Introductory Talk

(Following an introduction by Father Joseph Lynch, S.M.)

Every once in a while I get impressed with the way our sins catch up with us. So now we’ll make a few mistakes together! The subject that we are going to talk about today is on the frontiers of thought, so we can afford to make a few mistakes. We want to think about the subject together, rather than have me simply tell you what the subject is. In the letter of convocation that we had, there were a certain number of points outlined and today we want to talk about the notion of the social virtues, the history of the social virtues, the nature and significance of the social virtues, and social charity and the other social virtues in the practical order. We’ll do that in the two discussion periods.

Introduction to the Social Virtues

The whole series, as you know, is on the subject of social charity. Now it’s rather difficult to make a three-day series out of social charity because the literature on social charity is closer to three words than three days. The first example I know of the use of social charity is in the encyclical of Pius XI, “On Restructuring Social Order,” the one we know by the name Quadragesimo Anno (1931).

In that Encyclical Pius XI mentions the word “social charity” some eight or ten times. But all he says about it, really, is that it is the soul of social justice. So there’s the literature on social charity — that it’s the soul of social justice. Later, in another encyclical, “Atheistic Communism,”[1] without using the word “social charity,” but evidently speaking about it, he gave a clue to his thought.

He said that man in society can imitate the divine perfection in ways that would not be possible for him were he to live alone.[2] Now that’s a rather interesting thought. We know that the object of charity is always either God or the image of God. There is no other thing that can be the object of charity. God or the image of God. And it is as the image of God that we become an object of charity.[3]

But if what Pius XI said there is true, that man in society imitates the divine perfection in ways that would not be possible to him were he to live alone, he means that you can see society as an image of God in an altogether exclusive way, a way that does not show up anywhere else in creation. And if it’s true that society is an image of God which we do not find elsewhere, then that society is worthy of love, because wherever the image of God is, in that technical sense in which we use that phrase — possession of intellect and will — personality — then society could be an object of charity.

So Pius XI lifted the corner, if you want, on this thought. He was busy explaining social justice and only mentioned social charity because it is the soul of social justice. Without it, the role of social justice would not only be unproductive, it would be dangerous, as we are going to see later on in the series.

Now let’s spend a little time trying to see what these new virtues that Pius XI mentioned, social charity and social justice, really are.

There are a great many people who think that they are just words, just like the words, for instance, “social problem.” You can’t give a definition to “social problem.” It’s kind of a blanket which would cover any number of things, but there is no question of giving a definition of it. Unfortunately, a great many people thought when Pius XI used those words, “Social justice and social charity” he was talking in those same ambiguous ways.

The Development of “Social Justice”

There was a use of social justice that was fairly close to that. The word is not a new one. The word you can find going back to 1850. Its meaning as a general rule was limited to what we call nowadays, social legislation, welfare legislation. That was social justice. No idea of a scientific concept at all — simply a category, a class of legislation and of problems.

Now, when Pius XI in his encyclical “On Restructuring Social Order” used the word “social justice” and “social charity” he meant to be scientific. He was giving a real definition, so to say, real in technical name, to a virtue he wanted to discuss and which he wanted to expand. Now we have to see what social justice is before we can even think of seeing what social charity is, because it is our only key.

As I told you, the literature on social charity is what I have given you so far. So far as I know, no one has really developed the idea since. But in the doctrine of Pius XI on social justice we can see what he meant by social charity and that’s what I‘ll be doing in this series.

Let’s take social justice first then. The idea, the scientific idea, the concept of a special virtue which would have to do with the social order is as old as organized human thought. It goes back to Aristotle, but in a very primitive sort of way. Aristotle, in the fifth book of his Ethics, begins with a discussion of what he calls legal justice — not social justice, but legal justice.[4] He explains that legal justice consists of all virtues; not in themselves, but towards another. And you can see how interested he was in the subject when he goes on to say that it’s not this virtue in us that we are going to talk about. He brought it up only in order to show that he was going to talk about something else.

Now that’s where it stayed for 1,500 years. There was a paragraph then on legal justice in philosophy, in morality and the most anybody did was to copy that paragraph for 1,500 years, even a little more.

The first break in a long history of neglect of this virtue came with St. Thomas Aquinas in about 1220, the 13^th century. In his commentary on Aristotle, while pretending to limit himself to the text of Aristotle, he actually went beyond it. He said that this legal justice of Aristotle was not only all of virtue insofar as it refers to another, but also was a special virtue, and this is important. It was also a special virtue that had the common good for its direct object.[5]

Now that would make it important — the most important good that we have here on earth is our common good. And philosophers are evidently interested. But St. Thomas himself did not ask any more questions. He did not tell how social justice, which has the common good for its direct object, could be practiced. He did not tell what it looked like. He simply indicated what its end was. Its direct object was the common good and that made it very important. But he didn’t say anything else about it, and no one else did for another 700 years.[6]

We come to a real analysis of its content in that Encyclical which I told you about, in that Encyclical which is called “On Restructuring Social Order.” The act of social justice is the title of that encyclical, restructuring the social order. Pius XI’s idea was this (we are going to move very rapidly here, but I think you will be able to get enough with our subsequent discussions) the virtues of justice and charity are always complementary.[7]

Charity is always the soul of justice and the reason they are complementary is that they both deal with the same value but in different ways. Both always and everywhere deal with persons, with the image of God. There is no question of justice with regard to animals or with regard to inanimate things. Justice always presupposes persons.

Now what is really involved in these two virtues of charity and justice? We can separate the two very nicely by saying that charity is the obligation we have towards the value of the human personality in itself, as the image of God. Every human person, no matter what his color, no matter what his social class, no matter what his circumstances, by the very fact that he is a person, an image of God, is worthy of our respect and our love in that theoretical and abstract sense. We often miss the idea that love can be something purely intellectual; it doesn’t have to be something emotional the way it is among many.[8] So charity is the attitude, the duty, that we have towards human dignity, personal worth wherever it is found.

Now what is justice?[9] That comes because of the fact that this personal worth that we were talking about now has to be made. We are not like God. God is self-sufficient, from the beginning, from all eternity to eternity He is God. There is no such thing as development within the divine nature.[10] But in our particular image of God it’s quite different.[11] When we are born we have exactly nothing to offer. In the course of our life we are supposed to come to personal perfection.

So you see we have a journey to make, we have a task to perform. I remember when we were studying psychology at Catholic University, we had a very good professor, Dr. Allers,[12] and he used to, once in a while, give us some very good insights into things. In trying to explain this question of human development he chose as his example a little child, three or four years old, maybe even less, who would be playing in a room and would get its mother’s latest magazine and a pair of scissors. The child would go to work on the magazine with the scissors.

Now. when the mother comes in and finds that magazine scattered all over the floor with the pages not only out of sequence but unsalvageable — there is no way of putting them together again and she had a story in there which she was very interested in following — he says now when the mother comes in that room and finds that child if she spanks it, she’s not a good psychologist. That little child is trying to accomplish the task of giving new form to matter. It’s one of the great human tasks, and that child is trying to accomplish that human task.

The fact that it doesn’t have anything to offer, that’s an accident. But if it’s allowed to give a new form to matter on that level, before very long it will be giving a new form to matter on a higher level. The mother may have to sympathize with her, she may have to buy another magazine. But she has to sympathize with her, because the child is developing. A good example, we all thought, of how little we have to begin with when we start our human dignity.

Our human personality can be observed only by our mothers, not even by our fathers. A father looks at a baby, he says, “Oops, maybe it will be President.” But the mother sees a human person there from the beginning.

We, then, must make our personality. We must develop our image of God in us and that requires tools. We have to be able to give a new form to matter. We have to be able to make things. We have to be able to possess things. We have to have relationships which are satisfying. We have to have people who will accept us. Our mother always starts the process of course. But unless there are others added as we go along we don’t develop.

So all of those tools which we use to develop our sense of worth — possessions, accomplishments, good name, love of others for us — all of those things enable us to build up our personality and to become in actuality the image of God which we were only in potentiality when we started. Now just as charity is the attitude which we must have towards the human personality as such, as the image of God, so justice is the attitude we must have towards all these supports of human dignity — towards property, towards the friends of our family, etc.

If we rob another man of his friends by calumny, etc., we hurt him in justice. If we run off with his wife, we hurt him in justice. Everything that enables a human personality to raise himself to an understanding of himself, to an understanding of his worth, and thus to become more an image of God, all those things that are used in life, those are all the object of justice whereas the value of the human personality itself, this great value of intelligence and will which is the image of God Himself, that is always the object of charity. Now if it is true that justice is the attitude that we must have towards every support of human personality then we come, in the vision of Pius XI, to a very important point.

Society and Justice

Of all the things that we can think of which man builds his dignity on, his worth, his personality — of all the things that we can think of, society is first, most important, most extensive and most powerful in its influence. If we are members of good societies — a good family, a good neighborhood, a good city, a good nation, a good Church — if we have those societies around us and we develop in them, we have a far greater chance of becoming this image of God in actuality than we have if those societies are in any way suffering.[13]

Take a child who grows up in a family that is broken, where no one cares about anyone else or who grows up in a society that has been falsified as the Communists falsify society, against God, against liberty, etc. Immediately, once you have a society which is no longer built for human perfection, you have lost one of the greatest props, one of the greatest supports of this human personality which you must develop during life in order to become like to God.

So if society is this support of human dignity which is most necessary, which is most decisive in forming the human personality, there must be a virtue which keeps it in line, just as the virtue of individual justice keeps property in line. So there must be a virtue which keeps society in line with human perfection.[14] That justice is Pius XI’s social justice.

In the same way in which we owe to a man his property, his good name, his friends, his loved ones — and we cannot harm him in those things — so we owe to all of our neighbors a good society and we must not harm them by disorganizing that society. If it is disorganized, we must try to rebuild it. So that the virtue with which to bring society into line with the common good, that is, into line with human perfection, that virtue is social justice. We owe it to ourselves and to others to have that society in line with human perfection.

Pius XI gave an example. First, in the encyclical “On Restructuring Social Order” itself, he is speaking of a family wage. He says that in case the particular organization of an industry wouldn’t allow this family wage, which we had always said was owed by justice-in-exchange, commutative justice as we call it. If an industry were so badly organized that it was impossible to pay a family wage — there just wasn’t enough money in it — then, of course, the employer couldn’t pay it.

But Pius XI says that if in the present state of the industry it is impossible to pay a family wage then social justice demands that changes be introduced into the industry which prevent unjust competition and make the family wage possible.[15]

Now I had a lot of fun with that passage when it first came out asking people what social justice demanded. Almost everybody would answer that social justice demands a family wage. See if individual justice can’t give it, then social justice gives it.

Actually that wasn’t what Pope Pius has said at all. He said that if in this given organization of the industry it is impossible to pay a family wage, then social justice demands that changes be introduced. There’s the justice — the changing of that industry, the restructuring of that industry so that it could pay a family wage. That is the object of the social justice — change — as I said, the title of the encyclical itself “On Restructuring the Social Order.”[16]

There’s another famous example in the Encyclical “On Atheistic Communism,” the follow-up one. Pius XI says “It happens all too frequently under the salary system.” You notice he’s always talking about structure. “Under the salary system,” he’s not talking about this pay envelope or that pay envelope, but the salary system — “it happens all too often that under the salary system that an individual employer is helpless to insure justice.”[17] This is the same situation as the other one.

He goes on with a little more detail: “Unless with a view to its practice he organizes institutions with other employers to prevent unjust competition and to make the practice of justice possible.” If this is true, then the employers have the duty to found, to promote, and to encourage such organizations as a normal instrument for the practices of justice, a normal instrument of the practice of individual justice. They can’t pay a good wage until the industry is fully organized. And when the industry is fully organized they can’t pay a good wage but it’s what we call a material sin: “… it happens all too frequently under the salary system that the individual employer is helpless to ensure justice.”

Now if the individual employer is helpless what can he do? Nothing! He’s finished in the individual order. So in the individual order he pays an unjust wage; but it’s a materially unjust wage.[18] He wants to pay a just wage but can’t. So he pays what he can. It’s materially unjust — he won’t go to hell, but all the workers go to the poorhouse! In the individual order it’s finished. As St. Thomas explained, no one is held to that which is impossible.[19]

Now the impossibility was there in the individual order: under the system the individual is helpless. But the individual is never helpless in the social order. He can, with the other employers, organize institutions which change that industry and which make a just wage possible.

So there you have the picture of social justice. There is a justice which deals with pay envelopes, with individual friends of individuals, with the props that are the individual possession of each one who is supported, who is propped up in his personal dignity. But there are other relationships which are specifically social, which cannot be done by a single individual.[20]

The single individual in both of those examples of Pius XI was helpless. He became unhelpless, he became able to work, only when he got other people in, when he organized institutions with others, when he changed the industry with others. Once he organizes with others, and once he starts working on the structure itself, then he can remove injustices which for the individual are completely impossible to remove. So you see there is the picture.

Social Justice and the Common Good

Now this social justice is a much better, much more full conception than the legal justice of Aristotle. There’s something to Aristotle’s idea — that legal justice, general justice, is all the virtues insofar as they are referred to another.

Evidently the common good of our society is going to be made up of a certain number of things. There are the material resources of nature which are fixed — we can’t do much about them. Then there is our ability to transform those resources, there we can do a great deal, technology we call it. Then we have all the acts of all the virtues — the way Aristotle saw very clearly — because every act of every virtue will make our society better, will make our society more livable, more human and therefore more perfective.

And then finally — what nobody saw up till Pius XI — there is the fact that all of those actions can be organized together into institutions, and can be reorganized into better institutions when the institutions suffer.

So those four things — the resources of nature, the ability to transform them, the acts of all the virtues, and then our power to turn these acts into structure, into institutions — these are the components, if you want, of the common good.[21] And when Aristotle said that general justice consisted of all the acts of all the virtues,[22] you can see that he was saying in a certain way that it had to do with the common good.

But he didn’t say that and it was not developed. St. Thomas was the one who pointed out that the general justice that Aristotle talked about was the virtue that had the common good as direct object, in other words, to improve, safeguard the common good itself as the mold of our perfection. And he didn’t say how you could do it, except by repeating what Aristotle had said that every act of every virtue would help us along.[23]

It was only Pius XI in 1931 who completed the picture and showed that it was our ability to structure our actions into institutions, to make those institutions conform to human perfection. It was that which was the object of social justice, the act of social justice. Then the object, the necessity of that act would be to structure that society so that it conforms to human perfection so that it brings men along to become better images of God.

There you have a very brief résumé, a brief summary, as you can see, of well over 2,000 years of human thought. You can't insist too much on the fact that before 1931, you couldn't have talked about social justice in any way that made sense. You couldn’t have known what the terms were, although the problem was open from Aristotle on down. Aristotle had opened the problem up in the fourth century before Christ. And here, only in 1931, we begin to get a complete picture of the answer.

I insist on that because it is important to know that you are dealing with something that was not only important — if it’s common good it’s important — but also extremely difficult. Two hundred years and more the best minds of the Western world had that problem open and it was one of their biggest problems. But only in our day are we coming to a coherent theory of how we can meet that problem and with what tools. So that is the doctrine of social justice.

Now Social Charity …

Now we don’t want to talk about that except, as Aristotle did, to introduce our subject. Our subject is social charity. You have seen this, that society is important in the development of human perfection. Pius XI has a very good description of that importance. He said that the institutions of human life take so tight a grip on our development that they largely determine whether and to what extent individual perfection is even open to each one.[24] (It was actually his Secretary of State who wrote it, but we happen to know that Pius XI was instrumental even in the terminology.)

We can see how that would be true. What chance would a child have, for example, in an atheistic country, violent and totalitarian? In a total atheistic country, what chance would a child have of coming to a knowledge of God, if society limited its perfection, limited to what extent it could attain perfection?

The subject therefore is important. It was difficult. It took all those centuries to get it worked out. And it’s becoming more and more important with every passing year. We’ll see in one of the subsequent talks how everything at the present time is becoming bigger and bigger, more complex, more integrated, how the process of socialization, as John XXIII called it, is increasing with every passing day.

With every increase of socialization you can see immediately you have a greater need for this virtue which controls socialization, which structures for human perfection. And it we can’t structure it for human perfection, then the bigger it gets the more it oppresses us, the more it deprives us of the possibility of perfection.[25] So with every passing moment this doctrine of social justice is becoming more important. And by the same token, it becomes important that we should know what is the soul of this social justice and how we can handle it.

Now let’s pay attention to the few details we have. It’s very seldom that on an important subject you can have the complete literature available. But you have it in your hands. The complete literature on social charity is first in “On Restructuring Social Order.” It is the statement that social charity is the soul of social justice and besides that it is 10 mentions of the name itself, but always in combination with social justice, so that you don’t have any more information.

Pius XI mentions social charity with social justice because social charity is the soul. The next encyclical which explained that one[26] because there had been a great deal of very futile discussion about this social justice and social charity. In that one Pius XI lifted the veil a little on what he was thinking, when he pointed out that society is the image of God in a way that exists nowhere else. Therefore society as such, as an image of God, has to be an object of love.

Now let’s work with those two ideas. That’s the literature; where do we go from there? Perhaps we can take something that will come later on, but perhaps we can take it here just as an introduction.

When Karl Marx began analyzing the society of his time, the society of the early Industrial Revolution, he found tremendous injustices. Among other things, as you know, the factory owners found that children five or six years old could reach into the threads and tie them when they broke much better than the older people with hair on their hands. So these factory owners went out to hire children five or six years old as well as a great many women in the weaving industry, etc.

The factory owners fully expected — they never saw any reason to expect anything different — that those people would work as long as they could keep the factory open, in other words, as long as it was light. And they didn’t see any reason for paying them anything more than was necessary to get them back to work the next day.[27]

You’ve all read about the Industrial Revolution, about the tremendous injustices that grew up before men had a chance really to think their due processes through, and Marx saw that. He saw that this new capitalism, as it was then called, this economics which dealt with impersonal relationships like the market, value, capital, labor, wage, etc., that these impersonal relationships were killing not only men and women, but even innocent children, five or six years old. He had to try to correct that injustice.

We all know how he tried to correct it. He decided that the only thing you could do was to throw the whole thing out and start over, to destroy everything that was there by violent revolution and then to rebuild a society that would be just.[28]

Now let’s just look at his reaction for a moment and see what it seems to imply. The first implication was that you couldn’t do anything with what was there. If the only solution was by violence to destroy everything that was there and then to build something better, evidently what was there had no value whatsoever. It was something that could only be destroyed.

Now let’s think of the common good in the sense that we mentioned before. Evidently Marx wasn’t going to destroy the resources. What he would destroy would be man’s relationships with one another — the way in which institutions were made, the way in which capital was exercised, the way in which factories were organized, etc.[29]

Let’s look at the common good with its four elements. Recall that these consist of the wealth and resources of nature, our power to transform them, our relationships with one another in all ways, all the virtues, and above all our way to organize, our way to organizing our actions so as to accomplish tasks bigger than we are. Evidently what Marx wanted to destroy really was that last thing. He wanted to destroy the way capital was organized, the way in which it worked, the methods it used, etc., because it was those things which determined the society, and determined the injustices he saw. Now, with that provision, Karl Marx saw a society which was evil. He wanted to destroy that evil completely, to get it out of the way and then to remake a new society with the wealth and resources of nature that would be left.

What are we to think of that approach? Was it a failure in justice? No, you can’t say that it was. The organization that Marx saw and that Marx condemned and that Marx wanted to destroy, that organization was evil. It was bringing in very young children, as soon as they could be taught how to do something in sequence, because the smaller they were the easier they could get in among the threads. I used the age five or six there before as an extreme example. Evidently most of them were not that; they were mostly children 8, 10 or 12 years old, who could be guided easier. But there was no age limit. If there were younger ones to tie the threads, the younger ones were taken.

So the thing was evil, tremendously evil, and we can sympathize with Marx that he wanted to destroy that evil and wanted to start the thing over. Where do we have to stop sympathizing with him? In the fact that he misunderstood his problem. If the common good is organized — he would have admitted that — then you can’t destroy everything and start over. You have to start with what you’ve got.

We come here to something that sounds very much like charity. Remember, “Charity covers a multitude of sins.” We love our friends, our relatives, with their faults. We don’t love them because of the fact that they have no faults.

I have a friend who is very exigent about his friends. As soon as someone doesn’t measure up he kicks him out and looks for someone else who is better. Of course, he is always changing. I tell him, “Well, look, my friends are integrated, both sinners and saints. And I have a lot less trouble. I can keep them all.”

So that’s what charity does. It’s integrated; it takes things as they come. It tries to find what’s good in people, and it loves what’s good in them. It knows that people are not saints and that even the saints are hard to live with. It knows that and it accepts that anyhow.

So that just as we accept our friends with all their faults, so the first lesson of social charity is that we accept our society with all its faults. It’s our society; it’s the only common good we have. If we try to destroy that we have lost our common good and we can’t be without that. So that we must — there’s no way out of it — we must maintain our common good in order to perfect it.

You see then why social charity, which accepts the common good the way it is, is the soul of social justice. Because the moment you stay with your society, that moment social justice gets you and you have to try to perfect it, you have to try to make it better.

I have a very good friend in Colombia whom I happened to be with one time a number of years ago, although with the political disorganization that is there now, he’d probably do the same thing. I was there during a time when Colombia had an extremely important election. The Catholics felt that the outcome very much depended on Christians coming out ahead of what they call the liberals, the anti-clericals, the secularists.

This family, which is a very pious family and also very rich, has its own private chapel. They asked for special permission to have exposition of the Blessed Sacrament the whole election day. They made very sure that every hour of that whole day some member of that family was there praying for good elections — and not one of them voted! There was not a vote that came from that house. They all were busy praying that the votes would be good.

You can see right away there’s a misunderstanding there. They don’t understand their common good. They have a completely false approach to it.

Now the same thing can be said of Karl Marx. I suppose he was as much interested in justice as they were. But his remedy was just as ineffective — less pious, but just as ineffective. He failed in not keeping his society, and therefore, in not getting into it.

I asked my friends in Columbia afterwards, I was curious, I said, “Well, now will you mind telling me why you don’t vote, why you don’t get into politics, if politics needs attention so much?” They said it was so dirty that they couldn’t afford to be in it. Their conscience can’t accept that sort of thing. Politics is unjust, it’s dirty, it’s venal, and we don’t have anything to do with it.

Now, what about those people? They were not accepting the only common good that exists — the only one, there was no other one. And that one had to be accepted with all its faults, the same way we accept our friends. And once we have accepted it, then social justice demands that we change it so that we can get rid of its faults. There you have the picture how social charity is the soul of social justice.

Who Is Obliged?

Anyone who says that politics is too dirty a business to be in, and I’m sure you’ve all heard that from someone or other, that person may be a very virtuous person, but only on one condition, that is, on Chesterton’s conditions for ignorance. He, in one of his books, had occasion to use the word “our innocence,” “until we have lost our innocence.” Then he put a parenthesis “(that is, our invincible ignorance),” closed the parenthesis and went on.

So insofar as this person would be ignorant of what social charity was he might be virtuous, at least he wouldn’t go to hell. But insofar as he would know what social justice would be, he could not say without sin, that politics is so dirty that he won’t get in it. Just because it’s dirty and because it’s yours, because it’s the common good that, yours, you must get into it, you must stay with it and then as soon as you stay with it you must change it because it’s dirty.

There you have a complete machinery if you want, a complete instrumentality to get hold of society, to get hold of our social life and to make something out of it.

Now that machinery, that framework was not there before 1931. Everybody knew that you ought to try to make things better. Everybody knew that a bad society was a bad thing, but there was no clear scientific conception of how you’d have to go about it, how to make the society better and above all whether there was any obligation to do so.

In the past, we always thought of social action, social effort as a kind of option — you could take it or leave it alone. Some people like that sort of thing. It’s very good for those who like it. But those who didn’t like it could walk away. Not any more! In the measure in which we come to understand social justice and social charity, every one of us will have to be in one way or another involved in our society. First, in accepting them as they are, and then, once we have accepted them, we are obliged to get rid of their faults, to try to work to make them better, to make them more perfect instruments of human perfection. That’s as far as we want to go now. I think we can have some questions.

But you see now what we are dealing with. It’s something quite new. We are on the edge of thought here. People are beginning to think these things over for the first time in human history and, as I told you, the materials are very scarce. You have to work with your head. You can’t work with books. There will be books, but they are not written yet.

Just as a little teaser if you want, I’ll take back what I said. The books are being written, but in the most outlandish place you ever saw. You’d think that books about this would be written for seminaries and religious communities and things like that. You know what they are being written for? Business! For industry, by men who are making money, not by men who are trying to perfect and protect human nature — what you call human relations at the present time and it’s a tremendous thing.

You go into any library and ask for their books on human relations in industry. You are going to find shelves and shelves of books because there are so many of them coming out. Men who are trying to think how you have to respect human nature as it is when you try to get human nature to work.

So the thing is being done. But it’s not being done by people who are moralists, by people who have this preoccupation of human perfection. It’s being done, strangely enough, by people who want to make money, and have discovered that in order to make money they are going to have to act human.

Now I think that’s a very sad thing, that we whose business it is to safeguard human perfection have left these ideas fall almost without a flop and that other people who are making money have picked them up. Now what do we want to talk about?

Second Talk

Let’s see what we’ve done briefly before we start again. We saw something of the history of the development of social justice and social charity as clear and precise ideas, scientific ideas. The words “social justice” existed before, but not as a clear idea. Since Pius XI it is a very definite virtue, as clear and as precise and as scientific in its definition as any other virtue.

Social charity was not so developed. It was left to the theologians, and so far it has not been developed consistently in the same way that Pius XI himself developed social justice. But we can see the outlines. We can see at least the field that we should work in and what would have to be said about it.

Then we made some applications in order to explain that. It’s a rather difficult concept. We had enough applications, I think, to give you the idea of what the significance of those virtues would be and their importance. Now this afternoon we wanted to develop the idea a little further.

Social Prudence

We have two things here, the nature and significance of the social virtues in general, and finally social charity and the other social virtues in the practical order. Let’s consider first of all society virtues in general. We can see in these two, social justice and social charity, certain common lines which would be true of any social virtue. And then history has a social virtue in it.

The moralists always recognized a social prudence and they divided that social prudence into three categories, so to say, three divisions, three classes of action. There was political prudence which was of two kinds, regnative and political, but the simple word political prudence is enough.

The older ideas that the king was somebody special hardly would hold water at the present time.[30] The king is a human being who happens to have a job and in those times, coming down from the earliest Western philosophies, there was a failure to see that human dignity belonged to the human person as such. They tried to put men’s dignity in something else, in the fact that he was a citizen, that he was a king, or somebody special like that. Other people who didn’t have that particular characteristic were simply excluded from the common good.

I imagine all of you who have read Aristotle, Plato, or Seneca know that very well. In pagan philosophy, in classical philosophy there were certain people who did not participate in the common good — women, children, foreigners, slaves and mechanics, in that order.

The worst of all were the mechanics, the people who worked by their hands but weren’t slaves, who were, as we would say, free workers. Aristotle very clearly says what’s wrong with them. He says at least the slave has a reflected glory from the citizen.[31] He belonged to somebody who’s worthwhile. A mechanic has nobody, so the best thing you can do is become a slave.

So you get there a completely foreign frame of mind. We don’t participate in that part of their philosophy at all. But you can see what it was. It was an attempt to build human worth on something that they understood, and something they understood was citizenship.

Because they were trying to do that, those who were not citizens were less than human, and we know the terrible definition of Aristotle, “A slave is useful for the wants of life.”[32] In other words, a slave is a thing that you employ. It’s not a human being. So there was a very limited conception of where man’s dignity really lay in his value as the image of God, not in being a citizen or anything else.

So certain of their categories, very rigid categories, very well preserved, simply have no meaning. Aristotle and those other people after him went to great lengths to show how the king, because he exemplified citizenship in the fullest extent, was a perfect man, you know, better.

There’s nothing quite so evident in history as the morals of kings and they are not good! But for that philosophy it was important that the king should be a perfect man because he best exemplified citizenship, and for them citizenship was the perfection of humanity. So sometimes we desert our philosophers and that’s one of the places we desert them. So for us social prudence is just political prudence, we don’t have to have regnative and political, just political.

Then there was economic prudence, and then there was a military prudence.

Social Prudence in Modern Management

Now, strangely enough, we have rediscovered those three divisions in modern management. We can distinguish nowadays three different kinds of organizations. If welfare purposes, the perfections of the people inside the organization, is the primary purpose, then we call that an organization of life — the family, state, cities, neighborhood, tribes, Church.

All of those organizations have for their goal the perfection of the people inside them. That makes a particular kind of organization and it’s guided in a certain way. Then you can also have, besides the perfection of people inside the organization, you can have the perfection of people outside the organization. Then you have an organization of service.

Any kind of business is an organization of service. The faculty of a university is an organization of service. Then you can have an organization which is concerned with the organization of the means for these two. See both of these, perfection of people inside and perfection of people outside the organization, would require means. And those means have to be adapted to those two purposes. But we have certain organizations where the means themselves become important.

You all know the definition of a successful army: It’s the one that gets there first with the most. A military organization depends on the effectiveness of its means and its organization, because it is with its means and its organizations that victory is achieved.

So you have three kinds of organizations: 1) organizations of life, that’s the political prudence of St. Thomas; 2) organizations of service, that’s the economic prudence; and, 3) organizations of struggle, that’s the military prudence. So that actually in this way we bridged a few centuries of human thought.

In social prudence we have some pre-thinking of some thinking that’s being done now for the first time in the field of justice. There are different kinds of organizations that are fundamentally different in the kind of authority you have in them, in the kind of obedience you give in them, and in the way in which they are organized, etc. So there was a social prudence in history and you can read that in any moral book. But that’s the only social virtue that was ever developed.

The legal justice — which is the same thing as social justice, only a primitive name — was never developed by St. Thomas as legal justice. It was simply named and, at the most, it was given by St. Thomas the goal, the purpose, of being at the direct service of the common good. But nobody ever developed the meaning of legal justice in the same sense that I just showed you.

That doctrine of social justice is now being developed. In fact, Pius XI simply gave up the old term. If you wanted to see how he did it, it’s in an Encyclical called Studiorem Ducem.[33] He uses the word legal justice and social justice and he applies legal justice to the courtroom and social justice to the social order.[34] So he simply gave the term to the lawyers and never used it again. That’s the only place Pius XI ever used the term legal justice and he handed it over to the lawyers. It’s courtroom justice, legal justice, from now on. And the thing which was legal justice in history now is social justice, only with some body, with some meaning, with scientific definition.

Social Virtues in General

Now we have three social virtues then, social prudence, social justice and social charity. Prudence was always there. Social justice or social charity were developed or named in the words of Pius XI and since the work of Pius XI we’ve begun asking some other questions. If three of the virtues have social twins, would it be possible that all virtues have one?

In other words, instead of having a morality which is largely individual but has a few social virtues in it, is there a whole social morality alongside the individual morality? That’s a question which is becoming more and more clear as time goes on. In what way does it become clear?

From the structure itself of the social virtues that Pius XI pointed out and that we know from history and from prudence. In prudence there was — in that division I told you about which no longer exists and is valid — the regnative prudence which St. Thomas said was architectonic, structural. And the political prudence was executive. So that you can see that both deal with the structuring of action of society. And of course once you get into the social justice and social charity of Pius XI, the idea of structure is tremendously evident.

The direct matter of these virtues is change, structural change, and the title of the encyclical is “On Restructuring the Social Order.” So once you see that point, these virtues have two things in common: some kind of a common goal — common activity in the pursuit of a common goal — and then they have some structure; they are bound together. One man can’t do them; only people in society can do them.[35] Then you can see that evidently other virtues could have that characteristic besides justice and charity.

Social Fortitude

Take courage, for example, fortitude. We all have heard of such a thing as organizational morale, which is a quite different thing from courage. It’s easy to see that it’s different. You can have some quite brave men, tremendous individual bravery and put them under ordinary leadership and they will go to pieces. You can take some very ordinary Joes, who are afraid of the dark, put them under good leadership and they’ll tackle anything.

Social bravery and individual bravery are two different things, and you work at them in different ways. For bravery, individual bravery, you would give encouragement, you would try to give ideals and so forth. For morale, you might put on a good show — these are two different things — to get their sense of belonging, a sense of worthwhileness in the thing they are trying to do together.

So it’s very probably that in this sense the concept of organizational morale, we’re dealing with a social fortitude, which has the same relationship as social justice to individual justice or as social charity to individual charity. It’s about structures; it’s about things that are done in common.

Social Temperance

In the same way it is quite possible that we can locate social temperance in any kind of organization. Well, let’s take an example of what is obviously a certain lack of temperance.

Mike Quill,[36] before he died, when he was making his demands on the New York subways, his tactic was to be intemperate, to demand more than he expected to get and to keep insisting on that up to the last minute. The tactic was, if you want, intemperance.

Now there is a real effort on the part of any organization not to have those exorbitant demands on all sides, but to try to ask for things that people know that they can get. So in any business, in any group action, there is an attempt on the part of everybody, if they are interested in the organization, to play the game by the rules, so to say, to expect no more than they are likely to get for the common good.

Anytime all the people in the organization start asking for everything they can get, that organization goes to pieces. I imagine a good example would be the Common Market[37] in Europe and De Gaulle’s[38] idea of French grandeur. The two don’t go together. You can have a Common Market, you can have a united Europe, but in getting that you have to limit your ideas of grandeur. And it’s because he’s trying to get both of them together that we have a lot of tension in Europe and we won’t arrive at a united Europe.

That would be a certain example of a lack of social temperance, how much you want to ask of the group. Anytime a group of people are working together, they will ordinarily try to limit their demands to what all can get. And that desire to limit demands to what all can get is a kind of temperance. All you have to do is to ask for everything you can get, and nobody gets anything. Like a theater, for example, when somebody shouts “fire.” If they all want to get out at the same time, nobody gets out. It’s only insofar as they are willing to wait their turn that anybody can get out.

So there is a social temperance and what we wind up with is a kind of social virtue different from the individual virtue in every virtue we have named. Social justice has nothing in common for matter, for the way you do it, or for the time limit, with individual justice. If you owe a man 10¢ at 10:00 on Tuesday, then if you haven’t paid him 10¢ at 10:00 on Tuesday, then you are unjust.

But you could never do social justice that way. Take the example that Pope Pius XI gave of changing an entire salary system to make a just wage possible. That evidently couldn’t be done overnight because you must organize, promote and support such organizations with the other employers as a normal means. It may take years to just organize and promote those organizations before they get anything done.

So you see it is not something that can be done at 10:00 on any day. But individual justice is defined that way — you owe somebody something at 10:00, at 10:01 you’re unjust if you haven’t done it. So the things don’t look the same, they don’t act the same, they don’t act with the same things. Individual justice deals with a wage or a piece of property; social justice deals with social structure, with society itself.[39] So the probability is that what Pope Pius XI pointed out to us is really a whole new morality which has to be written for the first time alongside the traditional morality.

In another context Pope Pius XI used the expression: “The pastoral theology of another day is now no longer enough.”[40] It was in connection with what he then called Catholic Action. But it can apply to this. Pastoral theology, the moral theology of another date, is no longer enough. We have to move on. We have to see aspects of the truth that we never saw before.

But, as I mentioned in the first talk, it’s unfortunate that our moral books, the books of the seminary and study, don’t reflect any of this. The books that you want that will reflect this are in a different field entirely, they are in the field you call management, the theory of administration and of management — a purely secular enterprise which has no Christian influence at all except by accident.

That is unfortunate, and sooner or later we hope that the moralists will take over and will try to direct these people who are trying to think through the problem of management, in other words, the problem of trying to direct human effort towards the attainment of common goals. You can see in that very statement, “to direct human effort towards the attainment of common goals,” that it is a moral problem. And the people who are thinking about it now are not moralists. The moralists are thinking about something else. I don’t know what it is.

So when you come then to the nature and significance of social virtues, which is the second topic on our list for today, I think we’ve answered that to a certain extent. The nature of social virtues is that they always deal with organized activity, with human pursuit of common goals, of common perfection and the thing that sets them off is that structuring of activities.

Structure and Habit

Now we might spend a few moments on that idea of structure, so that it becomes a little clearer to us. In the individual order, we have a thing called habit. For instance, when we are very small our mother teaches us to tie our shoes and it’s a job, it takes quite a while!

Suppose that that first experience that we had of tying our shoes — which may take weeks before she gets around and gets it so that we can do it — suppose that had to be gone through every time we wanted our shoes tied. You can see there’d be no room in life for anything else.

We have time in our life for other things because tying our shoes becomes a habit and more than likely none of us ever thinks of tying our shoes every time. We do them, while we’re thinking of something else.

That’s only one example, a very ridiculously simple example, but our whole life is like that. If we didn’t have habits, we would be absolutely stymied. We’d be paralyzed from one end of the day to the other just tying our shoes, or just getting in shape to perform an action. It’s because we are, so to say, trained — because we have stored up in our own nerve complexes all of these habits — that we can live all during the day thinking about the goals that we have. But if we once had to think through every step, if we had to perform every step consciously, we would be completely paralyzed. Without habits we are hopeless.

Now what are those habits? They are structures, structures of individual actions. A good example is a man who would learn to play the piano, a great artist who has become great by practice. What does his practice consist in? It consists in organizing his nerve impulses. He may practice scales one day. He may practice rhythm one day. He may practice finger movements, accent, all kinds of things that he practices one after another.

As he practices them he stores the nerve impulses up in his memory bank, whatever that is, and they are there for him to use. When he comes to play he just reads the music and all of these habits are in action because he stored them up. If you haven’t gone through that work, if you haven’t done all of that practicing to store up habits, there’s no use trying to play.

You’ve all heard the joke, I imagine, where someone asks a man whether he can play the violin, and he says, “Why I don’t know, I’ve never tried.” The answer always is, if you haven’t tried, you don’t know, because it is a question of building up habits, and until you’ve built up those habits, you can’t play.

Now our whole life is like that. Until we build up the habits which we use every minute of the day, we can’t live. We can transfer that same thing now to the social order. In the social order also there are habits and we call those habits “institutions.”

Just try to think for a moment of the tremendous amount of confidence in the predictable actions of men that would be represented, for example, by a prisoner of war in Japan who would get extra rations for his companions in that war camp by writing a check for the keeper. He wanted to buy some more food and he didn’t have any money, so he wrote a check. This is a real case! The prison guard accepted the check, brought him the food and cashed the check in New York. He sent it in the mail and got the money.

Imagine that, a piece of paper which would just have a signature on it and which could be counted on by all the people concerned in that operation to make food available to those people who needed it. Evidently there’s something in there besides paper and ink. There is a whole organization of life. A check means something, a signature on a check means something, something which would have a predictable response.

Now that check was a very simple example, in one way, of an institution. In another way it was very complicated. For example, in the example the check was signed with a pen; but it if was a Chinaman who was doing it, he’d sign it with a brush. Now the fact that you use a pen or a brush, that’s an institution. It’s a thing which has been built up over the centuries.

When you go into a store here in this country you ask what the price is of something and then somebody behind the counter will tell you what the price is, and then you either buy the thing or you walk out. That’s incredible!

There are some places in the world where if you did that, you’d be locked up, you’d be crazy. What you do is you walk in and say, “I’d take it but it’s spoiled, it’s not good.” Then the other person says, “Well, of course I could give you a little reduction on it.” Then you say, “Oh, no, nothing you could do would make me interested in it now because it’s not worth it.” You start walking out, “No, come, come back …” — what you call bargaining. That’s the way you do it.

You’d never go in and ask what the price is. If you ask what the price is they’d tell you something twenty times what it should be and if you paid it you’d be stupid and they would be the first ones to despise you because you don’t know how to live. Whereas in a fixed price tradition you go ahead and ask what the price is and then you expect them to tell you what the price is and then when they tell you, you either accept it or you don’t. But if you may ask which one is the simpler of the two?

We had a man in China before the Communists. He wrote a story back on how you do business in China. He said when a missionary comes, it’s the same as when a chicken fancier here has walked in among a group of foxes. He’s a source of income for the community!

So when he wanted a piece of land to build his church on, his missionary compound on, he said, “I don’t know how you’d do it in the West. Maybe you’d go and ask somebody what they’d want for their land; but over here that would be suicide. What you do over here, is you let your number one boy know that this barren swamp back of the woods wouldn’t suit your purposes if it were given to you with money to build on. And then as that word gets around, he [the owner] lets it be known to all his friends that if you had offered $10,000 a square foot he still wouldn’t consider it because that land is too valuable to alienate.”

“This goes on for maybe five or six months. Nobody knows about it except the 10,000 people in the surrounding villages. And after everybody is quite clearly convinced that the missionary won’t take the land at any price and that the man who owns it won’t let it go under any consideration, the deal can be carried through with remarkable simplicity.”

Now you’d ask which is the more complicated, this bargaining or the fact that you can walk into a store, ask what the price is, be told, and either buy it or walk out. Which is the more complicated? Fixed price! The other one is simple because you build it as you go. Nothing is understood, nothing is structured. You go in and you try to get the best deal under whatever circumstances there are.

Whereas when you go into the store and ask what the price is, that’s an indication of what the real value of that thing is. You’re taking that all for granted. But look what organization is behind that. And you simply say, if you find it too expensive, “No, I can’t afford that. I’ll have to get something cheaper.”

Published with permission of the Center for Economic and Social Justice.

Social Charity

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