people. Rather, it is a summons to change the economic and political conditions and structures that hold people in economic poverty or political bondage. And, therein is a summons for all of us: to strive to bring about social structures that serve the needs of everyone, not just those at the top.
This is partly what drives the Occupiers to continue their campaign, and it is something around which our Church would do well to educate and organize. The message from the Vatican is here – to see in this economic crisis “an opportunity for discernment, in which to shape a new vision for the future.”
Pope John Paul II once wrote that we can no longer tolerate “a world in which there live side by side the immensely rich and the miserably poor” (1998 World Day of Peace). Though we may not be among the “miserably poor”, many local individuals and families struggle with financial tensions and economic hardships. These are among the greatest threats to our basic institutions, like marriage and family life, and we in the Church should not sit idle. A good preparation for action would be to read this new Vatican document (www.zenit.org/article-33718?l=english) in conjunction with Bishop Kinney’s pastoral letter: As I Have Done for You . . . So you Also Should Do.