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| Photo by Kelly L |
The roots and manifestations of racism, economic inequality and injustice of all kinds are recognised in Catholic social teaching as sins, therefore ought not be tolerated. As Anna Rowlands reports in her study of the development of this fruitful area of Christian thought, the Church accepts that "sin resided in the social and cultural systems, structures, institutions and practices of a society, and that such structural manifestations of sin have an impact on the moral subjectivity and agency of all members of a social body".
This view is expressed also by theologian and social teaching scholar Kenneth Himes, who defines social sin as "the disvalue...embedded in a pattern of social organisation and cultural understanding". The term "embedded" is not to be taken lightly as it suggests a recasting of what is "natural" and what is to be expected, with no consideration of doing things differently.
Rowland posits such a "disvalue" as a descriptor of "an everyday force acting upon and within the life of an individual and restricting the space of free action and for necessary humanizing experiences of love and justice".
While there is no individual that can be identified as blameworthy, Rowlands states:
This sin becomes the sin of a whole society and especially difficult for those with various forms of privilege to grasp and accept.
However, those dispossessed in any way by the "everyday force" directing the nature of relationships within society, the primary material victims of this sin are usually ignored, as if their condition was also "natural", as with a view of society as a zero-sum body, meaning there will necessarily be many losers along with the few winners.
The reality of this "established disorder" is made vivid by academic and priest Byran Massingale's reading of the much replayed 2020 incident in New York's Central Park "when Amy Cooper, a white woman, basically called the police on an African-American man, Christian Cooper—no relation—who asked her to comply with the posted park regulations and leash her dog".
She had told the police that there was an African-American man who was threatening her.
Massingale, an African-American, said the incident "tells us a great deal about what we mean by white privilege, white supremacy, and why these more blatant outrages occur".
We see a white woman who exemplified all of the unspoken assumptions of whiteness. She assumed that she would be presumed innocent. She assumed that the black man would be presumed guilty. She assumed that the police would back her up. She assumed that as a white woman, her lies would hold more credibility than his truth. She assumed that she would have the presumption of innocence. She assumed that he, the black man, would have a presumption of guilt. She assumed that his race would be a burden, and that she had the upper hand in the situation. She assumed that she could exploit deeply ingrained white fears of black men, and she assumed that she could use these deeply ingrained white fears to keep a black man in his place.
It occurred to me that she knew exactly what she was doing, but also that we all know what she was doing. Every one of us could look at that situation and understand exactly what was going on, and that’s the problem. Whether we want to admit it or not, we all know how race functions in America; it functions in a way that benefits white people and burdens people of color, and especially black people.
That systemic advantage, that awareness that most white Americans have even if they don’t want to admit it, means that they would never want to be black in America. We need to be honest about the centuries-old accumulations of the benefits of whiteness that make it easier to be white than it is to be a person of color. Until we have the courage to face that reality and to name it explicitly, then we’re always going to have these explosions and eruptions of protest, but we will never have the courage and the honesty to get to the core of the issue and to deal with the systemic ways in which inequality works in America.
History and culture are intertwined in considering social structures Rowlands relates how the Church, reflecting on conditions in South American societies, recognised "the impact of culture on the operations of conscience". Therefore, the structure and culture of a society are key elements in the formation of an individual's conscience, and in the forms of community encounter experienced by the dispossessed particularly. The goal for a society is that it enables lives to be lived in solidarity, in dignity and according to the common good.
With the doctrine of Original Sin in the background, Rowlands dwells on one issue that the Catholic Church contends with in regards to "social sin" is just what is meant by "sin":
John Paul II reminded the Church that only individuals could be said to sin, and that no structure could be understood to have moral agency independent of individual moral action. He notes that regardless of the presence of undoubtedly unjust structures, the individual human person remains free, responsible, obligated and open to the operation of grace and conversion in relation to basic moral norms.
Rather, the Church speaks of "unjust structures and objective obstacles that create inducements to further individual sin". In 1995, in his letter to the Church, called Evangelium vitae, "... John Paul II adopts the language of structural sin (but not social sin) to describe a pervasive moral climate of uncertainty". Rowlands continues:
He [John Paul] pursues the idea that in a given age values themselves can become ‘eclipsed’, seemingly unavailable to a community of moral reasoning. Naming a ‘culture of death’, he argues that such an ideology can become ‘a veritable structure of sin’, one that ‘denies solidarity’. We can speak in this context about ‘a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless’.
He notes, ‘[a]ll this explains, at least in part, how the value of life can today undergo a kind of “eclipse”, even though conscience does not cease to point to it as a sacred and inviolable value.’ In this, his most far-reaching statement on structural sin, the pope goes beyond previous critiques of the use of structural sin and notes that widespread social injustice and a culture of moral uncertainty can induce sin and ‘mitigate the subjective responsibility of individuals’.
The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, issued in 2004, has some pertinent reflections on the topic, defining "social" sin this way: ‘[E]very sin is personal under a certain aspect; under another, every sin is social insofar as and because it also has social consequences.’ Rowlands comments:
Sin is defined here as social by virtue of its outcome: a personal sin is committed and becomes immediately social ‘by virtue of human solidarity which is as mysterious and intangible as it is real and concrete, each individual’s sin in some way affects others’. The following paragraphs outline a further acceptable usage of the idea of social sin as a direct offence against a neighbour, a sin against justice due between persons.
The social consequences of sin, so the Compendium continues, accrue, consolidate and develop structural form, thus becoming difficult to remove. The Compendium repeats the view that all such sin remains personal in origin, and thus the language continues to attach to the will expressed in an originating individual, traceable act. In [the encyclical letter] Solicitudo rei socialis John Paul II uses the language of structural sin in two different contexts: corrupted power in a Cold War world divided into power blocs; and as present in the drive towards a relentless profit motif in economic life. He writes:
[I]t is not out of place to speak of ‘structures of sin’, which . . . are rooted in personal sin, and thus always linked to the concrete acts of individuals who produce these structures, consolidate them and make them difficult to remove. And thus, they grow stronger, spread and become the source of others sins, and so influence people’s behaviour.We can see the way personal sin and the force of culture become intertwined in the immediate historical circumstance of post-pandemic inflation. Today, we have a Reuters article with the headline: "$10 toothpaste? U.S. household goods makers face blowback on price hikes". In this instance, given the well-embedded drive for profit by self-interested investors, and the desire by executives for an ever higher income, the personal sin of greed might be seen as being fostered by the culture's disordered "winner-take-all" mentality to produce an offence of social disorder against the poor in particular.
Personal sin as affecting society's well-being was highlighted in Pope Benedict XVI's 2007 address to South American bishops. Rowlands paraphrases him in this way:
... He excoriates both capitalism and Marxism for touting a false-doctrine that just structures could be established without need for prior individual morality and which, once established through a conscious will-to-power, would be self-perpetuating and automatic generators of the grounds for their own communal legitimacy.
The personal factor is highlighted in Benedict's commentary on the South American experience:
‘Just structures will never be complete in a definitive way. . . . Just structures are, as I have said, an indispensable condition for a just society, but they neither arise nor function without a moral consensus in society on fundamental values, and on the need to live these values with the necessary sacrifices, even if this goes against personal interest.’
Rowlands sees value in the South American bishops' response to Benedict’s words: ‘[T]here are no new structures unless there are new men and women to mobilise and bring about convergence in people’s ideals and powerful moral and religious energies.’
Rowlands also sees the need to meld recognition of the personal responsibility for sin within society with accounts of the force brought to bear on the person within by social structures within any historical context. She poses further questions for exploration by Christians wishing to capture the reality of individual freedom vis-a-vis the experience of the victims of violence and dispossession. Such questions are:
How do we conceive of responsibility for what we know to be true of our material world but which we do not will? How do we think theologically about the calcified structures in our midst, about conditioned cultural forms of thinking and knowing, from which our individual and collective minds naturally shrink, and consequently, of which we are only partly aware? Why do we tend to fall silent in the face of a violent and abusive social reality – including within the Church itself – that begs for an account of failure that extends beyond individual wrongdoing?
That question, "Why do we tend to fall silent in the face of violent and abusive social reality?" is taken further by Massingdale, when he says:
What allows racism to exist in our society, quite frankly, is that we don’t have a critical mass of people who are angry. To put it more directly, we don’t have a critical mass of white Americans who are angry about the situation. Anger is a passion that moves the will to justice. Thomas Aquinas understood that unless we are angry in the presence, at the reality, of injustice, then the status quo will all too often continue.
There is a "very difficult truth" as to why the struggles of many over the years have not brought success:
The reason why these measures haven’t proved effective up till now is because white Americans, or not enough white Americans, don’t want substantial change. [...]
Martin Luther King Jr. said that most white Americans are neither unrepentant racists, nor are they forthright racial-justice advocates. The majority of white Americans, he says, are suspended between two extremes: they are uneasy with injustice, but they are also unwilling to pay a price to eradicate it.
Therefore, advocates of Critical Race Theory who proceed in the materialist Marxist tradition of browbeating the mass into accepting a position will succeed only in forcing that mass into posing as "antiracists" whereas their true moral conviction will remain unchanged. That is why a transformation of society by awakening people's awareness of their moral responsibility, of the sinful nature of individual and cultural behaviour, is more likely to have a lasting impact.
With spiritual insight into our condition we see that the pressing need in societies around the world is not to grow the bureaucracy or create more rules or divide with fresh forms of discrimination, rather the need is to engender renewed solidarity as all being brothers and sisters so that economic inequality with its consequences of disparities in education, income and health, and of racism, will be tackled with a vision of removing all that offends our God-given dignity. This is presumably what Rowlands had in mind with the title of her book, Towards a Politics of Communion.
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