Social Justice Isn't What You Think It Is

by Michael Novak

  In his eightieth year, Oswald von Nell-Breuning, S.J., wrote in the journal Stimmen der Zeit of the trepidation he had felt when, in 1931, at the age of forty, he had been given practically sole responsibility for the authorship of Quadragesimo Anno. In a nice touch, Nell-Breuning added that, regarding the very few paragraphs actually penned by Pius XI (90–96), he himself was given authority over whether they should be included and where. Later, Nell-Breuning came to regret having included those paragraphs, which seemed to approve of the “corporatist state,” since in many minds that linked the encyclical too closely to Mussolini and his Fascist-party program.

  Nonetheless, Nell-Breuning added in his commentary, what Pius XI intended was not the corporatist state ruled from the top down, but the rejuvenation of civil society by what Leo XIII had called the “principle of association.” Still, the frank revelation by Nell-Breuning of his own role in drafting Quadragesimo Anno makes all the more valuable his line-by-line, book-length commentary on that encyclical, published in English as The Reorganization of Social Economy. Pius XI’s encyclical, soon treated as the locus classicus of social justice, sets forth two roles of social justice: the role of virtue and the role of conceptual framework.

  “Both social justice and social charity have been investigated but little by theology,” writes Nell-Breuning in his commentary on Quadragesimo Anno. “Both are neither unknown nor new to it, even though the terms have been introduced but recently.” Nell-Breuning is able to find, indeed, only one reference to social charity in papal documents before Quadragesimo Anno, and that in a personal but official letter of June 24, 1923, from Pius XI. Nell-Breuning follows this observation up with the remark: “To extend and deepen the doctrine of social justice and social charity will be an important task of theology.”1 This challenge has not in all respects been met even today, and as such is partly the motive behind the present volume.

  During the nineteenth century, the term “legal justice” came to be used by German jurists in ways that brought that term into disrepute (for example, “the letter of the law,” “state laws”). This German controversy over “legal justice” and the rise of the slogan “social justice” in the mid-nineteenth century led a number of interpreters to bind the two as one. This German controversy is important context for the use of the term “social justice” by Nell-Breuning, who expressly credited it to one of his teachers, Heinrich Pesch, S.J. (1854–1925).

  Writing in the depth of the worldwide Depression (and an especially severe banking crisis in Germany, in which wheelbarrows full of paper money could barely pay for a loaf of bread), Nell-Breuning began drafting Quadragesimo Anno, poignantly aware of massive social instability. Stalin was beginning to starve millions of Ukrainian farmers; Hitler was on the rise in Germany; German banks were embroiled in scandals and inflation was staggering; Mussolini was arrogantly exercising a bullying dictatorship in Italy; and Japan’s warlords were plotting their expeditions overseas.

  Forty years earlier, Pope Leo XIII had spoken of the spirit of revolutionary change undercutting European institutions. By 1931, the widening dimensions of the “social question” had overflowed from politics and economics into the world of terrifying moral ideals such as Nazism, fascism, communism, and fashionable Western nihilism. The world faced a moral and religious crisis, deeper than the highly visible economic crisis. The deepening dimensions of this moral crisis, as well as the more visible political and economic crisis, was clearer in 1931 than it had been forty years earlier.

  Pius XI grasped the moral challenge in the rumblings of impending ruin, and asked what justice demands from humans in unstable times. He made an intensive effort to recover the idea that Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas had intended by the name “general justice” and, placing this new term in the context of rapid social change, gave it a new name: “social justice.” The big picture Aristotle and Aquinas had in mind is that while justice had long been defined in terms of the duties of individuals “to give to each his due,” important historical moments showed that humans sometimes also felt a keen duty to give their lives for their city. The heroic stand of the 300 Spartans against the whole force of a million Persians at the narrow pass of Thermopylae set a brilliant marker in world history. It was said that the young Spartans gladly took up their duty to fight to the death in defense of their city (and civilization), fought nobly as Spartans ought to fight, and died happy “doing justice.” There are forms of justice beyond individual to individual. They owed a debt to their city.

  A few words about the personality and background of Pius XI may illuminate his efforts. Poland gave the modern papacy one of its own sons, John Paul II, in 1978; but in an odd way it also gave the world Pope Pius XI. Born Achille Ratti in 1857, in the little industrial town of Desio near Milan, the young Father Ratti (ordained in Rome in 1879) was a most unlikely candidate for the papacy. Quiet, studious, and reclusive, his first assignment (after receiving three doctorates in three years) was as an instructor in the Milanese seminary. So scholarly was he that he was assigned to pursue historical research, notably in paleography, at the Ambrosian Library in Milan for twenty-two years (1888–1910). After that, he spent another eight years as vice-prefect of the Vatican Library in Rome, where he continued writing and publishing historical monographs, several on the history of Milan and one on the modern history of the Church in Poland.

  At the age of sixty, Ratti might have expected to continue such obscure scholarly work for the rest of his life; but the emergence of Poland as an independent country in 1918 presented a perplexity to the Vatican diplomatic corps, since the Vatican at that time had no expert on Poland. Someone recalled Father Ratti’s monograph; he was speedily consecrated a bishop and sent to Poland as nuncio. In Warsaw from 1918 until mid-1921, he endured the Communist siege of the city, worked closely with Josef Pilsudsky, and, in a way, midwifed modern Polish Catholicism (a work that eventually changed the world under Pope John Paul II). The organizational abilities, leadership, and diplomatic astuteness of this sheltered scholar surprised many, but Pope Benedict XV took note and that June made Ratti the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan, Ratti’s own beloved city. Barely had the new archbishop established a Catholic university there—soon to become famous around the world—than Benedict XV died, and Cardinal Ratti was elected to succeed him on January 22, 1922.

  Ratti chose the name Pius as a name of peace. As if he could see what was coming, he dedicated his whole pontificate to peace, even secretly offering God his life for it. In the crowd in Saint Peter’s Square, receiving the new pope’s first blessing, stood Benito Mussolini, soon to assume dictatorial power in Italy, not without menace to the Vatican. The two would become fierce antagonists: Peter and Caesar locked in yet another historical struggle. Indeed, the stubborn resolve of the scholar-priest from Milan would soon be pitted not only against Mussolini in Italy, but also against Hitler in Germany and Stalin in the steadily expanding Soviet empire. Taking as his motto “The Peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ,” Pius XI, almost as if in defiance, established the universal feast day of Christ the King in 1925. He called for the Catholic laity to awaken, to organize themselves voluntarily, and to act for justice. In 1937, he warned the totalitarians (Hitler, in particular), “The day will come when the Te Deum of liberation will succeed to the premature hymns of the enemies of Christ.”2 Pius XI died on February 10, 1939, shortly after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and annexation of Austria. His death came only months before the second outbreak in twenty years of full hostilities. He was eighty-two-years-old. Gloom covered Europe like a pall, and, at an unprecedented cost in human lives, the war he had tried to prevent soon overwhelmed Europe and also Asia.

  When Pius XI wrote of social change, therefore, he knew the stakes. When he wrote of social justice, he sought an alternative to the mad principles on which Europe was then basing its social order. In large measure he blamed liberalism—not so much for its institutions as for its irreligious mores and ideology. In sweeping the house of Eu
rope bare of the morals of its ancient and medieval past, liberalism in the Continental sense had invited into this “clean, well-lighted place” a nihilism inhabited by seven devils worse than the first (as the biblical parable puts it). From his earliest years as pope, he had hearkened back to Leo XIII’s plea for a sounder reconstruction of Europe’s morals and virtues—not in opposition to change, but in search of better directions for change to take.

  “There is an instability from which no single thing can escape, for that, precisely, is the essence of created things,” Pius XI had written in 1926, for the thirty-fifth anniversary of Rerum Novarum. “Precisely in those social elements which seem fundamental, and most exempt from change, such as property, capital, labor, a constant change is not only possible, but is real, and an accomplished fact.”3 He looked at each of these fundamental social elements in turn. Here is his discussion of labor:

  From the primitive work of the man of the stone age, to the great organization of production of our day, how many transitions, ascensions, and complications, diversities! . . . What an enormous difference! It is therefore necessary to take such changes into account, and to prepare oneself, by an enlightened foresight and with complete resignation, to this instability of things and of human institutions, which are not all perfect, but necessarily imperfect and susceptible of changes.4

  This is the perspective in which, five years later, Pius XI took up the term “social justice” as his solution to the moral problems inherent in social change. The pope used this new term nine times in his encyclical “On the Reconstruction of the Social Order,” as Quadragesimo Anno is also referred to in English. No single meaning is easy to derive from these nine texts.5 But where there had been considerable confusion and vagueness about the three terms “legal justice,” “general justice,” and “social justice,” Pius XI intended to establish a term for practical modern use. He thereby raised questions no one before him had asked with such clarity.

  In most of the passages in which he uses “social justice” in Quadragesimo Anno, the pope begins with a concrete problem—in paragraph 71, for example, the fact that fathers of families are not receiving wages adequate to support their children. The pope had already noted that social systems are in flux and that social change is quite natural. What he now added is that free citizens have a responsibility to shape these changes in a moral way. If fathers are not receiving wages sufficient to support their families “under existing circumstances,” he wrote, “social justice demands that changes be introduced into the system as soon as possible, whereby such a wage will be assured to every adult workingman.”6 A society that would allow children to starve and individual fathers to be helpless to improve their family’s condition is, in his view, neither a good nor a stable nor a fully legitimate society. Humans must not simply wring their hands about this. They should “introduce changes into the system as soon as possible.” He did not say “by route of the state.” Though the means were not specified, to introduce such changes is the object of the virtue of social justice.

  Three points are worth stressing here: personal responsibility, institutional change, and practicality. First, humans are required by the morality written into their own nature to accept responsibility for the shape of the institutions of their society. This is because it is their nature both to be responsible and to live in society. Second, they should fix their eyes on changes in the system—that is, in those institutions and organizations that in their ensemble constitute society. Third, they should be realistic, aiming for what is possible, not utopian dreams. These three characteristics help to clarify the nature of the new virtue that Pope Pius XI called on us to develop. During past ages, common people were relatively passive subjects rather than responsible citizens. In the new circumstances of 1931, they needed to exercise new responsibilities whose object and methods are social, and whose exercise requires prudence and practicality.

  The way was open for Quadragesimo Anno to set forth a full theory of social justice as a virtue. Pius XI did not do that. While it is true that the concept of social justice has undergone many changes since 1931, Quadragesimo Anno remains the urtext to which all others refer. And according to Nell-Breuning’s commentary:

  Social justice is a spiritual and intellectual guiding rule which does not act through itself, but assisted by a power. This power, according to Leo XIII and Pius XI, is the state. The right social and economic order is established by the supreme authority in society, which in turn is bound by the demands of social justice from which it draws all its legal authority to direct and to regulate. In a properly regulated community, social justice finds its material realization in public institutions, and acts through public authorities or their representatives.7

  Thus in the view of Pius XI, Nell-Breuning writes, social justice (1) “is always an efficient principle in public authority.” It looks (2) “first of all to social legislation.” Its aim is (3) to “bring about a legal social order that will result in the proper economic order.” Christian social philosophy (4) “seeks to restore order which would lead economics back into firm and regulated channels and would ultimately exert its beneficial influence upon property.” In this sense, social justice is (5) “a spiritual and intellectual principle of the form of human society.” Social justice (6) “becomes an institution in the constitution and laws of society.” Further, social justice (7) “determines the structural form and shape as well as the functioning of society and economics.”8

  Let me summarize. Looked at in this way, social justice is plainly not a virtue. It is an institution in the constitution and laws of society. It determines the structural form and shape of society. It is a spiritual and intellectual guiding rule. It is an efficient principle in public authority. It gives the state its legal (moral) authority. It looks first to social legislation. It brings about a legal social order. It results in the proper moral order for a sound economy.

  Thus, Pius XI’s program of social justice was not at first glance easy to distinguish from a heavy-handed political order which plans and directs the economy, and which enforces the monistic cultural order enshrined in the corporatist states of socialism and fascism. But to see Pius XI’s program in this way is a great mistake. To be sure, as Nell-Breuning admits, the pope did bend over backward not to antagonize Mussolini and to be fair to the aims of fascism. After a few tense years, after all, the pope and the dictator had only recently signed an accord turning most of Rome over to the Italian state, while guaranteeing the autonomy of certain narrowly drawn properties and spaces (not all of them contiguous) as the Vatican state. These were wholly surrounded by Mussolini’s Italy, and his police quite thoroughly had jurisdiction over Vatican employees who did not live within the Vatican’s walls.

  Pius XI tried to distinguish his own program from Mussolini’s by way of irony rather than by direct verbal confrontation. For instance, he was vehement in his denunciations of socialism; as his successor John XXIII wrote: “Pope Pius XI . . . emphasized the fundamental opposition between Communism and Christianity, and made it clear that no Catholic could subscribe even to moderate Socialism. The reason is that Socialism is founded on a doctrine of human society which is bounded by time and takes no account of any objective other than that of material well-being.”9 It was a slap in Mussolini’s face, knowing full well that Mussolini’s fascism expressly boasted of being a form of socialism.

  But what exactly were the differences Pius XI saw between a Christian social order built around the guiding rule of social justice and a fascist/socialist order? Fascists and Nazis went out of their way to contrast their commitment to community, society, and the collective with Anglo-American individualism and decadence. In fact, the very symbol chosen for fascism was a bundle of wood tied tightly together—as if to represent the power of the collective against the easily scattered individuals of the Anglo-American world.

  There are, above all, differences in the fundamental philosophy of each. “The Pope,” Nell-Breuning writes, “contra
sts this truly social idea [that is, social justice] with the mechanist-individualist reform plans of socialism and its followers.”10 Socialism may desire “a restoration of sound social order” over against liberal individualism, but “it accepts all the materialism and individualism of the liberal order.”11 Besides, socialists (even when they try to appear moderate) seek the abolition of private property, while Catholic teaching emphatically does not. And socialism maintains both a powerful animosity against religion and an anti-Christian morality. Socialism is a morality of free love which deliberately undermines the family. The only thing socialism and social justice appear to have in common is the above-mentioned drive “to restore order which could lead economics back into firm and regulated channels.”12 But their philosophy of the state, private property, the family, and morals are worlds apart.

  There can be no mistaking the animosity of Pius XI and Nell-Breuning toward the liberalist illusion which, oddly to Anglo-American ears, they see as the starting point of socialism and communism. Nell-Breuning writes: “The Pope keenly attacks the erroneous belief that the market under competition regulates itself.” But this is not a factual description. Equally, Pius XI rejects the theory “that the human mind is capable of directing economic developments according to a definite plan.” “We must admit,” Nell-Breuning confesses, “that human endeavors to regulate economics are subject to the danger of error and false judgment, and that, indeed, not all experiments have led to the desired result.” The conclusion that Nell-Breuning draws from these mistakes is that it “is necessary to advance cautiously and to learn from our mistakes.”13 He emphasizes that economics is a social science, concerned with “the existence of economic society,” and that society is “far more than a non-cooperative mass of individuals.”14 It is this, he writes, that obliges the pope to conclude in paragraph 88 that it is “very necessary that economic affairs be once more subjected to and governed by a true and effective guiding principle.” The pope, in short, “looks for something that is above economic power, and can therefore direct it toward the right goal.” Here, Nell-Breuning adds, he “conceives of two powers: Social justice and social charity.” And in seeking how these can be “implanted into economic society as a regulating force,” the pope “attaches first importance to governmental and social institutions.”15