Oct 22 Tue
*Should a Catholic have an ethic of conflict or an ethic of justice?*
There are specifically Catholic ways of thinking – and acting – in the public realm that are always relevant, and important to be a responsible citizen. But it’s even more urgent – and perennially so – that we go to the deeper sources of the common good, solidarity, subsidiarity, the human person, and much more that our times desperately need.
In ‘Ethics Primer,’ St John Paul II brought Catholic ethics to bear on moral questions under debate in his day. He explained the Catholic worldview over and against the ideological presuppositions about human persons that Marxism was trying to impose on Poland. Those were not just policies: they were a worldview that a “proper citizen” should self-evidently hold.
What Wojtyła did in the ‘Ethics Primer’ remains relevant today because we again are confronted by social movements that push not just policies but comprehensive, ideological Weltanschauungen for the “proper” citizen in a “democratic” society. There, he answers questions critical to tackling today’s controversies from Catholic premises.
One such area is “class conflict,” the soul of Marxist ethics, the engine that moved its history towards its self-proclaimed inevitability. A version of it is being pedaled, one that infers that the wealthy must have somehow gained their money unethically and, therefore, should be forced to pay their “fair share” for the “common good.”
Wojtyła rightly notes that you can have an ethic of conflict or an ethic of justice. Against the Marxist default to conflict, he insists that Christians must build social ethics on justice, which can involve conflict with entrenched and self-protecting special interests.
But first, we must see the other as truly a neighbor. “Who is my neighbor?” is a basic ethical question whose answer does not include income tests. Is the other seen truly as a neighbor in a common social enterprise or really as a shirker who has to be held to account? And how do we verify that our leaders’ perspective is honestly one of seeking justice and not simply stoking envy while paying for the goodies they want to hand out?
Second, is my perspective of “fairness” driven by a right moral order? As Wojtyła notes, material goods diminish by division: “They cannot in any measure be simultaneously possessed and used by a great number of people, or by many societies or groups.”
That’s not true of spiritual goods. They, paradoxically, increase by sharing. Six people don’t get as much pizza as four, but six people sharing love are richer than four. Without diminishing the importance of the material – we are physico-spiritual beings – the spiritual has primacy. Do we ever hear politicians talking about shared spiritual goods in the community?
Catholic justice demands a recognition that, socially, “we are all in this together” not just as individuals randomly stuck together but as a natural political community. That should at least temper the heat with which class conflict is played upon in political discourse. Justice is necessary too, but does not replace love of neighbor.
Pic: Black Madonna of Częstochowa. Excerpts from John M. Grondelski