St. John the Baptist Catholic Church- Social Justice Committee

Social Justice Committee

Social Concerns and Social Justice

Catholic Charities offers programs that provide services to people in need which are works of charity. Education and advocation for social justice is different in focus. Perhaps the chart below (adapted from Archdiocese of Dubuque materials) can illustrate the difference.

Charity .....Social Services	Justice ....Social Change
Scriptural Reference: Good Samaritan Story	Scriptural Reference: Exodus Story
The parable does not attempt to survey the causes of highway robbery or the institutional system. The Samaritan provides temporary and immediate relief.	Moses does not ask for food and medicine for the Jewish slave-labor force. He challenges the institutional system. Message: "Let My People Go,"
Private, individual acts	Public, collective actions
Responds to immediate need	Responds to long-term need
Provides direct service: food, clothing, shelter, health care	Promotes social change in institutions
Requires repeated actions	Resolves structural injustice
Directed at the effects of injustice: symptoms	Directed at the root causes of social injustice
Examples:
Homeless shelters and low-income housing, food banks and pantries, clothing drives, emergency services, visiting the sick, home-bound and imprisoned. Birthright, Catholic Charities programs, Federal and State welfare services like WIC, T'aNF, Medicare and Medicaid.	Legislative advocacy altering or changing public policy that excludes some people or favors others, changing corporate policies or practices, promoting public policy that fosters the common good and reduces poverty, community organizing, voter retistration, legislative lobbying, worker-owner enterprises, justice education.

“Charity will never be true charity unless it takes justice into account...Let no one attempt with small gifts of charity to exempt themselves from the great duties imposed by justice.” Pope Pius XI, Divini Redemptoris, # 49

No man or woman of good will should stand as an idle witness to the complex social problems of our day. Equally deserving of our attention and care is the private suffering of countless children, women, and men who do not have enough food to eat; who are deprived of adequate education, housing, or employment; or who suffer the trauma of abuse or neglect. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council strongly urged a proactive response to these and other human sufferings: "This social order requires constant improvement. It must be founded on truth, built on justice and animated by love; in freedom it should grow every day toward a more human balance." – Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes), no. 41.