Ann Lusch's List: Justice and Peace class

• For instance, the only support from the U.S. bishops toward climate change legislation can be found in a June 22 joint letter with Catholic Relief Services to every member of Congress. In the letter, represenatives of the USCCB and CRS welcome the progress that has been made on the issue itself but state that they are "deeply disappointed" that the current legislation doesn't do enough to help poor people worldwide who contribute the least to climate change but suffer the most from its effects.
• Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out time and again, most recently in his new encyclical. The U.S. bishops have followed the pope's lead.

• • a truly universal health policy with respect for human life and dignity;
   
  • access for all with a special concern for the poor and inclusion of legal immigrants;
   
  • pursuing the common good and preserving pluralism including freedom of conscience and variety of options; and
   
  • restraining costs and applying them equitably across the spectrum of payers.
   
  • Two of these criteria need special attention as Congress moves forward with health care reform.
• we strongly oppose inclusion of abortion as part of a national health care benefit. We would also oppose inclusion of technologies that similarly fail to uphold the sanctity and dignity of life. No health care reform plan should compel us or others to pay for the destruction of human life,
• Access for all: Reform efforts must begin with the principle that decent health care is not a privilege, but a right and a requirement to protect the life and dignity of every person.
• Therefore, we urge Congress to ensure Healthcare Letter to Congress
   sufficient funding for safety-net clinics, hospitals and other providers serving those who will continue to fall through the cracks of a reformed system.
• The Catholic bishops renew our appeal to provide equity for legal immigrants in access to health care. This can be accomplished, in part, by repealing the five-year ban for legal immigrants to access Medicaid; repealing the applicability of “sponsor-deeming” for Medicaid and CHIP; and ensuring that pregnant women in the United States, who will be giving birth to children who are United States citizens, are eligible along with their unborn children for health care regardless of their immigration status. Immigrants pay the same taxes as citizens and their health needs cannot be ignored. Leaving them outside a reformed system is both unfair and unwise.

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• Love —  caritas — is an extraordinary force which leads people to opt for courageous  and generous engagement in the field of justice and peace. It is a force that  has its origin in God, Eternal Love and Absolute Truth
• Charity is at the heart of the Church's social doctrine
• Without truth, charity degenerates into  sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way.
• adhering to the  values of Christianity is not merely useful but essential for building a good  society and for true integral human development.
• Charity is love received and given. It is “grace” (cháris). Its  source is the wellspring of the Father's love for the Son, in the Holy Spirit.
• As the objects of God's love,  men and women become subjects of charity, they are called to make themselves  instruments of grace, so as to pour forth God's charity and to weave networks of  charity.
• This dynamic of charity received and given is what gives rise to the Church's  social teaching
• Without truth, without trust and love  for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social  action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in  social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like  the present.
• Charity goes beyond justice, because to love  is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice,  which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason  of his being or his acting.
• charity  demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of  individuals and peoples.
• charity transcends justice and completes  it in the logic of giving and forgiving
• To love someone is to  desire that person's good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the  good of the individual, there is a good that is linked to living in society: the  common good.
• This is the institutional path — we  might also call it the political path — of charity, no less excellent and  effective than the kind of charity which encounters the neighbour directly,  outside the institutional mediation of the pólis
• In an increasingly globalized society,  the common good and the effort to obtain it cannot fail to assume the dimensions  of the whole human family, that is to say, the community of peoples and nations
• The  risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and  nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that  would give rise to truly human development.
•  Humanae Vitae indicates the strong links between life ethics and social ethics
• Paul VI clearly presented the relationship between  the proclamation of Christ and the advancement of the individual in society.  Testimony to Christ's charity, through works of justice, peace and development,  is part and parcel of evangelization, because Jesus Christ, who loves us, is  concerned with the whole person.

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• Last year, I had the opportunity to spend time researching two of these countries: France and the Netherlands. Neither country gets the attention that Canada and England do.

  • Right. I have heard often about Canada; never about the Netherlands or France. This makes the idea of good national health care seem more feasible.

• The next message for the World Day of Peace, which will be celebrated on January 1, 2010, will be dedicated to the following theme: If you want to cultivate peace, take care of creation. The theme intends to solicit awareness of the close connection that exists in our globalized and interconnected world between safeguarding creation and cultivating the good of peace.

• • Read up to P. 5  7/8/2015
    
    Up to P. 19 (introduction) 7/9/15
    
    
• people come to understand their own transcendent dignity,
• hey  learn not to be satisfied with only themselves but to encounter their neighbour  in a network of relationships that are ever more authentically human.
• Men and women who are made “new” by the love of God are able to change the rules  and the quality of relationships, transforming even social structures
• Only love is capable of  radically transforming the relationships that men maintain among themselves
• So many needy  brothers and sisters are waiting for help, s
• human conscience, which senses that it is called to manage responsibly and  together with others the gift received. Proof of this is found in the  universal recognition of the golden rule, which expresses on the level of  human relations the injunction addressed by the Mystery to men and women:  “Whatever you wish that men should do to you, do so to them” (Mt 7:12)[23].
• g — in  which God's love for man is made concrete
• According to the Book of Exodus, the  Lord speaks these words to Moses: “I have seen the affliction of my people who  are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know  their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the  Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a  land flowing with milk and hon
• The Ten Commandments,
• “constitute the indispensable rules of all social life”[26].
• the  Decalogue a commitment that concerns not only fidelity to the one true God, but  also the social relations among the people of the Covenant.
• the right of the poor: “If  there is among you a poor man, one of your brethren, ... you shall not harden  your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, but you shall open your  hand to him, and lend him sufficient for his need”
• “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you  shall not do him wrong. The stranger who sojourns with you shall be to you as  the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers  in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev 19:33-34
• the law of the sabbatical year  (celebrated every seven years) and that of the jubilee  year (celebrated every fifty years
• these laws call for the cancellation of debts and a general  release of persons and goods: everyone is free to return to his family of origin  and to regain possession of his birthright.
• This legislation is designed to ensure that the salvific  event of the Exodus and fidelity to the Covenant represents not only the  founding principle of Israel's social, political and economic life, but also the  principle for dealing with questions concerning economic poverty and social  injustices.
• These principles become the focus of the Prophets' preaching,  which seeks to internalize them.
• God's Spirit,  poured into the human heart — the Prophets proclaim — will make these same  sentiments of justice and solidarity, which reside in the Lord's heart, take  root in you
• Then God's will,  articulated in the Decalogue given on Sinai, will be able to take root  creatively in man's innermost being.
• internalization
• God freely confers being and life on everything that exists.
• It is in the free action  of God the Creator that we find the very meaning of creation, even if it has  been distorted by the experience of sin.
• Breaking the relation of communion with God causes
• a rupture in the internal  unity of the human perso
• It is in this original estrangement that are to be sought the deepest roots of  all the evils that afflict social relations between people, of all the  situations in economic and political life that attack the dignity of the person,  that assail justice and solidarity.
• The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,  because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor. He has sent me  to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set  at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”
• “He who has seen me has seen the Father” (Jn 14:9). Jesus, in  other words, is the tangible and definitive manifestation of how God acts  towards men and women.
• The love that inspires  Jesus' ministry among men is the love that he has experienced in his intimate  union with the Father.
• Jesus announces the liberating mercy of God  to those whom he meets on his way, beginning with the poor, the marginalized,  the sinners
• For Jesus, recognizing the Father's love means modelling his  actions on God's gratuitousness and mercy; it is these that generate new life.  It means becoming — by his very existence — the example and pattern of this for  his disciples.
• Jesus' followers are called to live  like him
• Saint Paul writes: “If God is for us, who is against  us? He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, will he not  also give us all things with him?” (Rom 8:31-32)
• God's gratuitous love  for humanity is revealed, before anything else, as love springing from the  Father
• By his words and deeds, and fully and definitively by his  death and resurrection[30], Jesus  reveals to humanity that God is Father and that we are all called by grace to  become his children in the Spirit (
•  and therefore brothers and sisters among ourselves.
• “Beloved, if God  so loves us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we  love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us” (1 Jn  4:11-12).
• The commandment of  mutual love, which represents the law of life for God's people[32], must inspire, purify and elevate all human relationships in society and in  politics
• “a new model of the unity of the human race, which  must ultimately inspire our solidarity.
• This supreme model of unity,  which is a reflection of the intimate life of God, one God in three Persons, is  what we Christians mean by the word 'communion'”[35].
• The revelation in Christ  of the mystery of God as Trinitarian love is at the same time the revelation of  the vocation of the human person to love.
• eing a person in the  image and likeness of God ... involves existing in a relationship, in relation  to the other ‘I'”[36], because God himself, one and triune, is the  communion of the Father, of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
• Gaudium et Spes,
• may all be  one
• parallel between the union  existing among the divine Persons and the union of the children of God in truth  and love.
• Human activity,  when it aims at promoting the integral dignity and vocation of the person, the  quality of living conditions and the meeting in solidarity of peoples and  nations, is in accordance with the plan of God, who does not fail to show his  love and providence to his children.
• They tell us that  the creation of man and woman is a free and gratuitous act of God; that man and  woman, because they are free and intelligent, represent the “thou” created by  God and that only in relationship with him can they discover and fulfil the  authentic and complete meaning of their personal and social lives; th
• salvation for all  people
• the human person in all his dimensions: personal and social, spiritual  and corporeal, historical and transcendent
• ts  completion, however, is in the future
• requires their free response and acceptance.
• It is not possible to  love one's neighbour as oneself and to persevere in this conduct without the  firm and constant determination to work for the good of all people and of each  person, because we are all really responsible for everyone
• “a man is alienated if he refuses to transcend himself and to  live the experience of self-giving and of the formation of an authentic human  community oriented towards his final destiny, which is God. A society is  alienated if its forms of social organization, production and consumption make  it more difficult to offer this gift of self and to establish this solidarity  between people”[53].
• Jesus Christ reveals to  us that “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8) and he  teaches us that “the fundamental law of human perfection, and consequently of  the transformation of the world, is the new commandment of love.
• In the nineteenth  century, events of an economic nature produced a dramatic social, political and  cultural impact.
• In response to the first  great social question, Pope Leo XIII promulgated the first social Encyclical, Rerum  Novarum[
• lists errors that  give rise to social ills, excludes socialism as a remedy and expounds with  precision and in contemporary terms “the Catholic doctrine on work, the right to  property, the principle of collaboration instead of class struggle as the  fundamental means for social change, the rights of the weak, the dignity of the  poor and the obligations of the rich, the perfecting of justice through charity,  on the right to form professional associations”[144].
• Pope Pius XI published the  Encyclical  Quadragesimo Anno[152], commemorating the fortieth  anniversary of  Rerum Novarum.
• principle of subsidiarity, a
• Already on 29  June 1931 he had protested against the abuse of power by the totalitarian  fascist regime in Italy with the Encyclical  Non Abbiamo Bisogno[155].  He published the Encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge, on the situation of the  Catholic Church under the German Reich, on 14 March 1937[156].  The text of  Mit Brennender Sorge was read from the pulpit of every  Catholic Church in Germany, after having been distributed in the greatest of  secrecy.
• calling them to resistance until  such time that a true peace between Church and State would be restored. In 1938,  with the spreading of anti-Semitism, Pope Pius XI affirmed: “Spiritually we are  all Semites
• With the Encyclical Letter  Divini Redemptoris[158],  on atheistic communism and Christian social doctrine, Pope Pius XI offered a  systematic criticism of communism, describing it as “intrinsically perverse”[159],  and indicated that the principal means for correcting the evils perpetrated

• fulfilment of the duties of justice at both the  interpersonal and social levels in relation to the common good, and the  institutionalization of professional and interprofessional groups.

   
• One of the characteristics of Pope Pius XII's interventions  is the importance he gave to the relationship between morality and law
• “Due to his sensitivity and intelligence in grasping the ‘signs  of the times', Pope Pius XII can be considered the immediate precursor of  Vatican Council II and of the social teaching of the Popes who followed him”
• The 1960s bring promising  prospects: recovery after the devastation of the war, the beginning of  decolonization, and the first timid signs of a thaw in the relations  between the American and Soviet blocs.
• This is the context within which Blessed  Pope John XXIII reads deeply into the “signs of the times”[163]. The  social question is becoming universal and involves all countries: together  with the labour question and the Industrial Revolution, there come to the fore  problems of agriculture, of developing regions, of increasing populations, and  those concerning the need for global economic cooperation
• Subsidiarity is among  the most constant and characteristic directives of the Church's social doctrine  and has been present since the first great social encyclica
• he necessity of  defending and promoting the original expressions of social life is emphasized by  the Church in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno,  in which the principle of subsidiarity is indicated as a most important  principle of “social philosophy
• Just as it is gravely wrong to take from  individuals what they can accomplish by their own initiative and industry and  give it to the community, so also it is an injustice and at the same time a  grave evil and disturbance of right order to assign to a greater and higher  association what lesser and subordinate organizations can do.
• On the basis of this principle, all societies of a superior  order must adopt attitudes of help (“subsidium”)  — therefore of support, promotion, development — with respect to lower-order  societies.
• Subsidiarity, understood in the positive sense as  economic, institutional or juridical assistance offered to lesser social  entities,
• require the State to refrain from anything that would de facto restrict the  existential space of the smaller essential cells of society. Their initiative,  freedom and responsibility must not be supplanted.

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• new developments in industry, new techniques striking out on new paths, changed relations of employer and employee, abounding wealth among a very small number and destitution among the masses, increased self-reliance on the part of workers as well as a closer bond of union with one another, and, in addition to all this, a decline in morals have caused conflict to break forth.
• We see clearly, and all are agreed that the poor must be speedily and fittingly cared for, since the great majority of them live undeservedly in miserable and wretched conditions.
• the old trade guilds had been destroyed in the last century,
• the present age handed over the workers, each alone and defenseless, to the inhumanity of employers and the unbridled greed of competitors
• a yoke almost of slavery on the unnumbered masses of non-owning workers.
• the Socialists, exciting the envy of the poor toward the rich, contend that it is necessary to do away with private possession of goods and in its place to make the goods of individuals common to all, and that the men who preside over a municipality or who direct the entire State should act as administrators of these goods.
• highly unjust,
• When the worker places his energy and his labor at the disposal of another, he does so for the purpose of getting the means necessary for livelihood.
• because in abolishing the freedom to dispose of wages they take away from them by this very act the hope and the opportunity of increasing their property and of securing advantages for themselves.
• nature confers on man the right to possess things privately as his own.
• but are ruled and governed by a two-fold innate instinct,
• For brute beasts are not self- ruling,
• protect themselves and their lives; by the other, to preserve their species.
• What stands out and excels in us,
• it is necessary that man have goods
• the mind and reason
• man is older than the State. Wherefore he had to possess by nature his own right to protect his life and body before any polity had been formed.
• The fact that God gave the whole human race the earth to use and enjoy cannot indeed in any manner serve as an objection against private possessions
• Those who lack resources supply labor
• since man expends his mental energy and his bodily strength in procuring the goods of nature, by this very act he appropriates that part of physical nature to himself which he has cultivated.
• a man will be defrauded of the things his labor has produced.
• the human race as a whole
• consecrated private possession as something best adapted to man's nature and to peaceful and tranquil living together.
• divine law, which forbids us most strictly even to desire what belongs to another
• Behold, therefore, the family, or rather the society of the household,
• certain rights and duties of its own
• if anywhere there is a grave violation of mutual rights within the family walls, public authority shall restore to each his right; for this is not usurping the rights of citizens, but protecting and confirming them with just and due care. Those in charge of public affairs, however, must stop here; nature does not permit them to go beyond these limits.
• It is a most sacred law of nature that the father of a family see that his offspring are provided with all the necessities of life,
• He can do this surely in no other way than by owning fruitful goods
• But if citizens, if families, after becoming participants in common life and society, were to experience injury in a commonwealth instead of help, impairment of their rights instead of protection, society would be something to be repudiated rather than to be sought for.
• If a family perchance is in such extreme difficulty and is so completely without plans that it is entirely unable to help itself, it is right that the distress by remedied by public aid,
• If incentives to ingenuity and skill in individual persons were to be abolished, the very fountains of wealth would necessarily dry up; and the equality conjured up by the Socialist imagination would, in reality, be nothing but uniform wretchedness and meanness for one and al
• we shall explain whence the desired remedy is to be sought.
• it is the Church which draws from the Gospel the teachings through which the struggle can be composed entirely, or, after its bitterness is removed, can certainly become more tempered. It is the Church, again, that strives not only to instruct the mind but to regulate by her precepts the life and morals of individuals, that ameliorates the condition of the workers through her numerous and beneficent institutions, and that wishes and aims to have the thought and energy of all classes of society united to this end, that the interests of the workers be protected as fully as possible
• in civil society the lowest cannot be made equal to the highest.
• There are truly very great and very many natural differences among men. Neither the talents, nor the skill, nor the health, nor the capacities of all are the same, and unequal fortune follows of itself upon necessary inequality in respect to these endowments
• It is a capital evil with respect to the question We are discussing to take for granted that the one class of society is of itself hostile to the other, as if nature had set rich and poor against each other to fight fiercely in implacable war.
• for just as in the human body the different members harmonize with one another,
• And first and foremost, the entire body of religious teaching and practice, of which the Church is interpreter and guardian, can pre-eminently bring together and unite the rich and the poor by recalling the two classes of society to their mutual duties, and in particular to those duties which derive from justice.
• the poor and the workers: To perform entirely and conscientiously whatever work has been voluntarily and equitably agreed upon;
• rich men and employers: Workers are not to be treated as slaves; justice demands that the dignity of human personality be respected in them, ennobled as it has been through what we call the Christian character.
• give every worker what is justly due him. Assuredly, to establish a rule of pay in accord with justice,
• avoid harming in any way the savings of the workers either by coercion, or by fraud, or by the arts of usury;
• she aims at joining the two social classes to each other in closest neighborliness and friendship.
• Whether you abound in, or whether you lack, riches, and all the other things which are called good, is of no importance in relation to eternal happiness. But how you use them, that is truly of utmost importance.
• wealth does not give surcease of sorrow, and that wealth is of no avail unto the happiness of eternal life but is rather a hindrance;
• To own goods privately, as We saw above, is a right natural to man,
• man ought not regard external goods as his own, but as common so that, in fact, a person should readily share them when he sees others in need
• when the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, it is a duty to give to the poor out of that which remains.
• poverty is no disgrace, and that no one should be ashamed because he makes his living by toil
• the favor of God Himself seems to incline more toward the unfortunate as a class; for Jesus Christ calls the poor [19] blessed,

  • option for the poor
• Such is the economy of duties and rights according to Christian philosophy. Would it not seem that all conflict would soon cease wherever this economy were to prevail in civil society?
• human society in its civil aspects was renewed fundamentally by Christian institutions
• if human society is to be healed, only a return to Christian life and institutions will heal it.
• But it must not be supposed that the Church so concentrates her energies on caring for souls as to overlook things which pertain to mortal and earthly life.
• the Church provides directly for the well- being of the non-owning workers by instituting and promoting activities which she knows to be suitable to relieve their distress
• And yet many today go so far as to condemn the Church as the ancient pagans once did, for such outstanding charity, and would substitute in lieu thereof a system of benevolence established by the laws of the State.
• those helps also which are within the power of men are necessary.
• what portion of the remedy should be expected from the State
• Therefore those governing the State ought primarily to devote themselves to the service of individual groups and of the whole commonwealth,
• it is within the competence of the rulers of the State that, as they benefit other groups, they also improve in particular the condition of the workers.
• For the State is bound by the very law of its office to serve the common interest
• Since it would be quite absurd to look out for one portion of the citizens and to neglect another, it follows that public authority ought to exercise due care in safe-guarding the well-being and the interests of non-owning workers.
• Although all citizens, without exception, are obliged to contribute something to the sum-total common goods, some share of which naturally goes back to each individual, yet all can by no means contribute the same amount and in equal degree.
• It is altogether necessary that there be some who dedicate themselves to the service of the State,
• Nevertheless, an abundance of corporeal and external goods is likewise a characteristic of a well-constituted State,
• To produce these goods the labor of the workers, whether they expend their skill and strength on farms or in factories, is most efficacious and necessary.
• Equity therefore commands that public authority show proper concern for the worker so that from what he contributes to the common good he may receive what will enable him, housed, clothed, and secure, to live his life without hardsh
• it is of absolute interest to the State that those citizens should not be miserable in every respect from whom such necessary goods proceed.

  • common good

  • enlightened self-interest
• it is proper that the individual and the family should be permitted to retain their freedom of action, so far as this is possible without jeopardizing the common good and without injuring anyone
• • SUBSIDIARITY
• special consideration must be given to the weak and the poor.

  • option for the poor
• private property ought to be safeguarded
• the masses ought to be kept within the bounds of their moral obligations.
• The authority of the State, therefore, should intervene and, by putting restraint upon such disturbers,
• Labor which is too long and too hard and the belief that pay is inadequate not infrequently give workers cause to strike and become voluntarily idle
• removing early the causes from which it would seem that conflict between employers and workers is bound to arise.
• • human dignity
• The soul bears the express image and likeness of God,
• all men are equal, and there is no difference between rich and poor, between masters and servants, between rulers and subjects:
• "Remember thou keep holy the Sabbath Day,"
• neither justice nor humanity can countenance the exaction of so much work that the spirit is dulled from excessive toil and that along with it the body sinks crushed from exhaustion
• it is not right to demand of a woman or a child what a strong adult man is capable of doing or would be willing to do
• as regards children, special care ought to be taken that the factory does not get hold of them before age has sufficiently matured their physical, intellectual, and moral powers
• Let it be granted then that worker and employer may enter freely into agreements and, in particular, concerning the amount of the wage;
• the wage shall not be less than enough to support a worker who is thrifty and upright
• it will be better, in order to avoid unwarranted governmental intervention, especially since circumstances of business, season, and place are so varied, that decision be reserved to the organizations of which We are about to speak below, or else to pursue another course whereby the interests of the workers may be adequately safeguarded -- the State, if the occasion demands, to furnish help and protection.
• see that the largest possible number among the masses of the population prefer to own property.
• For the violence of public disorder has divided cities into two classes of citizens, with an immense gulf lying between them.

  • gap between the rich and the poor
• one class will become neighbor to the other.
• For when men know they are working on what belongs to them, they work with far greater eagerness and diligence
• But these advantages can be attained only if private wealth is not drained away by crushing taxes of every kind
• employers and workers themselves can accomplish much in this matter,
• associations for giving mutual aid; various agencies established by the foresight of private persons to care for the worker and likewise for his dependent wife and children in the event that an accident, sickness, or death befalls him; and foundations to care for boys and girls, for adolescents, and for the aged.
• But associations of workers occupy first place, and they include within their circle clearly all the rest.
• Although private societies exist within the State and are, as it were, so many parts of it, still it is not within the authority of the State universally and per se to forbid them to exist as such
• men are by nature inclined to associate.

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