by
Patricia Hetter Kelso
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The Bishops’ Pastoral Letter on “Catholic Social Teaching
and the U.S. Economy” asks one fundamental question in three
parts: What should be done about domestic and world poverty — by
the church itself, by a Judeo-Christian society, and by moral individuals?
Although they address their question first to Roman Catholics, the
Bishops also invite the morally concerned of all faiths to contribute
to the dialogue they hope to start with the secular leaders and the
larger religious community of our pluralistic society. How should the
religiously-oriented social conscience express its values and exert
influence on an advanced industrial society where tools, machines,
structures and processes produce more and more of the goods and services?
How can all of society’s members become legitimate consumers
of the goods and services they want and need not only to live, but
to live well, and to maintain social dignity and self-respect?
It is a tenet not only of Christianity but of all major religions
that moral men and women cannot be indifferent to the quality of social
life, or to the well-being of every member of the human community,
for all are valuable in the eyes of our Creator. And now, no matter
whose citizens we are or where we are born or domiciled, our community
is the world.
The concern for a good society antedates Christianity. It was Aristotle
who described man as a social and political being, and both he and
Plato maintained that his virtue is dependent on the goodness of social
institutions. Bad institutions make bad human beings. Good institutions
assist and support men and women in their struggle to perfect their
natures and to live as God has commanded.
The condition that the Bishops urge us to address, on the grounds
of morality and justice, is not pre-industrial poverty. About that
not much could be done. As long as human labor remained the chief producer
of goods and services, and the capital factor was represented by arable
land, domestic animals, and simple tools, poverty was a natural and
inevitable state — at least for those not willing or able to
enslave their fellow human beings or plunder their wealth.
But the poverty of our day and age has a different origin and dynamic.
Modern poverty begins with the agricultural revolution in Great Britain.
This first technological revolution, which began during the reign of
the Tudors, paved the way for the Industrial Revolution that was to
radically transform the material world and the way people earn their
living.
Historians tell us that the Industrial Revolution began in 1776. But
the force that powered it — technological advance — is
as old as humankind; as old as the first rock grasped in a rudimentary
hand to facilitate hitting or crushing.
What is different about modern poverty is that it is both curable
and preventable. The poor have known this for a very long time. It
can be fairly said that it is the poor themselves who have awakened
the churches to this incendiary fact. All over the world, the poor
are standing up and announcing, in dozens of languages and dialects: “We’ve
had it. We refuse to remain poor. We know that our misery is not due
to the will of God or to a decree of fate, but to human institutions.
Institutions run by you people up there. You people who are in charge
of the institutions are guilty of mismanagement. We can’t put
our finger yet on how you do it, but we know that you are mismanaging
and misusing the institutions that control the production and distribution
of the goods and services we want, need and demand. An we’re
not going to take it anymore. Either you figure out how to include
us or we’ll blow the society up.”
The institutions under attack — the economic and political institutions — are
working beautifully for a tiny minority of the world’s families.
They are failing the majority. And that’s what the Bishops’ letter,
in essence, is about.
...
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