Monday, October 06, 2008

Try to understand...

"Social Justice."

What does that mean to you? If you speak of what Jesus asks of us, you speak well. He asks us to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, and take the homeless into our homes. He does not ask us to transfer that task to the community, but rather to DO IT. these are the tasks of charity, which you and I will be judged on. The man who has taken me into his home and provided me with a place to stay, receives my prayers on his behalf; this is the realm of charity, it is social in that it involves interaction between people; it is just in that the Lord Jesus commanded us to "love one another."

As we move up the level of social entity, things can be done in Justice which the previous level was incapable of doing, and as Leo XIII through JPII wrote in their Social Justice encyclicals, only those things which cannot be done at the lower level should be done at the higher level. This we intuit when we acknowledge that law enforcement is not the domain of the private individual, but the state. To reiterate, Jesus never asked that the state perform the tasks of charity He set before us, He asked us to do so.

I cannot imagine you would support a politician who supported a host of popular social programs, but also strongly advocated that children should be allowed to euthanize their retired parents who were an inconvenience or in danger of spending all their retirement and leaving nothing to their children, but being a burden instead. What a horrible thought! Yet the position many advocate is morally equivalent. I don't expect you to accept that or even understand it, so I'll end with the definition of abortion - "Abortion is the willful termination of a human life in the earliest stages of development." Put aside all the arguments and chew on that till it sinks in what it is that you find so unimportant.

1 comment:

  1. By the way, as a side note, I think authentic "social justice" also rules out the legitimacy of merely (i.e., without more) "raising awareness."

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