What is ‘Justice for All’ in the Church?

by Michael Shackleton · September 22, 2015

The so-called social teaching of the Church confuses me because the Catechism of the Catholic Church is long-winded about it. What exactly does it mean? M Sauls

In the 19th century the Industrial Revolution enabled the wealthy classes of Europe to pour money into setting up factories and mechanisation. In order to make these profitable, they employed thousands of unskilled workers and paid them miserably for long hours of toil.

The result was that the accumulation of wealth and power was kept in the hands of the industrialists, while the workers were regarded as commodities, cogs in the wheels of industry, and not as human persons made in the image and likeness of God. Society became fragmented into two hostile camps: Capital and Labour.

Socialist and communistic ideologies attempted to unravel this tension, but as far as the Church was concerned, they manifested signs of atheism in their scorn for religious beliefs.

Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903) reacted against the trend, and to a large extent he can be said to have begun the Church’s social teaching of justice for all society’s members, the strong and the weak.

Among his many encyclicals on the relationship between individuals, families, states and the Church, he wrote Rerum novarum in 1891, in which he set out broad principles for the exercise of the rights and obligations of employers, workers and the state. He stressed the state’s duty to protect the worker from exploitation.

In 1931 Pope Pius XI went further when he issued his encyclical Quadragesimo anno. The state’s responsibility, he said, is the promotion of the common good of all society. His words contributed to a widespread awareness of the need for social reform and the injustice of abusing the rights of workers.

In 1937 he wrote Divini redemptoris, reaffirming that each member of society must interact with the others in a reciprocal way for the greatest possible common good.

The teaching is rooted in the dignity of the human person who may not be treated as a thing or as a means to satisfy the greed of the marketplace. It upholds the nobility of work because labour is a gift from God which is directed towards eternal life. It must be justly rewarded with appropriate wages.

In sum, the Church’s social teaching is that the right to human life and dignity is sacred, the poor and vulnerable may not be manipulated to the advantage of the powerful, the dignity of the worker must be acknowledged by employers, we are all one human family with equal rights and we must care for God’s creation.