Sharing the "Secrets" of Catholic Social Teaching

I remember one particular hot September day in 1993. I was driving from Atlanta, where I was working on a degree in Christian social ethics at Emory University, to St. Mark's Church in Clarksville, about 90 miles away, where I was going to "cover" for the weekend. This was one of my first parish calls after being ordained a priest the previous June.

I pulled up to a roadside stand and ordered an Oreo ice cream cone from a personable young woman. Eying me a bit suspiciously as she counted out my change, she aske me what I did for a living. The head-to-toe black suit and Roman collar I was wearing didn't speak eloquently enough? "I'm a Jesuit priest, on my way to St. Mark's just over the county line."

She knitted her brow: "Oh, I've heard of the Jesu-ites! Aren't they like the spies of the Catholic Church?"

I wish now that I had had the presence of mind to reply: "No, quite the opposite. We Jesu-itts are not in the business of keeping secrets but work quite hard at exposing them!"

The secret I have in mind is the topic to which I have devoted about all my time and energy since that incident seven years ago: Catholic social teaching. The Church's teachings on matters of peace, justice, and human rights are often called "our best-kept secrets" because they are contained in long, wordy, and complicated encyclicals issued by popes and bishops over the past century.

Fr. Thomas Massaro, SJ, is author of Catholic Social Teaching and United States Welfare Reform (Liturgical Press, 1998) and Living Justice: Catholic Social Teaching in Action (Sheed & Ward, 2000).

The first few, including Rerum Novarum in 1891, Quadragesimo Anno in 1931, and Mater et Magistra in 1961, were addressed to bishops. Starting with Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris in 1963, they have been addressed to all the faithful, indeed to all people of good will.

But the difficulty is that they are traditionally pitched at the "jawbreaker" style of discourse, challenging just in vocabulary alone to many grad students. The Vatican issues translations from the original Latin, but the message needs to be further "translated" into the parlance of ordinary folks. That is where I come in. I am one of many Jesuits who, along with others, both clergy and lay, convert Catholic social teaching from abstract concepts into a living word that inspires people to transform the world into a place of greater social justice.

Jesuits working for social justice do many things: lobby in the halls of Congress, serve mashed potatoes in soup kitchens, work with inner-city youth in gang-prevention programs, and organize migrant farm workers. Teaching classes on Catholic social ethics at a graduate school of theology in Boston is my work.

As a professor of moral theology at Weston Jesuit School of Theology, I expose my students to Catholic social teaching and all that it says about political and economic issues that surround us. My students include fellow Jesuits preparing for the priesthood, members of other religious congregations, and lay men and women preparing to serve the Church through a variety of ministries and professions.

I teach courses with such titles as "Religion and American Public Life," "Social Justice in Theory and Practice," "Ethics of Work, Family and Environment," and "Christian Political Thought." Most of my classes start with a student presentation on a particular reading, then I usually lead a discussion on the presentation. In the second half I clarify key points in lecture style.

A student once called me "eminently interruptible," and I consider that a definite compliment. I welcome student requests for clarification or refutation at any time, even if it breaks the momentum of my presentation.

In my classes there is plenty of agreeing to disagree as I invite challenges to me and to other students. Social ethics is the kind of topic where everyone has an opinion on what justice is, and that is a good head start.

The rich combination of interests and experiences of my students is the source of their greatest gift to me: the spectacular range of questions they ask. The opener for one discussion we had was "Do you think the Church has been wise to give unconditional support to labor unions? Aren't unions becoming counterproductive if not irrelevant today?"

Some students, former union members, supported the Church's union advocacy, but others (two had managed factories) opposed them, sure that workers can attain well-being in other ways. It was the type of discussion I encourage: both sides committed to the core value of the flourishing of workers but envisioning different means to that end.

Weston's students and their concerns are increasingly international in scope. Some from Africa, for example, grapple with the horrors of genocide in their homelands at the same time they read Church documents about peace, reconciliation, and the just-war theory. I have led some through individualized directed-readings courses geared to their concerns: a Korean explores yardsticks for economic justice for agricultural workers in his homeland; a Filipina searches for strategies to combat child labor and the sex industry in Asia.

I know better than to parade as "answer man," but I do put people with burning questions in touch with resources that take them the next step toward a just response to a practical situation -- whether that information comes from Church documents, academic research, or the experience of social activists.

Among those many resources are the writings of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement and those of Fr. Walter Burghardt, SJ, on "Preaching the Just Word"; the work of sociologists Peter Berger on secularization and Robert Wuthnow on religious values and American political culture; and the books of legal scholar Stephen L. Carter on constitutional law and the religious roots of civic virtues.

Because Weston's students are increasingly of the "second career" variety, their justice concerns come alive in extraordinary ways. When I hear them agonizing over workplace struggles or the fairness of corporate and government policies, I know that these questions are not idle speculation but arise from practical experience in the real world.

When people ask me when it was that I discovered that I wanted to teach about social justice and conduct research in this field, I mention 1975, my freshman year at New York's Regis High, the year I met my first Jesuits, including Frs. James DiGiacomo, Stephen Duffy, and Robert Sarno.

By the time I left Regis, I was the proud owner of a dog-eared copy of Pope Paul VI's 1967 Populorum Progressio, the first post-Vatican II social encyclical that addressed Third World poverty. It called for reform in international trade, land reform, and even expropriation of property where the monopolization of resources on the part of wealthy elites locked out the poor.

To the mischievous Jesuit who put this radical document in my teenage hands and invited me to reflect on what the pope's call for social justice meant for me, I say that I am still working on answering that question as I approach middle age!

Also in 1975 the Society of Jesus concluded its 32d general congregation in Rome, presided over by Father General Pedro Arrupe. The Society was rededicated in that famous meeting to the cause of social justice by the documents it produced, the most important of which was Decree Four, "Our Mission Today: The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice."

I could list dozens of other documents, from the United States bishops or the Vatican, that inform my understanding of social justice. I am always gratified when someone shares my enthusiasm for one of these Church documents. But what ignites my teaching, research, and writing on justice is the daily challenge facing today's Christians: to live out our faith in a world preoccupied with other pursuits, with values contradictory to the Gospel. It is a constant challenge in a materialistic, individualistic culture to exercise sincere discernment about what really serves the common good and to advocate for true social responsibility. In the worlds of government and business (and even sometimes in the life of the Church itself), it is so easy to forget about the plight of the disadvantaged.

The good news is that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, including the popes who wrote social encyclicals, especially John XXIII and Paul VI; a group of nineteenth-century bishops, Archbishop von Ketteler of Mainz and Cardinal Manning of London among them, who were in the forefront of social Catholicism; Jacques Maritain, who wrote on political and economic justice; Fr. John Courtney Murray, SJ, perhaps the most influential American Catholic social ethicist of the twentieth century; and Fr. John A. Ryan of Minnesota, who much earlier in this century brought Vatican social teaching into a U.S. context with his writings on distributive justice and a living wage.

The rich tradition of Catholic social teaching may not offer solutions to all the hard decisions faced by citizens and leaders, but it does lift up for us a core of social concerns: the respect for human dignity and rights, obligations to the widest circles of society, and a fair sharing of opportunity and participation. As I share Catholic social teaching with my students and with the wider audiences who hear my talks and read my books, I feel confident that my work will serve as an antidote to apathy and the artificial separation of the economic life and the faith life of Christians.

This is my modest way of being a witness to the Gospel. It may not be as exciting as being a spy, but exposing the "secrets" of Catholic social teaching has certainly brought me a high level of job satisfaction so far.