Morality and Social Justice – A 21st Century Invitation to Liberation

by Robert Ludwig, Ph.D., Director of the Institute of Pastoral Studies

The experience of Christ and grace in sacramental community is a path towards liberation–the liberation of individuals from their enslavement to all that is not God and God’s reign through a lifetime process of conversion, and the liberation of all creation from indifference, injustice, and violence through the patient witness of the sacramental community in solidarity with the unloved, the poor, the oppressed, the violated. These two dimensions of liberation go together–personal conversion and social transformation. One is set free from one’s small ego-encapsulated self and embraces the larger self, the whole self, the self that is imaged in Christ. The experience of liberation is a turning to others in compassionate service, identifying with the marginated other in one’s recognition of one’s own marginated status.

The origins of the Christian tradition, in fact, lie in a peasant movement for justice grounded in the compassion and wisdom of God active in life and history. Biblical historian Dominic Crossan has “[Jesus] had both a religious dream and a social program, and it was that conjunction that got him killed…. Indeed, if Jesus had been only a matter of words or ideas, the Romans would have probably ignored him, and we would probably not be talking about him today. His kingdom movement, however, with its healings and exorcisms, was action and practice, not just thought and theory. (The Essential Jesus, p.3).

In the liberation experience, all that can be said about Jesus, about grace, about sacramental community meets the concrete dynamics of history. Here, in a new and more powerful awareness, we recognize that Jesus really died–that his own solidarity with the poor and the oppressed led to his violent demise. Here, in a new and more powerful awareness, we see that the dynamics of conversion–of saying yes to God’s offer of grace and no to sin–makes us vulnerable to the brutal power of human systems and their terrible violence, that entering into the Reign of God experience puts us in jeopardy with the powers that rule this world. Here, in a new and more powerful awareness, we understand that as the body of Christ in history the sacramental community is called to embody and act on the same compassionate love that animated Jesus–that going into the water in baptism and breaking bread in his memory, if these actions are truly authentic, also means suffering love for the oppressed and courageous moral action on their behalf.

This experience of liberation is the basis for the Catholic moral tradition. Catholicism calls the individual to a continuous process of moral conversion, seeking liberation from sin and complete surrender to God in Christ, growing in the patterns of love and justice; and it calls the church community to a continuous process of social transformation, seeking social structures and public policies that affirm and protect the dignity of every person.

The experience of liberation–of being liberated oneself and of collaborating (conspiring) in the liberation of others–is simultaneously the most challenging and the most affirming dimension of contemporary Catholicism, the most daring and yet the most attractive aspect of pursuing the Catholic path. In liberation, we abandon whatever false selves we’ve created to win acceptance and approval, and gain the courage to accept our own acceptance–to assert our own needs and our own dignity, to claim our human rights. In liberation, we find solidarity with every oppressed/repressed/suppressed person, helping others assert their dignity and claim their rights. In liberation, we become hungry for justice, and seek after peace, passionately giving ourselves to the work of transforming the structures of poverty and oppression, codependency and addiction, violence and death, into God’s Reign of loving compassion and radical egalitarianism.

This is a difficult struggle, because it means change and transformation, becoming vulnerable in solidarity with the most vulnerable, risking the safety and security of our present arrangements and identifying with those at the edge, the victims, the nobodies. Here we let go of other rules and give ourselves to the rule of God, let go of our own controlling and surrender to a compassionate God who loves the poor, the suffering, the outcast. Liberation is a real dying, but it is a death that hope compels. It is also a real rising in which we transcend fear and the self which is controlled by fear, finding new vitality and new power in God’s lifting up of the lowly. Again, Crossan helps us see the basis of all this in Jesus: ” The Kingdom movement was Jesus’ program of empowerment for a peasantry becoming steadily more hard-pressed through insistent taxation, attendant indebtedness, and eventual land expropriation, all within increasing commercialization in the expanding colonial economy of a Roman Empire under Augustan peace and a Lower Galilee under Herodian urbanization. Jesus lived, against the systemic injustice and structural evil of that situation, an alternative open to all who would accept it: a life of open healing and shared eating, of radical itinerancy, programmatic homelessness, and fundamental egalitarianism, of human contact without discrimination, and of divine contact without hierarchy.” (Ibid., p. 12)

The dominant focus of Catholic doctrine in the past century has been its social teaching. From the pontificate of Leo XIII, which began in 1878, up to the present, Catholic leaders have spoken boldly about social, political and economic problems and the implications of Christian faith for public life. This growing body of Catholic social teaching is about human dignity, human rights, and the responsibility of individuals and social institutions to insure that those rights are honored; about the importance of the common good and the role of government in protecting and promoting it; about the scandal of modern war and of spending billions on weapons of mass destruction and the critical need to address the widening gap between the rich and the poor; about the excesses of individualism, private ownership, materialism, and consumerism, and the need to put the needs of the poor first; about the structures of social sin and the need to reconfigure global systems. Taken together it provides a radical critique of modern society and a principled vision of transformation. Ironically, it has also been used to critique the church’s internal life, calling the church to practice itself what it preaches to others.

While this body of teaching is sometimes called “our best kept secret” (because so many people, including Catholics, know little about it), many contemporary Catholics have sought to make it practical in a wide variety of imaginative and creative programs and initiatives–increasingly in concert with people of other faiths or no religious stance who share our social concern and the underlying values that prompt a vision of social transformation. Nonetheless, Catholic social teaching is a startling departure from much of Catholic history, reversing centuries of church alignment with the rich and powerful, with the process of colonization and the oppression of indigenous peoples, with patriarchal sexism and the domination of women. It overturns common assumptions about Catholicism and challenges deeply inbred patterns of domination and submission which continue to characterize so much of the church.

Liberation takes place in the human psyche as well as in society. Removing external barriers and changing social structures are tied to removing internal barriers and seeking internal change. The destructive patterns which we find in society afflict our interiority as well: shame and guilt, fear, hatred, contempt, self-righteousness, judgmentalism, alienation. Self-esteem and esteem of others go together. Self-acceptance and openness to others, compassion towards self and towards others, recognition of our own dignity and the demands human dignity make for social justice–the liberation experience ties these together. Liberation is not only a social goal, but an exhilarating interior process which transforms the self. Liberation is a healing which restores self-esteem and self-confidence to individuals as they discover an inner center of authority. Persons who have interiorized external judgments and see themselves as defective come to see that the source of their self-hatred is in defective structures. This was the great insight that emerged from Brown vs. Board of Education: that racial segregation led children of color to despise themselves–to interiorize the racism of the dominant culture implied in segregated facilities. Women, whose self-esteem has been damaged by patriarchy and sexism, are empowered by interior healing as well as by changing social structures. Gays and lesbians find coming out within (being reconciled to their own sexuality and discovering their own center of sexual authority) a necessary prerequisite to confronting heterosexist structures in society.

People who belong to target groups aren’t the only ones who can and do benefit from inner healing. White, male heterosexuals are discovering increasingly their need to be healed–their urge to dominate others and their fear of diversity are tied to their own self-esteem problems. Excessive aggression and competition and the need always to be in control is more and more felt as a deficiency that is grounded in one’s own insecurity. Attitudes that are projected outwards–towards racial minorities, women, and gays–are tied to inner doubts and uncertainties. Being driven to position, wealth, power, and prestige is related to inner anxieties and unresolved childhood experiences.

One can easily describe our national and global society today as “dysfunctional.” Just as in families, change and healing involves everyone. The patterns of dominance and submission, of controlling external authorities (international cartels, multi-national corporations, the market economy, lobbyists and political action committees, the media, socially dominant “isms”) and codependent groups (whole nations) and individuals who lack any connection to their own inner centers of authority, are in great need of healing “interventions.” Liberation movements–whether among Latin American peasants or inner-city neighborhoods; African-American, Hispanic, feminist, gay, or white-male–seek the healing of a deconstructed and violent society in crisis. The economic dissonance created by abject poverty and opulent luxury, by an all-powerful elite and the powerlessness of the masses, is creating an inner and outer tension. Today’s victims are found in Harlem and on Wall Street, in barrios and wealthy suburbs, among the poorest and the richest. We need liberation and healing–grounded in the only real authority, which is God. The liberation and healing of Jesus’ Reign of God, mediated in sacramental communities of compassion and service, must make social justice and the politics of compassion central to their identity and their work. Here inner and outer healing go together as people discover charis as their center and charism as their vocation, experiencing forgiveness and mercy as personal empowerment through conversion, and compassion and justice as the empowerment of a transformed social order.