Good evening. My name is Gail Salvetti, and I'm a member of the Glastonbury Abbey Institute. Welcome to the first Zoom program in this fall 2023 season.
Our speaker tonight is Father Thomas Massaro. Before we begin, let's... let's remember to use the chat pod for any technical questions or difficulties. The Q&A pod is where you put your questions for Father Massaro. Please enter your questions as soon as they come to you, and they will be ready immediately when he finishes.
Finally, you may want to alter the size of your screen. the slides and the speaker so that the slides, so that you can see the speaker better, more clearly. And that you do that by just clicking on the little line in between the two and dragging it to the left. Okay, so Bada Massaro is professor of moral theology at Fordham University. And I looked it up and he gets rave reviews from his students.
He has authored several books, including Mercy in Action, The Social Teachings of Pope Francis. In addition, he has two new books coming out in October, Pope Francis as Moral Leader and Living Justice Catholic Social Teaching. It is my honor and pleasure to give you Father Thomas.
Massaro. Father Thomas? Thank you so much, Gail, for that warm introduction. And I'm delighted to be participating in this three-part series because although I'm living here in the Bronx, New York, Fordham University, and I was a native of New York, I spent my first 18 years of life here, I've actually spent a majority of my adult life in the state of Massachusetts.
I did my college years, four years out in Amherst College. Western Mass. I had a mind of vision in the Jesuits in the 1980s, was in the city of Boston.
I worked for a couple of years at Bishop Connolly High School in Fall River, that's southeastern Massachusetts. And then I had over about 15 years teaching at that school of theology that used to be called Western Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, and then it became part of Boston College. It's now called the School of Theology and Ministry of Boston College.
So I've moved around since then. But I think that adds up to something like 23 or 24 years of my life. That's nearly half my life in the state of Massachusetts.
And I have actually been to the Glastonbury Abbey that's sponsoring this institute and these talks. I've been to Hingham. Mostly I've been through Hingham on the way to Cohasset. It's at Route 228, I recall. So it's a lovely part of the state.
And I'm so delighted. that there are so many listeners participating in this first of the three parts of our series. I also am familiar with Father Tim Joyce at the Glastonbury Abbey, and many of the listeners, I believe, know about the nonprofit organization called A Faith That Does Justice. It's led by my good friend, another Jesuit priest, Father Peter Jives.
And. I'm sure the overlapping membership, many viewers are part of that. I'm part of the board of A Faith That Does Justice, which is a great nonprofit.
If you don't know much about it, look it up. They're always looking for participants in their programming as well. So as Gail's introduction mentioned, my entire career, I could list more books and articles and courses that I teach.
They all boil down to the study and appreciation. of those three words that are somewhere on your screen there, Catholic Social Teaching. And I'm going to, in the next 10 minutes or so, just walk you through an overview. I call it the foundational points about Catholic social teaching, what it is, where it comes from, what it consists of, how does it operate, the methodology that is.
And after those 10 minutes, we'll be launching into the series of the six themes that we'll treat today. And then there'll be four more themes next Tuesday. And then the final Tuesday of our series, I'll be doing some of the contributions of Pope Francis.
focusing on the current pontiff and how he has advanced many of these same themes. So there's an outline there. There is method to our madness here. But hopefully you'll emerge from this series, even if you know quite a bit about the Catholic Church's tradition of teaching about justice and peace.
Hopefully you'll emerge with an even deeper knowledge and appreciation of the great riches of Catholic social teaching. So let's get started with that. Of course, it's always a little bit artificial to be on a Zoom screen.
My students, Gail mentioned my students give me good reviews. That's because in a classroom, it's easy to kind of reach out to people and energize them. I'm not so persuaded that the Zoom screen is the ideal venue or genre for communicating enthusiasm, but I think it's possible.
I had to teach for two semesters on Zoom. In fact, I was sitting in this very chair. for most of the year 2020 teaching students over Zoom in various courses. So let's hope it works. I'm sure it will.
And to tell you the truth, I'm mostly interested in the last 20 minutes or so of each session when your questions will be forwarded. We have a way of registering your questions. And then I'll be very happy to answer the questions that arise. I'm actually, I always learn from the questions that any audience poses to me. Okay.
So let's do that, those couple of maybe 10 minutes of foundational issues. What stands behind Catholic social teaching? How can we understand where it's coming from?
What is its context? The very broadest context is the fact that the Roman Catholic faith is committed to two things simultaneously, and they go together. You can't separate them out. It's our identity as people in this world on earth.
We're terrestrial beings with a body and concerns about how the world is going at this very moment. Very practical, very material, very grounded concrete. That's half of the picture. But the other half of the picture is our spiritual destiny. Now, it's easy to say heaven or paradise or beyond the tomb, the other side of the tomb.
There's so much we don't know. It's a great mystery. What is our ultimate destiny?
But. To be Christian is to have one eye on our supernatural destiny, to be with God forever as we were created, but never to the exclusion of the well-being of ourselves on earth and all other people on earth as well. So as Christians, we're committed to making this world, with all of its, you know, warts and all, the sinful conditions and wars and poverty, to making that as good as possible. We call that ameliorating the conditions of the world, making them somewhat better.
It's not just an optional thing. We have a duty as Christians, and especially as Roman Catholics, to care for our world. That includes creation. We'll be talking about ecology and the environment, Pope Francis's great encyclical, Laudato Si', but also our fellow brothers and sisters, especially those who are poor, who are marginalized.
whose lives are precarious, they're vulnerable, maybe they're refugees, maybe they're oppressed and have a very low standard of living, we have an obligation. So that's my first point. We're an inner worldly faith.
We care about this world, the here and now, and especially the dignity of our brothers and sisters, those in need. And secondly, we have that other eye on our supernatural destiny of heaven. Now, people usually talk about modern Catholic social teaching.
that's a good phrase because it's really since 1891, the year that Pope Leo XIII published the first great social encyclical. We'll be talking about the meaning of social encyclicals in about two minutes from now, but it's really the last 130 years that we've had this tradition of modern Catholic social teaching. Popes publishing encyclicals, bishops'conferences, writing very important pastoral letters.
about peace and social justice, you might ask yourself the question, well, what were we doing for 1800 years? Why didn't the early church or the medieval church or the early modern church until 1891? Why didn't they have some social concerns?
Well, the answer is obvious. They did. They just didn't have the language or the means.
An encyclical is a modern genre of literature. They didn't have those ways of expressing their concern for the poor, their concern for peace, their concern for good social order, and all the themes we're about to talk about over the next hour or so. So from the very beginning of the church. Anybody listening to the words of Jesus in the four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, could not help but notice of his concern for the poor, his closeness with the poor, his identification with anybody in need. Think of all the great parables, like the parable of the Good Samaritan, the parable of the Last Judgment, whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me, and so many other selections of the Beatitudes, blessed are the poor.
So, We knew that if we're followers of Jesus, we must care about justice, about poverty, and practice charity. For many centuries, until really the 1800s, charity seemed to be enough, appealing to people to do the right thing, appealing to people to, in their conscience, share their wealth with the poor. The economy wasn't that complicated.
There weren't, you know, large factories. factories or mass production. It was local people, whether they lived on farms or the medieval fiefs, etc. It was neighbor to neighbor assistance.
And then I think everyone knows the story of the Industrial Revolution, the 1700s, the first factories. And by the way, Massachusetts, if you're zooming in from Massachusetts, the leading state, I think, in the early Industrial Revolution on this side of the Atlantic. On the other side of the Atlantic, Industrial powers like Germany and England and France and Italy started building factories and mass production. And suddenly there were people displaced from the land, no longer was farming the major productive enterprise. And so all of a sudden we had a very complex economic system.
We had a very we had a need for wealth to be distributed better. We had workers whose livelihood was very precarious if they were working in a factory. They had long hours and low pay, really starvation wages before the age of labor unions, organized labor.
There was a great need for somebody to champion the workers of Europe and North America, the industrialized parts of the world. One of those factors, one of those agents of help for the workers turned out to be the Roman Catholic Church. By the late 1800s, we had great bishops in Germany.
thinking of Bishop von Kettler in Mainz, Germany, or in England, Cardinal Henry Edward Manning, and even on this side of the Atlantic here, Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore, started siding with the workers and urging the church to take the side of the oppressed workers in factories, etc. So that was the beginning, we call that social Catholicism of the 19th century, that movement of the church to stop being apathetic. to really take sides and to stand up for social justice, even the scales of power between the owners of big capital, of factories, and the employees who had really no power in the system.
So that was the beginning of the era of modern Catholic social teaching. Our church got organized and it started standing up for the phrase social justice, which doesn't replace charity, neighbor-to-neighbor assistance, one-to-one, giving freely and voluntarily. but it complements charity, complements justice, social justice, complements charity.
We do things out of the kindness of our heart on a one-off basis, but we also want to change the world, restructure the world, to make it a place that's fairer, more peaceful, with a better social order. And just a few more paragraphs of preliminary material, our foundational material. One thing to keep in mind is that the Catholic Church doesn't attempt to make a blueprint for the entire economy.
No pope has ever said, I've got the perfect economic system, and I'm going to impose it on you, all right? The church actually is quite modest. If you read through all the documents of Catholic social teaching, there's a certain modesty.
The expertise of, what, economists and the secretary of labor or heads of state, prime ministers, presidents, because... They obviously know more about the economy than any, you know, leader of the church. The leaders of the church have a division of labor and they take care of spiritual health. but they have their eye on material health as well without aspiring to know everything about it.
So John Paul II, our Pope at the end of the 20th century, said this wonderful sentence, the church does not seek to impose its teachings on the outside world. It only seeks to propose ways of achieving justice, not impose, forcing, but propose, offering up good ideas, candidates, appealing ideals and virtues that all people should follow, such as cutting down on greed and sharing the wealth and distributing wealth to all people and not just a very few people. So that's a very important baseline.
The church has, at least in our last century or so, has respected the boundaries of church and state, has not sought to overwhelm people outside the church. We live in a pluralistic society, the United States of America, amazing pluralism. The Catholic population, somewhere around 22 or 24 percent, could never impose its will on all the people. The idea is to cooperate in a social cooperation and the Catholic social teaching message, to spread that message and to offer it as advice, as a set of principles that people can live up to if they're good people of good conscience. All right.
And. One way of summarizing that point is Catholic social teaching is not really an answer provider, doesn't have an answer to every question about the economy or about peace. It's not an answer giver. It's a value raiser.
Very often there are questions. Are we doing enough for the poor? Are we protecting migrants and refugees? Are we doing everything we can to bring about peace? Wouldn't it be wonderful if countries cooperated more?
that would bring about peace and reconciliation. These are the values, the types of values, and we'll see more coming up, that the Catholic social teaching tradition seeks to share with the rest of the world. And since I mentioned documents, I'm going to hold up a couple of documents. These are my visuals. They're easy enough.
So if you're as old as me or maybe a little older, you might remember that the church used to produce a lot of pamphlets. So... Church teaching documents in pamphlet form. And many of those documents were documents of Catholic social teaching.
There's about 15 papal documents in this category. Here's one that was published by Pope John XXIII way back in 1961. It's called Christianity and Social Progress. The Latin words are Mater et Magistra.
So you might have a copy of this on your shelf if you go back as far as 1961. Here's another one. Again, it's a pamphlet form. It was printed in paper, not high-tech, not online, not before the age of the web. This is Pope Paul VI's great social encyclical in 1968. In Latin, it's called Populorum Progressio.
You see the Latin at the bottom line there. And in English, On the Development of Peoples. So there's another excellent one.
John Paul II published three documents like this. Here's the one called On Human Work. laborum exertions in the original latin it dates from 1981. so you might have some of those and by the way more recently the the large there's a larger format about twice the size this is pope benedict's uh caritas in veritate or charity in truth from the year 2009. so that's just a couple of visuals of uh documents that you might have on your shelf if you are in the habit of buying things and pope of buying church documents and now they're all posted on the vatican website Pope Francis has had two social encyclicals. I'll hold up my copy of Laudato Si'on the environment. We're going to visit this again in sessions two and three.
Laudato Si'in 2015. And do I have the other one? Here. And the most recent encyclical from Pope Francis from 2020, Fratelli Tutti, Brothers and Sisters All.
And it's a really good encyclical. Again, the year 2020. So you can Read them. They're getting thicker over time. But those are some of the encyclicals.
And by the way, you can find books where they're all bound together. Here's a copy of about 10 encyclicals bound together. They're almost a thousand pages.
I use this in my courses with graduate students, especially. So it's Catholic social teaching. The documents all bound together.
You've got to have a lot of time to read through all of them. But hopefully my students are supposed to anyway. And I finally, though, my last. prop for a few moments anyway, is I was so delighted at the title of this series, which somebody else, some brilliant person chose. It wasn't me.
The title of the series is Our Best Kept Secret, the best kept secret of the church, Catholic social teaching. I am holding up a book that was published way back around 1980 called Our Best Kept Secret. It was published by a Jesuit think tank in Washington called the Center of Concern. And I was an intern there in the middle 1980s.
And I knew about this book. I probably stole this copy of the book. I was in charge of packaging these and mailing them out when somebody placed an order. Back then we had checks and mail orders and traveler's checks and things would come in. And I would be the guy that would pack up copies of Our Best Kept Secret or OBKS for short.
So it's amazing that the series is called Our Best Kept Secret. I support that completely. Okay.
So I think we're getting close to breaking into our themes, but not quite yet. I want to make a few further points. Everything I've said so far about the documents. roughly 15 papal encyclicals on social justice, those social encyclicals. They're all published by popes and then a few documents from the Second Vatican Council, synods of bishops, national conferences of bishops like the U.S.
Conference of Catholic Bishops. But, you know, that's official Catholic social teaching. There's also a category that I really love, and it's unofficial Catholic social teaching. You don't have to be a pope or a bishop to write something good, or maybe even to give a video presentation about Catholic social teaching.
Any layperson, male or female, young or old, it could be somebody like a newspaper writer might write an excellent article about Catholic social teaching or any aspect of justice, and that might be a perfect example of unofficial Catholic social teaching. One of my favorite writers is Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker way back in 1933, and she lived until a ripe old age in the 1980s, and she is now, her path to canonization has possibly been opened up recently. So she wrote lots of things, books, books and books and articles, and I consider her a great writer of Catholic social, unofficial Catholic social teaching. So just keep that in mind as we work through these themes.
And my last preliminary note is about what are the sources of Catholic social teaching. If a Pope decides it's time to publish another encyclical on social justice, from what sources does he draw? So not just the Pope, but maybe his advisors who help him put it together. This long document usually takes a team of writers.
They typically look at four things. And you're familiar with all four of these. I'll just have a sentence or two about each one.
First, scripture. They turn to the Bible and especially the New Testament, the words of Jesus about social justice, about charity, about caring for neighbor. Maybe it's the parables.
Maybe it's the prophets from the Old Testament calling for social justice against the establishment if it's become oppressive. So scripture is a really deep source. A second source is tradition.
As Catholics, we believe that it wasn't just, you know, God's revelation didn't end the day that the last gospel writer. finished his gospel, Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, or St. Paul finished writing his letters, or the book of Revelation was finalized. God continues to reveal brilliant thoughts to saints, doctors of the church down through the ages, and church people too, like popes and bishops and unofficial authors of Catholic social teaching, male and female, lay and clerical. So tradition, so besides scripture, we have tradition, a growing body of understandings. by theologians, by writers, by church officials.
A third source of Catholic social teaching is reason. So I always say this to my students, the best part of the human body is the gray matter of the brain. I think that's true, more or less.
We are able to reason our way from premises to conclusions. If we figure out ways, here's an example of the just war theory. It's a product, not of the Bible, it's not even in the Bible, but of reason. Over the years, great teachers like St. Augustine in the first millennium, St. Thomas Aquinas in the second millennium, and many other thinkers in the church and beyond, have put together rational ways of limiting warfare, of criteria to limit when people resort to war and when they are fighting a war, to respect civilians, to make sure it's a last resort, and all kinds of rules, constraints on war. That's a product of reason.
And it's a good thing that we have using the gray matter of our brain to figure out the ways of pursuing peace, limiting violence and war, and of course, pursuing social justice. in the economy and politics, et cetera. So we did scripture, tradition, and reason.
The fourth source of Catholic social teaching is experience. We're learning from experience. Sometimes we learn from, I don't know, political scientists, economists, I don't know, psychologists. So social sciences, hard sciences, like physics and biology and chemistry. But we also learn from like little experiments that we have.
Your parish might start a program. We call that pastoral planning. Let's try to meet the needs of people in need locally here.
And after a year, we'll evaluate our program. Maybe it's a soup kitchen or a shelter or a clothing bank or something. And we'll see if it's working. And then we'll do more pastoral planning to make it better next year. That's called the circle of praxis or sometimes it's called the hermeneutical circle.
I call it. The see, judge, act spiral. It's like a spiral.
You see, you observe the situation, you judge, you make some judgments. Oh, we need a program or we should do something about this. That's a judgment. And then you act, you commit resources and actually get out of your comfortable cocoon to actually accomplish some things.
See, judge, and act. And every turn of the circle, it's more like a spiral, gets better and better. You're climbing to more and more adequate programs.
That's the idea of a spiral. getting better over time. Those steps, see, judge, and act, really are the method, the methodology of Catholic social teaching.
All those popes who write encyclicals and promulgate them and publish them, they've gone through a process of see, judge, and act themselves before publishing that encyclical. See a problem, discern, figure out what's wrong, maybe have a little diagnosis of a social problem, then make a judgment. This is what the world needs.
These principles need to be emphasized. Let's write an encyclical, let's act, and then put it into practice. Let's implement it. Let's apply these lessons to the real world and send out suggestions for what dioceses and parishes can and should do to follow up on these words. So they're not just words, they're actions as well.
Okay, so there's your primer. There's your background foundations. Now we're ready.
for the theme. So I'm going to request the slide from my tech person here, put the slide up of the six themes that we're going to cover today. And by the way, once again, if that slide is too big or too small, you can put your cursor at the right side of it and you can make it bigger by sliding it towards the right, or you can make it smaller, see me bigger if you want, by sliding it to the left. So if you want to see my face or you want to see the slide bigger, you've got control over that by...
by your cursor. Okay. So what are the six foundational things? We're going to spend about five or six minutes on each of these, and then I'll take your questions shortly after the top of the hour.
So just to say them out loud in case you have trouble with your screen. The first one we're going to treat now is the dignity of every human person and the idea of human rights. The second theme or the B on this list are the collective ideas, solidarity, common good. and participation.
The third theme is family life. The fourth theme, here's the hardest word I'm going to use all night. It's a jawbreaker.
It doesn't go through a spell check. Subsidiarity and the proper role of government. I promise to explain that in full.
You've never seen the word subsidiarity either. Fifth theme we're going to look at today is property ownership in modern society and to own property, to be an owner of what? capital or anything, bank account investments, means that you have both rights and responsibilities to use your property wisely, prudently, and generously.
And my final theme for tonight, it's the sixth on this list, is the dignity of work, the rights of workers, and support for labor unions. And I'll walk you through a little bit of the church history with those things, okay? And by the way, just to give you, you'll get a slide later on these, but Just to mention, next time we have four further themes, I'll just mention them briefly.
Seventh theme is colonialism and economic development. The eighth theme is peace and disarmament. The ninth theme is the option for the poor and vulnerable.
And my final theme next week, it will be care for the natural environment. We'll talk about Pope Francis as well. Okay, so there's your 10 themes. And by the way, if you have studied Catholic social teaching, in some other place, maybe you took a college course on it, or even a high school course on it, or you've gone to the bishop's website, it's unitedstatesconferenceofcatholicbishops.org, usccb.org.
You will find a listing of themes that is slightly different than mine. I think one version they had seven themes, another time they had nine themes. In fact, in this book, there are 14 themes.
Our Best Kept Secret has 14 themes from the Center of Concern 30 years ago. That doesn't mean that I'm cheating you out of any themes. Different authors combine them in various ways or pull them apart.
So somewhere between seven and 14 themes is roughly what most authors do. I've chosen these 10. I don't rebut other options. It's okay to combine them in different ways.
Okay, so are you ready for the first theme? Let's talk for a while, five minutes or so, about human dignity. This is the foundation of Catholic social teaching.
And just think of how easily we lift this theme from the Gospels. Jesus treated everyone he encountered. with great dignity, even people who were outcasts, members of the Canaanites or the Phoenicians or the Syrians who surrounded Israel.
He wouldn't treat anybody like an enemy. Everybody was dignified, worthy of even performing miracles to heal the daughter of Nahum and the daughter of a Syrophoenician woman. He did great miracles.
And I have to You try to think of why this member of the house of Israel, an Israelite, would care about people of other nations. I suspect Jesus was looking back very strongly to, of course, the Hebrew scriptures, the only scripture that there was when Jesus was first around, and its great regard for human dignity. Go back to the book of Genesis, where God created the first two, Adam and Eve, called them good. wanted them to be fruitful and multiply because he created each person in the image and likeness of God. Okay, now that's metaphorical language doesn't mean that everybody like if you don't have a beard, you can still be in the image and likeness of God.
I grew the beard just so I'd be as close as possible. I'm just kidding. But all people, just whatever the diversity of what bodily forms, ethnicities, languages, faith traditions, there's no exception. Everybody.
has dignity. Then we get to some hard cases. What about when someone has committed a terrible crime, even murder?
Should we kill that person, have capital punishment, the death penalty? And the Catholic Church has, at least in recent decades, we've developed our teaching away from the permissibility of capital punishment, although that was the case many decades ago, but in a definitive way since the age of John Paul II. We've said, Nothing you do can forfeit your human dignity and your right to life. Nobody is justified in taking a life. Now, you could say an innocent life, and that gets complicated, doesn't it?
What about in war? There's an enemy combatant who's about to kill either you or, more pointedly, other innocent people who are not armed. So if you're a soldier for one side, can you kill the soldier on the other side?
This is getting ahead of ourselves. We'll treat... war and peace next week. But these questions of justified killing are never easy, but defending all human life as much as possible, respecting the dignity of all people, and that includes from conception to natural death. And so the church has taken some very strong, and I have to say, often unpopular stands against abortion, against euthanasia at the end of life, so-called mercy killing.
Our lives are in God's hands. God determined who we are and how we live our lives and how long our lives should be. So the church has stood up, again, unpopularly in some cases, for the universal concern and respect for all people. And there's a rationale behind it, the imago dei, the image of God that is in all people.
Now, you might hear people who are not Christian or religious at all. Talk about human dignity. And in fact, you see that second word there under letter A, human rights.
Human rights language is basically a secular, non-religious language for talking about the dignity, the worth of people. People possess rights, a right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That's in our Declaration of Independence.
The French, in the year 1790, the French Revolution had the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and they had their list of rights. The United Nations on December 10th, 1948. Oh, hold on. The 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is coming up on December 10th. I may go down to the United Nations, it's only 10 miles from here, and join those celebrations for the 75th anniversary of that great human rights instrument, we call it. In any case, secular language of human rights is good, kind of a pioneer, and I feel that the Catholic Church's use of human rights Although more recent, we didn't really use that phrase until the 1960s.
Pope John XXIII wrote Pacem in Terris, a great encyclical in 1963, giving the Catholic version. It's sometimes called the Catholic Charter of Human Rights. So we were latecomers to this idea of human rights.
But I believe that the Catholic version of human rights is a very satisfying account because the rights are lodged in people by God alone and nobody else, no human. can take away the rights or the life of anybody else. Again, there are complicated factors like killing and self-defense or killing and warfare. We'll get to those later. But that is the satisfying version of human rights grounded in our very picture of the universe, God's creation, our response to that gift of grace, and of course, our response of love to all of our neighbors.
We should never think of hurting another person. much less taking their lives. Okay, so that's a pretty good picture of human rights and human dignity.
I think it's a familiar concept. And just for you to know, it's the foundation of Catholic social teaching, trying to figure out ways to treat people with the full dignity to accord them the dignity that they deserve by the nature of being created in the image of God. All right, take a breath. We're ready for the second theme.
And the second theme, solidarity. common good and participation is really the inverse of the first theme. I actually think of it as a scale.
If you emphasize theme one, the first theme, it gets too individual. It's all about my rights and my dignity and those things. But it needs to be balanced, and it's not impossible to achieve a perfect balance with the community. It's not all about me.
In other words, that's a common phrase, right? It's about our life together in community. Ideally, the community serves individuals, protecting their rights and dignity, and the individual contributes to the community, even to the point of making sacrifices.
Every time you pay your taxes, you're making a sacrifice for the common good. That's part of the second theme. What did I always say?
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization. Okay, so. The idea that we're all in this together is the communal aspect. And the phrase we have, and it comes from the Greek sumpharon and from the Latin bonum commune, is the common good in English. All languages have their own version of this phrase, the common good.
Looking out not just for number one, but for everybody. Having a kind of a charitable perspective, an attitude of care, of solidarity. of recognizing how we're in this together, we have a stake in the well-being of everyone else, and nothing should take away from that.
I'm going to give you a vivid example, though, of how this gets into a debate very quickly. And you have to do a thought experiment. Imagine with me for just a moment in your mind's eye, an elderly couple, say they're grandparents, and all their children are long-grown.
And maybe they have no grandchildren, but there's nobody in their entire family that's in school, a public or Catholic or private, et cetera. And when they receive their tax bill, the real estate taxes, you have local taxes, wherever you are, I'm sure, to pay for the school system, they open up the envelope and they grumble. The husband and the wife grumble together. Why do we have to pay this? It goes to the schools.
We have no stake in the schools. Our kids are through school. I don't care. I hope the schools, I don't care what happens to the school. I hope that you can see how ridiculous that argument is.
Although I can understand it on one level, if they're short on money and everything, nobody likes to pay taxes more than they have to. But it's so easy to justify those kinds of taxes that people pay in order. to support the common good.
A healthy, well-funded school system is part of the conditions of the common good that we all benefit from, not just one person. We share those goods in common. And by the way, I can make a pretty good argument that even an elderly couple with no relatives in the school system, that they have a stake in a good school system, having an educated electorate, for example, smart people around them, leading to all kinds of things that they do. benefit from good public works, et cetera.
So all of those elements of the common good, and I could go through a much longer list than just schools. Think of public parks. We all enjoy the parks together or not at all, right? If there's no green space near you, everybody in the neighborhood suffers. Or here's a broader one, national defense.
If our country didn't have some defense, we'd be at the mercy of, I don't know, dictators, Hitlers, Putins. And we would all suffer together. And so we pool our taxes.
We spend, we send some of it to the Pentagon, maybe too much of it. You could argue either way. But civil defense, national defense is a common good.
We all chip in and we all benefit it from together. So common good, anything that's beyond my private good is a common good, not being selfish. And it's kind of the answer to the question that God asked Cain after he slayed Abel, or Cain responded to God.
God said to him, where is your brother Abel? Cain had just killed him. Am I my brother's keeper? Cain said. Well, what's the proper answer to that question?
The answer is yes. We are the keepers, the guardians of our brothers and sisters universally, and not just in our country. We have obligations to all people because of that word there right after the letter B on the slide, solidarity. It's a key word of Catholic social teaching. And to tell you the truth, it was really what Pope Francis was getting at in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti.
The Italian words there mean we are all siblings, brothers and sisters, all, without exception. And as you know, Pope Francis, we'll get to this in session three, two weeks from now, cares greatly, especially greatly for refugees because they have the least. So those are what I've done in the last five minutes in talking about The second theme, solidarity and common good, is to smuggle in some social theory, whether you knew it or not. It's not just biblical stuff. It's not just Roman Catholic theology.
It's really an entire underlying theory of society, of our common destiny. We came from the same source. God gave us gifts in common.
We'll get to that when we get to property in a few moments. And we have to act responsibly and care for all people, safeguard their well-being, share with them, and sometimes make sacrifices for the well-being of all. Get beyond our selfish calculus and care about other people. The final word there under theme two or letter B is participation. And I just want to emphasize that everybody has a right, every member of the social community, whether a national community or a local community.
to participate in the political system that could include voting and in the economic system in various ways, whether you're a worker or a manager or an employer or an owner of capital, of factories, of firms, you have a right to participate. And all too often workers get sidelined. People with the least resources don't have a say in how a company is run or people in our political system are disenfranchised, are not allowed to vote, or their vote doesn't count for as much.
We have voter suppression, et cetera. So participation in the economy and in the political life, those are key parts that go with the common good and solidarity. Good.
I think we're doing very well. We've got about four more themes to go, about five minutes on each of those themes, and we'll be right on target. So the next theme, it's C on that slide there, the third. theme of our list of six for tonight, is probably the one that we can all relate to the most readily.
It's vivid. It's concrete. We come from families.
We're parts of families, families of origin, families that you have with a spouse, children or grandchildren, if God blesses you with that. What does the Catholic social teaching tradition say about family life? Well, it has some very interesting and I would say beautiful phrases to describe family life. My favorite, and it goes back 100 years nearly, is this phrase.
It's the family is the first cell. of society. It's like where an organism of society is a large organism, a human body or a whale or any large animal.
And every one of its cells contributes something as small as a cell is contributes to its common life. And that's where the vitality of society lies in its family. They see the word family familiar, the people who are familiar to us. Maybe there are parents who nurtured us, who gave birth to us, raised us, and taught us everything. They were our first teachers in the ways of faith.
Maybe it's siblings, maybe it's extended family like cousins, uncles, and aunts, or eventually grandchildren. These are the elements of family life, and that is aptly described as the first cell of society. A second beautiful phrase that the church has come up with to describe family life and its importance is, the domestic church.
So we belong to a parish that's a local church that's great with hundreds or even maybe thousands of people in any given parish. We belong to a diocese. We belong to a church in the United States.
We belong to the worldwide Catholic church with, I think it's 1.3 billion people or something. But the closest unit to us is the family. And that's where, again, the vitality is. That's where we learn.
virtues, the ways of love. That's where we expect to find love. What's the old definition? Family and home.
That's the place that they have to take you in, even if they don't want to. Hopefully, they always show up at their door. They will take you in.
We're guaranteed. So the bonds of family are sacred in the Catholic social teaching tradition. Parents have rights. By the way, children have rights too. And they are really entrusted with the really...
sacred duty of raising up future people, citizens of a country, members of a church, faithful believers, participants in civil society, as well as the economy and the government, etc. Okay, so the domestic church, that's where people learn their virtues. That's where people seek out their habits, their virtues like love.
And I believe that we all have an obligation to contribute to the well-being of families. We all have an obligation to keep an eye out for whether families have what they need to thrive. Do they have the resources? Maybe our government should do more to enact what we call family-friendly policies.
The accessibility of affordable daycare, child care for children so that parents can do other things, including be in the workplace. Do we have good education? Do we give people the policies like parental leave.
And so obviously we want to have maternity leave. Now we have paternity leave very often, but other kinds of leave to take care of aging parents. So sick leave and other kinds of discretionary leave.
These are the conditions that will make family life healthier, more feasible, and more readily so that we can all readily execute our responsibilities. So later in our series, we will talk about... Pope Francis's two synods on the family, 2014 and 15. And at the end of those two synods, he wrote up the results of these hundreds of bishops and others who gathered, talked about the health of family life, challenges to family life. And his long letter, it's one of the longest documents in church history, is called On Love in the Family, Amoris Laetitia.
So we'll get to that a couple of weeks from now. Okay, so I could talk forever about families and I'm sure you could too, but that is part. of Catholic social teaching, safeguarding the well-being of families and making sure they have the conditions like family-friendly public policies of governments to do what they can do. And hopefully your parish and your diocese, wherever you are, Catholic non-profits, the Catholic hospital system, everything, including graveyards, by the way, there's something that families benefit from, at least in the very long term. Catholic Church has always looked for ways to help people at every phase of life.
early in life education, later in life health care, and as I said, even dignified cemeteries. Okay, so now we're ready for the fourth of our six themes. This is the jawbreaker.
This is the one that doesn't go through spellcheck. It's the word subsidiarity. The word subsidiarity did not exist until the year 1931, when Pope Pius XI put it in, I think it was paragraph 90 of his encyclical, uh one of his encyclicals, which one was it? Oh, Quadragesimo Anno, the 40th year of Catholic social teaching. So in 1931, Pope Pius XI wanted to write about the order of society.
By the way, it was shortly after the stock market crash of 1929. It was 18 months later, and the Great Depression had just started. So he wanted, in both the United States and in Italy, where he was, and all over Europe, all over the world, and he wanted to... put the Catholic Church on record as being in favor of prosperity.
And let's watch out for the workers who are getting trampled and care for people and use government to alleviate the burdens of poverty on people, start programs, have policies like a minimum wage that was promoted in that letter as well. So in paragraph 90 of Quadragesimo Anno, Pope Pius XI put this word in there. It was originally in Latin. And the root word is subsidium, which means assistance. So the idea of subsidiarity is that all levels of society, the local, the regional, the national, even the universal level, think of the United Nations or global pacts and covenants and treaties, all the levels should help and assist, subsidiums assist each other.
They should all work together, a division of labor. And so we know how this works. It's just... common sense.
The national government from Washington, D.C. does not send garbage trucks into your neighborhood. They're controlled by your local municipality. Maybe it's a city, maybe it's a county, maybe it's just a small village or hamlet.
They take care of trash removal. You might go to the next level up if you're going to have like regional roads, state routes, bridges, tunnels. Those are usually on a state or at most regional level, taking care of the infrastructure and doing things like.
dredging ports and building bridges and tunnels. Those are regional things appropriate to a state or region. And then you've got some goods that have to get kicked up to the upper level because they're national in scope. The building of the interstate highway system back in the 1950s under President Eisenhower, there's a good example.
And I mentioned national defense. There are plenty of things that only a national government can do, but there are also many things that a local government can actually do better because it's closer to the people. This is not brain surgery. It's really a common sense approach to dividing up the labor of getting good things done.
So we want cooperation. We want each level that I just mentioned to respect the other levels. And by the way, it's not all about government. Local nonprofit organizations, voluntary associations, you know, they have a role to play. We call this The institutions of civil society, not controlled by the government, not really part of the formal economy.
It's not about production and distribution and investment, but ways that people invest their time, ways that people volunteer to do good work, humanitarian good works for other people. So think of voluntary associations that you might be a part of. Many of them are based in the Catholic Church. I'm so proud of our church. St. Vincent de Paul Societies.
Catholic Charities at every level, on the local level and the national level, Catholic Charities USA, coordinating these things, some of them concerned with poverty alleviation or health care or emergency relief, disaster relief, like Catholic Relief Services. I'm a member of the Jesuit Order, so we have the Jesuit Refugee Service internationally taking care of refugees all parts of the world. These are all civil society, not part of government, but government too.
has its role to play at all those levels. In the United States, we call this federalism. We have a federal system. The states have certain power and the counties and municipalities have certain duties.
And Pius XI, way back in 1931, said that it would be imprudent. It would be a really a disaster, he said. It would be an offense against good order for any one level to dominate the others. They have to work together, respect each other.
And that's how good social outcomes come. Social coordination, social cooperation. Popes have been very optimistic that this can go well.
And as a matter of fact, Pope Francis in this, again, the most recent social encyclical from the year 2020 in Fratelli Tutti, he has an entire chapter on the bases of social cooperation and subsidiarity plays a major role. Is that clear enough? I think that's a really important part of Catholic social teaching.
It makes sense. It's kind of a common sense insight, but it's one that should not be overlooked. And I just want to add one final note on this fourth theme, subsidiarity.
Sometimes some commentators take it too far in either direction. So there are people who think that everything should be controlled by the centralized government, or after all, it's more efficient. Washington, D.C., they have more power.
By the way, they do. The Internal Revenue Service is a pretty powerful group. The Pentagon is a pretty powerful group. The U.S. Department of Labor, pretty powerful. They get things done.
They have ways of distributing resources, et cetera. We need them, but not at the expense of local autonomy. So there's a certain level of local autonomy respecting the states and the municipalities. So that's one end of the spectrum.
people who are overly enthusiastic about national solutions at the upper top level. They're in favor of centralization. The other end of the spectrum are the extreme localists who maybe they're just suspicious of the federal government.
They had a bad experience. They don't like red tape. Sometimes Washington has a lot of red tape, federal programs.
So they are radical localists. We call this defensive localism and they distrust anything. that's outside of maybe the local city hall. And they believe in minimal government. And that's just going too far.
And you could find popes throughout these papal encyclicals on social justice, talking about what I call the sensible center. One end of the spectrum hates the centralized solutions. The other one overly relies on centralized solutions. The sensible center, where we balance these two levels, and many other levels as well, that's where The center of gravity of Catholic social teaching has always lied.
Okay, so I think we've done justice to subsidiarity. You've learned a new word. Again, see if it goes through spellcheck.
It never works for me. I have to double check the word subsidiarity. It's still a very valuable thing, nearly 100 years after it was founded. Okay, you're ready for the last two.
Now, these fifth and sixth themes for today, property and work. They get a little complicated. I'll try to keep it on the simple level. We don't need to solve all the world problems.
We can't. And by the way, to any of the claims that I've made, you could probably think of objections. Maybe I overemphasize subsidiary.
Maybe I didn't get a family quite right. Maybe the Catholic Church documents didn't quite hit the right balance for your satisfaction. Look at the first two themes. Maybe you're more of an individualist, so you like the first theme. uh persons and you in human rights individual level and maybe you're not so up on the communal level the second theme solidarity common good participation there's a balance to be struck objections are very often reasonable and the ideal of catholic social teaching is not that we pretend we have all the answers and we impose them on others but that we are learning we're we're journeying along the way uh revising our understanding of society and people and institutions that support people.
And it changes over time. As a matter of fact, I think the first thing I'm going to say now about property ownership is to remind us how much the idea of property has changed over time. If you were born even before the year 1900, your idea of property was probably land, real estate, in most cases, arable farming land, agriculture, because really until the last century, most people on the earth were farmers. And most of what anybody owned, the productive assets were land, were good crops, arable land where crops could be raised. So that was the model of property way back.
As a matter of fact, if you go far back enough in history, money, monetary units, currency, were actually quite rare. Many people, the Romans had coins, the Greeks had coins, but Most of trade was barter. Oh, I'll give you three chickens if you give me a sheaf of wheat or whatever the bargaining was. Most people rarely touched coins or any kind of currency until recent centuries.
So property started as land. Then it became other tangible assets. We started getting some technology, artisans, industrialization, the late medieval ages.
forging metals in large amounts, having factories that could mass produce goods on assembly lines. So property became capital investment, the ability to invest in somebody's factory or industry or company. And we had joint stock companies, et cetera.
We had stocks or Wall Street and other places where stocks were traded. So then it became money. and either tangible assets or intangible assets.
Think of what is the major property these days. I'll bet that there's more value in technology. We call this intellectual property, ownership of computer programs, coding, or just today, I think it was the Apple company announced, Apple, what's it called? iPhone 15. I'll never get one.
Or all these high-tech things. That's where the money is these days. That's where the understanding of the property, that's the center of gravity these days. So just as Catholic social teaching is always evolving, changing, getting more adequate to the times, updating itself, so does the notion of property ownership. And ownership is really a bundle of rights.
I own something, I can control the use of it. But of course, there are exceptions. The right to property is not absolute.
Every Pope from Leo XIII... 130 years ago to the present, emphasized that the right to property, although important, it's part of Catholic social teaching. It's our belief that the natural law means that we can own property. It's good for people to do that.
It brings order in society, so nobody shirks their duties if all property was common. But it's not absolute. The right to private property is relative, not absolute. If you run a bakery, and you have a monopoly on all the bread in a town, and the other people in that town are starving, they may be able to make the case, those hungry, starving people, that they have a right to seize some of your bread because you're hoarding it. More frequently, think of the global south, where only a few people seem to own all the arable land, a cause for land reform for the peasants or the campesinos, to use another word, have rebelled over time, hopefully not violently, but have pressed their charge for land reform to more widely distribute the land.
Because after all, God gave us the earth in common, and it was meant to support the livelihood of all people. This is a phrase that's always in the documents of Catholic social teaching. The phrase is the universal destination of material goods, the universal destination.
of creation. God gave us the land. God gave us all kinds of resources, fish in the ocean to eat, arable land to till, forests, ores to mine and to make metal. All of those things are gifts to God, to humankind in common, and we have a responsibility to share it.
So I hope I've given you I'm about halfway through theme five now. I hope I've given you a balanced picture of the rights of property, which are important. If you work hard and you get some money or you get some land and you buy something, your personal effects, that belongs to you. But at the same time, if you do accumulate great wealth, then you have a responsibility to use that wealth for the wellbeing of other people, especially if you're monopolizing the wealth in such a way.
that you cut off other people from the means of satisfying their basic needs. John Paul II put it so well, I think it was in 1981, when he said in the encyclical, I had it right here, in the encyclical Laborum Exertiens, that all private property exists under a social mortgage. There's John Paul II, and there's the encyclical where he said that, Laborum Exertiens on human work.
Private property exists under a social mortgage. If you've ever had a mortgage, you know that that house that's still under a mortgage doesn't just belong to you. It's not free and clear. You still have to keep paying your mortgage payments to the bank.
And until you clear that, the house is, in a sense, co-owned. All property is, in a sense, co-owned. You cannot monopolize it in such a way that others are cut off from the chance. of supporting their livelihood. There's that phrase again, the universal destination of material goods.
Okay. So I think I've made most of my claims here. It's somewhat controversial. Some people accuse the popes, even though I think they're very nuanced, very careful in what they say, the way they balance those rights and responsibility of property.
Some people have always accused them of being socialist or communist or not respecting private property. And it's an ongoing debate. You know, are the bishops, are the popes overly socialistic?
Well. I would say this. They are appealing with the principles like universal destination of material goods of all created goods. They're appealing to our conscience to consider not just my self-interest, but the good, the interests of all, the common good that we all share. So careful balance, accusations fly all over the place, but I think the principles are clear, even though it's hard to know exactly how to apply them, for example.
Does my right to property, my own property, mean that I can't be taxed, whether that's income tax or property tax or any excise tax, purchase tax, sales tax? Well, obviously not. That's the way governments raise money and support the common good.
The level of taxation, there's another question. And again, members of the Catholic Church as church leaders don't pretend to have all the technical details to. dictate to any government exactly what the tax rate should be.
But they do stand for the principle that those who own the most, those who earn the most, have a duty to pay a higher share. And we call that progressive taxation. The United States has progressive taxation.
Almost every country on Earth that I know of has progressive taxation. It's sensible. It's fair. It's common sense.
So I think we are ready. We're in our last five minutes of my presentation. So get those questions in mind. We're up to my final theme, the dignity of work, the rights of workers, and support for labor unions.
I've pretty much tipped my hand already on the content of Catholic social teaching on this bundle of concerns. Everybody has dignity, and that includes dignity in the workplace. The workplace should never be a place of humiliation, should never be a place where all the power is. you know, centered at the top of the pyramid. Workers should be listened to. There's that word participation from theme two all the way down here in theme six.
People should have their rights in the workplace respected. They should be treated with dignity. And by the way, that includes working conditions like safety. We have the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, OSHA.
It's a federal department, but every state has their own local OSHA offices too, to make sure that the workplace is not dangerous. In the early days of the Industrial Revolution, 150 years ago, lots of workers lost limbs or blinded or lost their hearing to overly loud or dangerous machines, get caught up in the gears, and nobody was there to protect them until laws were passed. So the dignity of work and the rights of workers to free, to safe employment practices, that's a bedrock part, not just of Catholic social teaching, but really of any humanistic. approach to the world of work.
Fair conditions for workers, all types of workers. There are white-collar workers. I'm a professor myself. There are blue-collar workers, people who don't work with paper in offices, but maybe they work on a factory, or they work in service jobs, or in the hospitality industry, or restaurants. These are service work, and it's extremely important.
During the pandemic, I think we got a new appreciation for the... really core service workers whose service, they put themselves on the line. Think of nurses in hospitals.
Every day they tempted fate by being around people with COVID. Those were the essential workers. And by the way, as a professor, I didn't consider myself an essential worker, but I did use this very Zoom screen to teach for a couple of semesters from here, wanting not to spread the disease myself. So, okay, what else do we want to say about, oh, the final piece of the worker picture. Actually, there's two more pieces.
One is support for labor unions. Many people are surprised at how strongly every Pope, since Pope Leo in 1891, has gone on record as supporting labor unions. Labor unions are a human right. It's the right to free association, to coordinate with your fellow workers, so you're not competing with them in the job contract, the chase for better wages.
not to compete with them, but to have collective bargaining, to bargain together. It gives you more power to balance the scales of power between employers and employees. Otherwise, the bosses have all the power. They could set the wage contract and workers are totally out of, really have no bargaining power at all.
Pope Francis reiterated this in a speech he gave to a group of Italian workers a couple of years ago. And he said it brilliantly. Without unions, the workplace will not be a place of justice.
Very clear message of support for unions. Unions are not perfect. Unions have discriminated against probably women, probably ethnic minorities in the past. They've been sources of corruption. People resent paying their union dues.
There's all kinds of arguments against unions, but the positives greatly outweigh them, according to Catholic social teaching. It's a guarantee. It's a method.
of guaranteeing justice. And I think my last piece about work, human labor, is we don't have an answer to this, but wouldn't it be wonderful, the question is, wouldn't it be great if we developed a full-throated spirituality of labor, a spiritual understanding of the meaning of human work, how work is good for us, not just a drudgery or toil or humiliation, how work allows us to express ourselves almost artistically. Not every job is an artistic, creative job, but many of them are. And workers in all walks of life find ways to visualize their contribution to the larger community.
John Paul II had a couple of paragraphs about a spirituality of labor in his 1981 encyclical on human labor, Le Boron Exertions. He never really developed it. I would love to see some theologian, maybe I'll have to do it, work out a spiritual understanding of labor and its place in our lives. And we have little seeds of that. But I believe that we can look back at Jesus himself, the carpenter from Nazareth, he was called, right?
Somebody who had some skills. You learned him from his father, Joseph, who was called a technon, a fashioner, could be woodworker, could be any kind of artisan. But Joseph worked with his hands, and Jesus probably followed in his footsteps before his public ministerial life at the end of his life, the last three years or so. So creativity, spirituality, finding meaning in our work, those are kind of an unfinished agenda of this part of Catholic social teaching.
All right. So that is the end of my formal presentation. I would like to tell the organizers that I kept my promise.
to end at exactly 8.10 Eastern time. And I hope that everybody could follow all of that. I got a little horse there, but I think we're in good shape.
And now we are ready to take the questions. And we also have some slides coming up too. But for now, the important thing, I'm not the only person to remind you of this. Tell us a little bit more, Bonnie, about the questions. Well, we have quite a few, Father.
We have 11. And so we should get started. But first of all, thank you. That was the- fascinating presentation.
Lots to think about, lots to digest, and I look forward to next two weeks as well. Let's start off with Joan, and she says, I'm trying to track down a late 19th century encyclical that said that all of our wealth that we do not need belongs to our sisters and brothers in justice, not just charity. That is Rerum Novarum.
So I said that in 1891, Pope Leo XIII, he was a very learned Pope, by the way. His brother was a Jesuit priest who helped him write some of that stuff, by the way. So Pope Leo XIII, his original name was Giacchino Pecci. He was from northern Italy.
So Rerum Novarum, I'm going to spell it, R-E-R-U-M, and then N-O-V-A-R-U-M. Those two Latin words mean literally of new things. The first two Latin words of the document give the title.
And so the first sentence was, oh, wait, I can read it. Wait a minute. Why do I have to try to memorize it and tax my brain? This is the book I teach from for Rerum Novarum. Here's the first sentence.
And I'm going to give you the English translation, but you'll be able to tell that it's about new things. Okay. First page. Can I find the first page? Here it is.
Okay. Here's what Leo XIII wrote in Rerum Novarum. First line. It is not surprising. that the spirit of revolutionary change, there's Rerum Novarum, which has long been predominant in the nations of the world, should have passed beyond politics and made its influence felt in the cognate field of practical economy.
So exactly what your questioner said, economy involves the sharing of goods. So our surplus goods, those who've compiled large bank accounts and, I don't know, magnates of industry, captains of industry. had an obligation, Leo was saying. to share their wealth. And by the way, that's not original to Pope Leo.
Go all the way back to the patristic era, the first four or five centuries of church time. Many of those people, St. Ambrose of Milan, St. Augustine of Hippo, I think that quote actually came from St. John Chrysostom, that our surplus goods belong to the poor. If you've got too many goods that you can't even count how many cars and clothing and whatever you have.
you should be sharing that as a matter of justice and as a matter of charity. So thank you. Good question.
Okay. And a second question from Joan, a comment. I have a theory that Jews are more comfortable with doing justice, Catholics, Christians with doing charity. I think Catholics are more comfortable with Mother Teresa than they are with Dorothy Day. Hebrew scriptures are filled with directions to do justice and gospels seem to be more centered on charity.
Am I wrong? Um, it's a good question. Um, I'm a both and guy. So in the Catholic tradition, you heard me say justice and charity serve each other.
They go together. Uh, boy, how much do I know about the Jewish tradition? I do know this, the Hebrew word for justice is Seda car, right? So it comes from a root SDQ, say doc.
So the right thing to do and doing justice in the Hebrew tradition is similar to the Greek tradition that we really inherit. Giving to each person what they have due, what they have coming to them, what is just, a right apportionment. Remember this, when the ancient Israelites took the promised land, they divided it into these 12 tribal units, and each family and each tribe were given an apportionment of land. I don't know if it was exactly equal, but there was the idea of a division.
So I think there's something in the Hebrew mindset that does look to justice, a division of goods, maybe in a literal sense, whereas maybe it's fair to say that we Catholics, we Christians, pick up on the words of the gospel in which the word charity appears much more often. So I'm going to be both and. I think both Jews have both justice and charity, Christians have both justice and charity, and maybe you can make that generalization, that the Christian approach tends to emphasize the charity more. That's a fair conclusion. I am from the Baltimore Catechism era.
How are the themes of Catholic social justice now incorporated into current religious education? Oh, good. Okay.
Yeah. Well, as you know, so I caught the tail end of that. I still, for my confirmation, I had to memorize the late 60s, early 70s. I had to memorize some little parts of the abridged, shortened version of the Baltimore Catechism. And by the way, that's not a bad pedagogy.
I wish my... college students would memorize some of these things. Anyway, I have open notebook tests because they're afraid of memorizing anything.
But yeah, so the question is, is Catholic social teaching getting what? Imbued or inserted into our religious education? I'm not the ideal person to ask because all of my teaching has been at higher education. So many years, graduate schools, seminaries.
And now undergraduates is as low as I really, I did teach high school for two years, but I was in history. But I will say this, about 10 years ago, the U.S. Catholic bishops promulgated, you may not like it, but they promulgated a somewhat controversial lesson plans.
It's called a curriculum for religious education at every level. And they publish books. By the way, someone's making some money on those books. It's not me, by the way. But, and I, you know, I.
In those 10 years, I have not even seen a copy. I haven't picked up a copy of that curriculum. I have reason to believe that Catholic social teaching, all the themes I just talked about, in some form appears in those curriculums, maybe at least from maybe age seven or eight up. I don't think a five or six year old would get much out of subsidiarity.
But in some form, I have reason to believe, my friends who teach grade school, they have these materials. that bring these, at least the broad themes, into the classroom. So you put a notice in my head to actually break down and look at some of those materials, but I'm confident that our youngsters are getting at least some of this at an age-appropriate vocabulary. Okay, how would you respond to criticism from the right that Catholic social teaching is socialist or communist in its roots?
I've heard about that a long time, and I'm going to tell a little 30-second story. The time when the accusation came out the strongest was in 1986, when the U.S. bishops published this document. By the way, it's more than a document.
It's almost a book length. It's almost 200 pages. It was called Economic Justice for All, Catholic Social Teaching and the United States Economy. So it was a pastoral letter. on the economy.
And the bishops spent three years, 84, 85, and 86, writing this letter. They actually released preliminary drafts three times before the final version. Again, it's, how long is my version? It's close to 200 pages before it came out.
And as soon as it came out, actually, even before it's a final release, a lot of voices on the right, I remember some of the names, I think they're all deceased now. William Simon, who had been Secretary of Treasury, Catholic layman, and Michael Novak. He died about a year or two ago. He was the head of one of the think tanks, right wing, very conservative. They're almost libertarians.
They want no exceptions to private property. So the bishops defended what they said, and they stood up for the communal rights of the community. And they were able to talk about taxation.
They said the same thing I said about taxation. I was just borrowing from them. justifying progressive taxation and rights to property are not absolute.
So the questionnaire is absolutely right. There are voices. I find them somewhat shrill sometimes and not really grounded in kind of what I consider to be gospel beliefs.
So that sensible center, again, I never take for granted that the two ends of the spectrum are going to fight it out sometime, whether socialism is one end of the spectrum. Sure. The other end is that libertarianism.
That's all individualistic. I think Catholic social teaching is a sensible median position that's a both and. Yes, you have a right to private property, but no, it's not absolute. I'm never surprised, though, when bishops and their statements, they just put out a Labor Day statement that was criticized for going too far in support of labor unions.
I'm never surprised when those criticisms come up. Okay. Marlene writes, I thought subsidiarity. is giving the smallest level of participation the right to govern and control what they have the capacity to take care of. Yes, that's a rephrasing of it, but I would be careful not to phrase it in such a way that there's no or a minimal role for the higher levels of government.
We need a federal government. In fact, I would make an argument that in some ways we would benefit from... something like a global government, not that it should control it, but the United Nations is never going to be that, but somebody to coordinate the peacemaking and peacekeeping activities. The international sphere is utterly Hobbesian. It's just like a war of all against all.
It's like nature red in tooth and claw. But anyway, at the higher levels, there is a real contribution to be made by a federal government. You don't want it to smother the local efforts. Abraham Lincoln, by the way, said brilliant things along these lines. Let me try to remember one of them.
This is a paraphrase of Lincoln in about 1862. We should have no government we don't need, but we should have all the government that we do need. So Lincoln was standing up for the principle that there are things that nobody else can coordinate except a national government. Again.
You don't have to go too far and be a statist, socialist, communist, centralized, command, control economy. But if your definition of subsidiarity rules out the benefit of upper level coordination, then you'll be missing something very important. OK, you're still ready to go on to read more? I'll go. I like the name so far.
Marlene is my favorite one so far. But keep going. How about Anonymous? That's fine.
Do you think there might be some inhumanity in the church's insistence on respecting human dignity at all costs when it comes to a necessary abortion to save a woman's life or dignity or compassionate end of life suicide measures for those who are suffering? Yeah, I feel the force of that question. You know, obviously, it's a very nuanced picture.
I have this approach, which is about the proper division. of labor on these things. I want my Catholic Church, I rejoice when I hear the Catholic Church making those firm statements about the dignity of life again from the moment of conception to the end of life. I think it's the church's teaching role to be the voice in society.
It might be the only voice in society that stands quite so firmly on that bedrock principle. It never surprises me to hear cases, we call this casuistry cases study, of extreme hardship cases where, you know, it's so painful at the end of life that we withdraw. Actually, that... The Catholic Church actually does allow for the withdrawal of care sometimes. But to hear that there are people whose life experience suggests that exceptions should be made, again, the, what are they called, the distress pregnancies, crisis pregnancies.
In my own heart, I want to leave some discretion or elbow room. to the people, a doctor who knows far more about what's the outcome of maybe it's an ectopic pregnancy or, you know, just crisis pregnancies, a cephalus baby about to be born. Personally, again, I want the church to be the voice that speaks about the absolute principles, but I think all in our conscience of all of us, we do wise to leave it to the local situation. If their conscience is informed, they know what's right and what's wrong. There's a certain level at which we have to respect people's application in their situation, as long as it's a very informed conscience.
These are hard. Yeah, they are hard. Where do you think artificial intelligence fits into Catholic social teaching in the future? Well, that's a really good question.
By the way, what did I spend my last week of August doing? Just before my classes started, roughly Labor Day, I wrote a policy about students, should they be able to use chat GPT, this artificial intelligence, a large language generative, even created an account on open AI. I have my password over here next to my computer so that I can see what my students are doing.
And so if I give them a question, I want to see how that chat GPT answers the question, then I'm going to catch them in plagiarism. So I did, I wrote a policy and I'm very restrictive. I don't want my students to cut corners that way. I want them.
to think creatively. So that's my personal opinion. But the future is a future of artificial intelligence.
You can't put the genie back in the bottle. The goal is to make sure that there are guardrails, ethical guardrails that prevent artificial intelligence, those big companies that run these models, these machines, programs and algorithms from doing unjust things or dishonest things. I'm very worried. Not so much about writing essays, although I'm worried about that too.
I'm very worried about deep fakes. Deep fakes is where you could tell that open AI, show me a picture of candidate X saying these words, I love Vladimir Putin or something. And you could get the artificial voice simulator.
You could make any politician's lips move. So it might look perfectly like your favorite politician. betraying our country or something. So I'm an ethicist. So I want ethical guardrails.
I would like corporations that control this technology to do a better job than they're doing right now to filter out the misuse of this technology. I'm not a coder. I'm not a technological expert. But I think there are ways of doing this.
I want to play it safe. And I admire those hundreds of scientists who gave that warning letter a few weeks ago. put the brakes on these until we get it right.
Thanks. Do you think the right to property can be abused by the haves in the name of the church? And where do we draw the line? Those who own the means of production seem to historically use it to imprison the have-nots. Yeah, that's a really good point.
And the only example that comes to my mind immediately is I mentioned land reform. So if you were in Latin America 100 years ago, or to tell you the truth, even today, a very small cadre of families. In El Salvador, I think there were 14 families owned 80 or 90% of the arable land. And those families, and that's what caused all the uprisings in the 70s, 80s and following. And then the oppression tamping down by a series of oppressive governments.
That's how Romero got killed by denouncing the opponents of land reform. So the church, by the way, was working hand in glove with those 14 families. And that wasn't the only country where that happened.
I think Chile, Argentina, other Latin American, other Central American countries. So there is a bad history of church complicity, Roman Catholic church establishment. powerful bishops and cardinals, working hand in glove with not the needy people, but the overly rich people who monopolized all the wealth.
So that's the history. I really can't translate that to the contemporary economy. It's such a fluid and complex economy. But remember what Pope Francis said, his first homily as Pope, how I yearn for a church of the poor.
And then later he said, I want a church that is poor and is for the poor. That should be our priority. The ninth theme, when I get to the end of next week, theme number nine is option for the poor and vulnerable. That's where the church belongs.
Okay. This next question in our comment is similar. We learned that the Catholic Church owns significant amounts of land throughout the world. In the age of the climate crisis, do you think it is using it generously to help people like...
refugees. Could it be helping more with the housing crisis too? Why does it not?
Good. I like that question. Short answer is yes. A couple of caveats though, of course. Don't forget that the universal church is kind of a fiction.
Some people think that Pope Francis, or whoever the Pope is, or maybe the Curia, people in Rome, control all of this territory around the world. False. The Vatican actually has a very modest budget.
I think like the city of Racine, Wisconsin has a larger, very modest sized city in the Midwest, has a larger municipal budget than the Vatican, the worldwide church has centered in the Vatican. The Pope really is a very small budget. I think it's under a billion dollars.
So where, sure, there's a lot of land, but it's owned by either religious orders. And by the way, I'm a Jesuit. we've lost a lot of our assets in recent decades at one point we did have a lot of assets um or diocese or archdiocese so if you're in the archdiocese of boston you could probably point to churches that have closed i know the cardinal about i got to know cardinal amali just a little bit when we overlapped in boston for about 10 years i really admire him but he had to close all those parishes and a lot of them are still standing vacant there was a famous one in situate right he tried to close this church with situate the right time yeah so anyway you famous cases.
But sure, I would love to see the buildings of the church that are not being used instead of falling into disrepair to be used to house refugees. Some of this has happened. And by the way, Pope Francis, in 2014, he challenged every diocese and even parish in Europe, because that's where the crisis was, the refugee crisis, to house at least one refugee family. And you know what? It worked.
So many parishes, even in Northern Europe, gave their spare space. Maybe it was a closed convent. It was a remarkable, it shows the hospitality.
In fact, even he, when he visited the Greek island of Lesbos, there's a huge refugee camp there called Moira. He took 12 refugees waiting relocation or what do they call that? Repatriation.
He took them on his own plane. He had cleared it first with the Italian authorities to Rome to help their resettlement. So small gestures.
whether it's a parish, a diocese, can get things done. I share your questioner's desire that resources be put to good use. Another anonymous attendee question.
What is the church's position on a monopolist like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and what they have done to society? That's a really good question. I'm pretty knowledgeable about all of these documents, and I can't think of a single place where Such a specific maybe admonition or guidance is given. Concentrations of wealth. And of course, the gentleman you just mentioned, Bezos, you could probably add Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.
Yeah, certainly Elon Musk. Those are near and far, I agree, they have power because they have almost total control over industry, mostly tech industries in those cases. So. The principle of the universal destination of material goods comes in here, but of course, we have to apply it.
You're not going to see the word Elon Musk in any papal encyclical, but if you apply that basic principle that God created the goods of the world to be shared, then it's a very easy connect the dots to make, to say anybody who controls that much money, nine figures, 10 figures, hundreds of billions of dollars, is probably not sharing adequately. Now, I do admire Bill Gates, even though he's in the top five, right? He created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They've done amazing work against global poverty and diseases and illiteracy and all kinds of research.
So I admire people. I still don't know why you need more than like two suits. I have two black suits.
That's good enough for me. I've never even had a car, but if you have a car, what's wrong with the one? Why do you need a second?
Anyway, there's always going to be rich people, but Pope Francis has joined the predecessor popes in speaking out for equality rather than great inequality. Thanks. I think there are four more. Are you up for four more? Lightning round.
I'm good at it. Okay. What is the church doing today? to help bring about the Green New Deal in the US?
Do you think they could be more vocal in their support to workers'rights as more franchises move to unionize, especially in Massachusetts? Paul Jay Yeah, yeah. No, I like the force of that question. I mean, the short answer is, we've never, never have we done enough, at least for my satisfaction. And it sounds like your questioner's satisfaction.
If you said the word Green New Deal to the Pope, he wouldn't know what you're talking about. He's no expert. on US politics.
He only visited the United States once in 10 years, and that was mostly to appear before the United Nations. He did appear before the US Congress. He's not tracking the Green New Deal.
Nobody in the Vatican probably knows much about that. But when he wrote Laudato Si, here it is, Care for Our Common Home, he talked about the basic underlying principles of fighting global climate change. breaking, what's the word, eliminating the use of carbon fossil fuels, lowering the carbon footprint that each of us has. So yes, in as much as any legislative package, call it the Green New Deal or any other, Biden's Inflation Reduction Act, IRA, which was really mostly climate change for about a third of it.
He would support the, any Catholic social teaching interpreter would support those things. So. it was climate change and one other item there. What was the other? It was green new deal.
I guess that was, that's it. Okay. But these are progressive pieces of legislation. I use progressive in a very positive sense of the word, not a partisan one that make progress that get us closer to sustainability, to a healthy world. That's, you know, sustainable.
And the, the, the resources of Catholic social teaching. The principles, the tools, the vocabulary that we have support all of the things that I heard in that question. So thanks for that question. I find the concept of spirituality of work fascinating. Would be so interesting to explore more how we serve each other, live out our gifts and more.
That's the comment, I guess, that's all. That's a great comment. And I made a joke there.
I said, well, someone has to write this book. Maybe I'll do it. So it's one of my aspirations.
Can I tell a story? It's a very brief story. So the Jesuits, I'm very proud of my Jesuit order.
I've been a Jesuit for 40 years now. Just went past the 40 year mark last month. One of my first internships, I did my novitiate in Boston for two years.
One of my first internships was with the Labor Guild of Boston. At that time, it was run by Father Mort Gavin. And then he got ill and Father Ed Boyle.
And then he died in the year 2007. So those two men. were, sadly, the last of a line of Jesuits who ran these local, the word labor guild is a great word, these little institutes that worked with labor union leaders. So I was the intern in the office. I got to accompany Father Boyle and Father Gavin to meetings of labor leaders.
We actually did some arbitration. Actually, we did vote count. I didn't do any arbitration myself around a bargaining table with labor and management.
But there's an annual Cushing Gavin Awards dinner named for Father Gavin and Cardinal Cushing. So this was a great, and it's still going. I think they relocated from the south end of Boston to Braintree.
And then I think they're in Weymouth now, wherever those, maybe it's Braintree now. Anyway, it's still a going office. There used to be 50 organizations like that with a night school for how to run a labor union and be a shop steward and give public speaking for blue collar workers. It was great. It was a great operation.
It's still going in Boston, but. The other 49 around the country ceased operation. So big fan of the labor movement.
The Jesuits have a proud history of working in labor guilds. It's kind of dried up now, but Boston has the last outpost of it. And the idea of a spirituality of labor is such a promising thing.
Think about it. We spend a third of our lives in the workplace. If you're a workaholic like me, even more, because when I'm not teaching, I'm writing or doing research.
but many of you might be workaholics like me. So maybe half of your life. is work-oriented efforts and time, except for sleeping.
It's the biggest thing we ever do, right? Most time consuming. We should be able to find spiritual meaning in that work, even if your work is drudgery. Did you ever hear? Okay, so here's a very brief version of the story.
One day, there was a man in medieval Europe. He was a reporter. I don't know if they had reporters back then. It's a story. Let's go with it.
And he asked three men what they were doing. And they had bricks and things like that. And they were stacking bricks.
So he said, what are you doing? The first guy said, oh, well, I'm just making a living. It's my job. Oh, okay. And the second, I'm just, you know, making ends meet.
The second guy, he was a bricklayer too. The reporter asked him, what are you doing? He said, well, you know, this is my career. I'm right now I'm a bricklayer, but I'm hoping to become a skilled artisan later. So in my career, so I'm building my career.
And the third guy he asked was doing the same ostensible thing, laying bricks. He asked, the reporter asked him, what are you doing? He goes, oh. I overheard you say that one guy is doing his job, one guy's building his career.
I'm pursuing my vocation. I'm building a cathedral. And I believe that it's God's will that this beautiful, soaring cathedral go up, and I'm making my contribution.
So no matter how menial your work is, I don't want to be a bricklayer, but I admire bricklayers. They do skilled work. I need them. I live in their buildings all the time.
I'm in a brick building right now. But you can have a basic level of understanding your job as necessary evil toil. You could have a more elevated one, but it still may be self-centered a little bit, personal achievement, or it can be in the context of God, of spirituality, of our attempt to contribute to God's kingdom.
Good story. Several thank yous along the way. And here's our last question or comment.
I am old and live in elderly subsidized housing. We as residents have rights and responsibilities to make our home the best for us. We are guaranteed. T this by HUD.
Population here will not get behind the legally formed tenant association to make things better for all. The residence was sold by the Catholic Church to management company, which appears to have profit over people. Where is the justice?
You know, I've heard stories like that before. And again, I don't know the details, so I can't really weigh in in any detailed way. But the any time so many institutions.
Great institutions were started by religious groups, not just Catholics, by the way. The nursing profession grew out of church involvement, Protestant and Catholic. Clara Barton, right?
Many of the hospitals in this country, clinics, especially in poorer areas, started by Roman Catholic sisters, other church agencies. Did I mention graveyard cemeteries before? Social service agencies.
I just recently read an article called The Social... What's it called again? Social work. The God, no, no, no. The church, godmother of the social work profession.
So wherever people were dealing with poverty, very often religious people, whether Catholic or Protestant or others, Jewish foundations, Lutheran Federation, all of these groups started many institutions. And it always pains me to see like a hospital losing its Catholic identity, selling out to a for-profit hospital chain or It's a profit corporation, right? And it's the same across the board, schools, et cetera.
So housing, I hadn't actually thought about housing. So many housing developments were church-affiliated previous generations, and now they're not. So I'm not surprised that there are abuses like your questioner voices. I don't have any detailed answers to this, but I would love to see the mission of the church, which is a social mission, to stand up for the poor, subsidize if you have to, you know.
whatever it takes to keep people in decent, respectable housing. And it's so sad when everything becomes for profit and people get taken advantage of, especially in their old age. So maybe there's a circle of hell for corporations that take advantage of people in their moments of weakness.
Maybe. That's the end. Thank you very much.
Okay. Now we have a very organized next step before we close. This is where... This is where I hawk my own books.
So go ahead. So thank you, Father Massaro, for such a wonderful, informative and thoughtful look at social justice teaching of the Catholic Church. For our audience, please. Oh, we already did that.
I'm sorry. We have the next slide that has to be advanced. So Father Massaro's presentations are a series of three.
And therefore, continue on the next two Tuesdays, September 19th and September 26th. And so since you've registered for tonight's session, you do not need to register for the next two sessions. You will automatically receive a Zoom link for September 19th and September 26th.
In October... We begin two of our well-known and popular series, Commonweal Conversations on October 2nd, and I Believe, Help My Unbelief on October 16th. Please check the website and sign up.
Now, Father Massaro, would you like to say something about your books? Yes, just go back. Whoever's controlling the slides, right?
That's the slide. So in a shameless self-promotion, and by the way, I don't personally get any proceeds from these books. The royalties go directly.
to the Jesuit superiors who do really good charitable works with them. I happen to know that. So the book Mercy in Action came out in 2018. It's the social teaching of Pope Francis.
Here's a hardcover of it. It looks like this. That's available. You can buy that on Amazon or from the publisher, Roman and Littlefield.
And that is going to cover much of that material in our third session, September 26th. The other two books are up there with those nice covers. Living Justice.
is a book that I have, that the fourth edition is coming out in October. Here's, by the way, the third edition looks like this. But if you could wait till October, you could go on Amazon or the same publisher, Roman Littlefield, and you could already look up the, I think you're being given the URL to pre-order a copy. The fourth edition coming out with some new material with those beautiful candles contains a lot of the material that I talked out of.
And the... final book there, Pope Francis as Moral Leader, is coming out also in October. I've never had two books come out in the same month. I'm calling them my twins, but the two of them on your screen there are coming out October of 2023. And now the third one is from Paulist Press.
It's run by the Paulist Fathers. And it's also, I think it's available for pre-order on paullistbooks.com or.org. So you'll get a lot of the material. from those two new books.
If you keep attending next Tuesday, the 19th, and the following Tuesday, the 26th, same URL link, same Zoom link. So thank you for giving me time to hawk my wares. My superior will be happy and my publishers will be even happier.
Well, we just want to thank you very much, Father Massaro. You're leaving us with lots to think about and we look forward to your presentation next week. And thank you to our audience.
for your support and interest. Good night, stay well, and we hope to see you again soon. Go Glastonbury, Abby.
Great work, everyone. Nice job. That went well from my perspective. I'm a little hoarse, but that's okay. A lot of questions.
A lot of questions, yeah. That's the most we've ever had, I think. Yeah.
And they were ready on time. Yeah. Good.
Good questions. If anybody has suggestions for things that I could do better next Tuesday.