Although such prejudice did not impact me personally, my father related how his father had been belittled when being interviewed for a job, when the employer decreed that my grandfather's personal name, Ignatius, from St Ignatius de Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, would be off-putting in commercial circles. He got the job, but he would thenceforth be known as Charlie.
Another example of the awareness of structural injustice that Irish Catholics encountered whether in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, where I grew up, related to the second-class-citizen nature of working people. For that reason the labour movement, and certainly in New Zealand, labour leaders, found friends in the Catholic hierarchy.
That background is by way of introduction to my reflection on Critical Race/Justice/Social Theory, which is upending social relationships in the United States in particular.
Critical Justice Theory, a German philosophical way of looking at society that uses Marx and Kant and others of an atheistic ilk, posits that inequality is "deeply embedded in the fabric of society (i.e. structural)", with the practice of critical social justice involving "actively [seeking] to change this". For that reason, education "is a political project" (Sensoy and DiAngelo 2017).
Just to dwell on that point for a moment, children's education has always been shaped by the goals the educator has wanted to achieve in that child. Just think of the Great Books program, which has a much diminished status in academic educational circles these days.
To move to the main point of this post, there is nothing new in arguing as Critical Race Theory proponents do in a manner as if they offer an extraordinary insight, that social structures can impede groups within a society of achieving full human development.
Divisions in society
From the letter of Pope Leo XIII in 1891, Rerum Novarum, on labour and the condition of the working class, the Catholic Church has given a lot of attention to the injustice perpetrated through the structures of society, and the structural influences on the condition of people globally. In 1931, Pope Pius XI's letter Quadragisimo Anno, marking 40 years since Rerum Novarum, spoke about how industrialisation had created a society that was "more and more divided into two classes":
The first, small in numbers, enjoyed practically all the comforts so plentifully supplied by modern invention; the second class, comprising the immense multitude of workingmen, was made up of those who, oppressed by dire poverty, struggled in vain to escape the straits which encompassed them.
Pius recounts how in the previous 40 years Leo's advocacy of labour unions as an aid to social reform had borne fruit, and so Christian workers "learned to defend ther rights and interests energetically and efficiently, retaining at the same time a due respect for justice and a sincere desire to collaborate with other classes". [My emphasis - we will come back to this point later.]
The Church's attention to the disparity in conditions among people also turned to the role of colonialism. As with Pope John XXIII's Pacem in Terris (World Peace 1963), in his Populorum Progressio (1967), Pope Paul VI looked to creating a more human condition for those in the developing world:
It is unfortunate that on these new conditions of society a system has been constructed which considers profit as a key motive for economic progress, competition as the supreme law of economics, and private ownership of the means of production as an absolute right that has no limits and carries no corresponding social obligations.
This unchecked liberalism leads to dictatorship rightly denounced by Pius XI as producing "the international imperialism of money". (#26)
Paul warns against violence in trying to bring about change:
There are certainly situations whose injustice cries to heaven. When whole populations destitute of necessities live in a state of dependence barring them from all initiative and responsibility, and all opportunity to advance culturally and share in social and political life, recourse to violence, as a means to right these wrongs to human dignity, is a grave temptation. (#30)
We know, however, that a revolutionary uprising - save where there is a manifest, long-standing tyranny which would do great damage to fundamental personal rights and dangerous harm to the common good of the country [Note this teaching!] - produces new injustices, throws more elements out of balance and brings on new disasters. A real evil should not be fought against at the cost of greater misery. (#31)
Writing of the horrendous living conditions in many Third World countries, Paul does not dispute that:
The present situation must be faced with courage and the injustices linked with it must be fought against and overcome. (#32)
But let them take care to associate private initiative and intermediary bodies with this work. They will thus avoid the danger of complete collectivization or of arbitrary planning which, by denying liberty, would prevent the exercise of the fundamental rights of the human person. (#33)
Regimes of racism
Paul also sees how racism is an obstacle to collaboration globally and within nations:
[It is] a cause of division and hatred within countries whenever individuals and families see the inviolable rights of the human person held in scorn, as they themselves are unjustly subjected to a regime of discrimination because of their race or colour.
Pope John Paul II examined the structures that are obstacles to social well-being. His 1987 encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis (On Social Concerns) states that "political motives" and a lack of "political will" have often created or left unchanged "misguided mechanisms" for regulating society. But that necessarily highlights the moral element of injustice in that...
...the behaviour of individuals considered as responsible persons, interfere[s] in such a way as to slow down the course of [human/group] development and hinder its full achievement. (#35)
Therefore, John Paul spends some time of this issue, which is at the forefront of Christian antagonism toward CRT, presented as it is in an aggressive and humiliating way to those who are not Black. There is little sensitivity shown, little attempt to create a collaborative approach to solving the problem of racism from the structures of US society. The ideological demand for immediate acceptance of methods and conclusions is concerting to those who are familiar with the freedom of mind and action commonplace among those outside that right-think training ground of universities.
John Paul identifies "sin" and "structures of sin" as the "roots of the evils which afflict us" (#36). He is talking about "a situation - or likewise an institution, a structure, society itself":
Whenever the Church ... condemns as social sins certain situations or the collective behaviour of certain social groups, big or small, or even of whole nations and blocs of nations, she knows and she proclaims that such cases of social sin are the result of the accumulation and concentration of many personal sins.
It is a case of the very personal sins of those who cause or support evil or who exploit it; of those who are in a position to avoid, eliminate or at least limit certain social evils but who fail to do so out of laziness, fear, or the conspiracy of silence, through secret complicity or indifference; or those who take refuge in the supposed impossibility of changing the world, and also of those who sidestep the effort and the sacrifice required, producing specious reasons.... (#36 footnote)
[Evil structures are] ... always linked to the concrete acts of individuals who introduce these structures, consolidate them and make them difficult to remove. And thus they grow stronger, spread, and become the source of other sins, and so influence people's behaviour. (#36)
One can speak of "selfishness" and of "shortsightedness", of "mistaken political calculations" and "imprudent economic deccisions". And in each of these evaluations one hears an echo of an ethical and moral nature. Man's condition is such that a more profound analysis of individual actions and omissions cannot be achieved without implying, in one way or another, judgments or references of an ethical nature.
In this consists the difference between socio-political analysis and formal reference to "sin" and "structures of sin".
[...] among the actions and attitudes opposed to the will of God, the good of neighbour and the "structures" created by them, two are very typical: on the one hand the all-consuming desire for profit, and on the other, the thirst for power, with the intention of imposing one's will upon others. (#37)
Ideology as a form of idolatry
So the pope is saying that personal "actions and attitudes" can accumulate and be concentrated so that good structures are destroyed or diminished and evil structures imposed in their place. He adds that we have to beware what lies behind the structures established for overtly benign reasons:
[However,] we would see that hidden behind certain decisions, apparently inspired only by economics or politics, are real forms of idolatry: of money, ideology, class, technology. (#37)
I have wished to introduce this type of analysis above all in order to point out the true nature of the evil which faces us with respect to the development of peoples: it is a question of a moral evil, the fruit of many sins which lead to "structures of sin". To diagnose the evil in this way is to identify precisely, on the level of human conduct, the path to be followed in order to overcome it.
In the next section of On Social Concerns John Paul II lays out how we should go about resolving social conflict. His approach is to start with urging everyone to take responsibility "for ensuring a 'more human life' for their fellow human beings, [and ...] become fully aware of the urgent need to change the spiritual attitudes which define each individual's relationship with self, with neighbour, with even the remotest human communities..." (#38)
... and all of this in view of higher values such as the common good or....the full development "of the whole individual and of all people".
The moral nature of his approach mirrors that of the leader of the arduous campaign to end segregation in the United States. On this point, Penn State academic Joshua F.J. Inwood states:
Martin Luther King Jr's understanding of the role of love in engaging individuals and communities in conflict is crucial today. For King, love was not sentimental. It demanded that individuals tell their oppressors what they were doing was wrong.
As King noted, all persons exist in an interrelated community and all are dependent on each other. By connecting love to community, King argued there were opportunities to build a more just and economically sustainable society which respected difference. As he said,
“Agape is a willingness to go to any length to restore community… Therefore, if I respond to hate with a reciprocal hate I do nothing but intensify the cleavages of a broken community.”
He also said: "Hate cannot drive out hate. Only love can do that".
In this light, for Christians, as with any sin, conversion - a thorough change in behaviour - is demanded, entailing a new relationship with God, recognition of the consequences of the evil act or omission, and hence a recommitment to "one's neighbour, either an individual or a community":
It is God, in "whose hands are the hearts of the powerful", and the hearts of all, who according to his own promise and by the power of his Spirit can transform "hearts of stone" into "hearts of flesh" (Ezk 36:26). (#38)
The Church has observed over the centuries that the pursuit of justice alone in righting a wrong, as in the case today of trying to dismantle racist structures in society, can cause misery of a different kind. Therefore, as the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church (2004) states:
In order to make society more human, more worthy of the human person, love in social life - political, economic and cultural - must be given renewed value, becoming the constant and highest norm for all activity. (#582)
Human relationships cannot be government solely according to the measure of justice. "Christians know that love is the reason for God's entering into relationship with [humankind]. And it is love which he awaits as man's response. Consequently, love is also the loftiest and most noble form of relationship possible between human beings. Love must thus enliven every sector of human life and extend to the internaional order. Only a humanity in which there reigns the 'civilisation of love' will be able to enjoy authentic and lasting peace" (John Paul II, 2004 World Day of Peace) (#582).
That "civilisation of love" envelopes everyone in society, pressing them to live honestly and also to right the wrongs that humans so easily create in our frailty. It is through the power of love, and by extension, that of the mercy and forgiveness that Dr King demonstrated, that society can more willingly demolish the structures of sin, build the means to healthy person-to-person relationships, and reinforce vibrant social relations throughout the community.
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