Jubilee’s Executive Director, Eric LeCompte, wrote a blog featured on Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. In “No Apologies for Heeding God's Call of Social Justice” Eric speaks to his personal calling to social justice and its relation to his faith. Read on to learn about Eric’s journey and why we can all find our own, personal call to justice.
I was 18 and living and working at a homeless shelter and soup kitchen in Rochester New York called St. Joseph's House of Hospitality. I had left my native Chicago with the intent of spending a year living the works of mercy. At the House we served lunch for about 150 people a day, housed a dozen homeless men and offered an AIDS hospice. These charitable works were vital for the people that we served. However, as the numbers of the hungry increased at our doors and I wrestled with the Gospels, I realized that addressing why so many were poor was a matter of justice.
Living at St. Joe's was a good place to struggle with these questions; the house was part of the Catholic Worker movement that practiced the works of mercy and acted on the work of justice.
We have lost the sense of justice as an activity. Instead the popularized version of justice is one of impartial decision making, often represented by balanced scales. Justice brings to mind a court of law, not a way of life.
Political theory (and Catholic social teaching) speaks of three types of justice, commutative, distributive, and social. Commutative justice is concerned with fairness in transactions. Distributive justice is concerned with the final distribution of goods and services. Arguing that a contract is invalid because it was signed at gun point is an appeal to commutative justice principles, while arguing that it is unfair for the top one percent of people in the U.S. to control 42 percent of the wealth is an appeal to distributive justice. These two ideals of justice often are in tension with each other. Proponents of distributive justice bemoan gross inequalities while proponents of commutative justice argue that acting to redistribute wealth would be a violation of commutative justice, that in most cases the wealth was fairly accumulated over a series of non-coercive transactions.
Social justice has been at the heart of a lot of recent debate, so it is worth looking at a clear definition from the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, "Social justice implies that persons have an obligation to be active and productive participants in the life of society and that society has a duty to enable them to participate in this way." The Bishops also refer to it as contributive justice, it is something that everyone is obligated to contribute to society.
The three types of justice are best understood as different angles from which to evaluate society. In a just society all three will be present. The Bishops conclude, "Basic justice demands the establishment of minimum levels of participation in the life of the human community for all persons." A society that excludes or marginalizes people from partaking in the economic life of society is prima facie unjust.
This vision of justice is grounded in the Biblical theme of covenant. Covenant law is foundational for life together, "Far from being an arbitrary restriction on the life of the people, these codes made life in community possible." The Bishops continue, "Laws such as that for the Sabbath year when the land was left fallow (Ex 23:11; Lv 25:1-7) and for the year of release of debts (Dt 15:1-11) summoned people to respect the land as God's gift and reminded Israel that as a people freed by God from bondage they were to be concerned for the poor and oppressed in their midst. Every fiftieth year a jubilee was to be proclaimed as a year of 'liberty throughout the land' and property was to be restored to its original owners (Lv 25:8-17, cf. Is 61:1-2; Lk 4:18-19)."
These laws make life together possible by reintegrating people into society. It was beneficial not only for the poor who had become landless, but also for the rich who were becoming cut off from the rest of society (Isaiah 5:8). The justice of Jubilee is an active justice where individuals acknowledge their obligation to society, to the common good. It is a way of life that affirms right relationships both with God and with others.
Jubilee USA seeks to bring this idea of justice to the forefront of international economics. In championing international debt relief Jubilee seeks to do justice and open the doors for all people to participate meaningfully in the economic life of the world. God's justice is an ongoing process that we are to be actively engaged in.
Some media pundits berate our active pursuit of social justice. What they don't understand is that social justice is God's practical call for dealing with the ills in our world. I will never apologize for working for social justice -- as a Christian its pursuit is a requirement.
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