Social Justice According to Pius XI | Thomas Storck | Homiletic & Pastoral Review
The term “social justice”… is the key term and concept of Catholic social teaching … with all the other aspects of the Church’s social doctrine—the principle of subsidiarity, the just wage or the right to private property—are related to, and rely, on the existence of social justice.
The term “social justice,” though common enough today, is little understood by most of those who use it—whether they consider themselves friends and practitioners of social justice, or they regard it as a suspect term of probably socialist origin. But the term does have a precise meaning. That meaning and the significance of this concept of justice, were carefully explained by Pius XI, the pontiff who introduced it into the corpus of Catholic social teaching. In many respects it is the key term and concept of Catholic social teaching. All the other aspects of the Church’s social doctrine—such as the principle of subsidiarity, the just wage or the right to private property—are related to social justice, and rely on the existence of social justice. Pope Pius, who reigned from 1922 to 1939, introduced the term into Catholic teaching in his encyclical, Studiorum Ducem (1923). He later made extensive use of it in two important social encyclicals: Quadragesimo Anno (1931) and Divini Redemptoris (1937). But, before taking a close look at the exact meaning of social justice, let us try to clear away some confusions over justice itself, especially as contrasted with charity.
To illustrate the frequent confusion about the meaning of social justice, and, indeed, about justice in general, one sometimes hears the activity of working in a soup kitchen cited as an example of social justice. However laudable such work is, it is not a work of justice, social or otherwise, but rather one of charity. Thus, the first distinction we must make is between “justice” and “charity.” What is justice then? Thomas Aquinas takes as the settled definition of justice that of the Roman jurists. 1 According to them, justice is “a perpetual and constant will of giving to each one his right {jus}.” Plato had already referred to justice under similar terms in the Republic (331e), attributing the definition to Simonides, a poet who died ca. 468 B.C. As we will see, there is more than one kind of justice, but common to all of them is this notion of rendering what is due, i.e., of what someone has a right to. As Josef Pieper put it: “The hallmark of all…forms of justice is some kind of indebtedness….” 2 Charity, on the other hand, although it can be a duty binding on someone, and even a duty toward a particular person, differs from justice in that its “violation does not involve injury, in the technical sense, and does not call for restitution or punishment.” 3 Often, duties of charity are not directed towards anyone in particular. For example, my duty of charity to give away a certain amount of my goods, while binding in conscience, does not oblige me to give to any particular person. No one particular poor man ordinarily has a claim on my charity.
The character of justice is easiest to see in the fundamental type of justice, commutative justice.
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