Category: Church Social Teaching

Theft from the poor: Quotations from the saints on social justice.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • March 16, 2017 • Church Social Teaching

There are plenty of them, including from St. Thomas Aquinas, who said that the rich owe their superfluous goods to the poor by natural law. And then there is this one from Pope St. Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Rule: “For, when we administer necessaries of any kind to the indigent, we do not bestow our own, but render them what is theirs; we rather pay a debt of justice than accomplish works of mercy.” “The earth belongs to everyone,” says St. Ambrose, “not to the rich.” St. John Chrysostom says our wealth belongs to the rich. Tradition is fascinating, don’t you think?

Does this Ratzinger quote refute Catholic social justice advocates?

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • March 13, 2017 • Church Social Teaching

“But Alt! Is social justice really a duty of the State? Come now. Doesn’t Ratzinger say that this is for the private sector and personal action instead? It’s not a political thing, you know. He says this in Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures. Well. I wish that when people come across quotations like this one, they would try to put them in context. Is that very much to ask? Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures is not a critique of social justice or the welfare state or leftist bloggers. Instead it is a critique of Enlightenment rationalism. I know you will have to, gasp, think.

Michael Hichborn, aka “The Lepanto Institute,” under attack by eeeeevil social justice warriors.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 16, 2017 • Blind Guides & False Prophets; Church Social Teaching; Exegesis

Michael Hichborn is still bunkered up somewhere at Lepanto after I posted a vicious hit piece against him. He writes to us from that bunker to defend himself against the “enraged” “social justice leftists masquerading as Catholics in our midst.” Said masquerade party is in a “blind rage” over his wery mention of Judas! Now Lepanto is being persecuted over a new meme suggesting that ugly and empty church buildings are a result of charity to the poor and that this is how “Judas got his wish.” Blind rage from SJWs ensued.

Hichborn meme attempts to link social justice to Judas Iscariot.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • February 14, 2017 • Blind Guides & False Prophets; Church Social Teaching; Exegesis

Hichborn misses the point. Judas did not put service to the poor above worship of God. Judas does not want to give the money to the poor at all; he wants to keep it for himself and pretend he gave it to the poor. Thievery from the poor does not match any definition of social justice that I know of. If Mr. Hichborn thinks it does, he needs to point us to who defines it in any such way. If someone claims to advocate social justice, but in reality diverts money meant for the poor to his own use, that is a betrayal of social justice, not its essence.

But is it the government’s job to ensure a just wage?

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • October 4, 2016 • Church Social Teaching; Politics

Some, putting up the armor of political theory against the teaching of the Church, will object that wages are a private contract. If a man thinks his wage is unjust, he can ask for a raise. Just like that! Or if his boss is a tightwad, he can find another job. Just like that! Simple. Bosses and magnates never exploited labor in the good old US of A, before there were laws to prevent it! That just did not happen. Not ever! But Leo XIII would find such thinking naïve. “The laboring man,” he says, “is, as a rule, weak and unprotected” and often a victim of “usurious dealing.”

Social justice is also a non-negotiable.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • October 3, 2016 • Church Social Teaching; Politics

Bottom line: The Church does not tell us how to vote. Often a candidate who supports abortion is running against a candidate who opposes social justice. The Church does not tell us how to resolve this conflict. What the Church does do is name the moral principles that should factor in our voting, and then leave it up to the individual’s own conscience and prayer. The one thing the Church tells us we must not do, on pain of mortal sin, is vote for a candidate because that candidate supports abortion. Our motives can put us into mortal sin, but not our vote itself.

Does John Zmirak even understand Church teaching?

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • September 7, 2015 • Church Social Teaching

Here is where Mr. Zmirak’s real concern becomes plain: It is not to find out what Catholic moral teaching might have to tell us about such things as the environment, immigration, or inequality. No. That kind of thing might advantage the left. That kind of thing might cause Republicans to squirm. We can’t have that. Not with a big election coming up. Mr. Zmirak’s real loyalty, in other words, is not to Catholicism but to the Republican party. Anything that causes Republicans to squirm is false Catholicism, you see.

Laudato Si is a hard teaching. And we must accept it.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • June 25, 2015 • Church Social Teaching

Encyclicals take time to read. They take still longer to digest and understand, and longer still for them to even begin to change our habits of thought and patterns of behavior. That is particularly true when, as encyclicals should, it hits us where we live. How many of us can say they’ve understood and modeled their moral life after Rerum Novarum? Can you? That was written in 1891. A hundred years later, Pope St. John Paul II still had to adjure us on its teaching when he wrote Centissimus Annus. We’re thick. This people is a stiff-necked people.

The Saints and Social Justice by Brandon Vogt: A review.

BY: Henry Matthew Alt • August 5, 2014 • Book Review; Church Social Teaching

Glenn Beck’s panic attacks aside, the Church is certainly “down with this whole social justice thing” because “social justice” is a Catholic concept in the first place. Those be our words. And the reason you should read Mr. Vogt’s fine book is that it very skillfully helps us to distinguish between “social justice” in the true, Catholic sense and “social justice” in the false, politically exploitative sense. For just because a false and atheistic political ideology has demagogued the poor does not mean that we have no real obligation to the poor.

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