PERSPECTIVES
Social justice is the heart of our Catholic calling
By Sean Sanford
Special to The Catholic Spirit
The summer after I graduated from high school things started to change. Friendships faded, a romance ended and childhood security gave way to those ‘big questions’ that make us human. Come September I found myself moving into a dorm in Philadelphia unsure of my future and less so of my faith.
My parents raised us to believe that Christianity and service to others are inseparable. So, not knowing what else to do, I threw myself into community service. As a homeless outreach volunteer I confronted a reality unfamiliar to my life at home. Walking the streets of Philadelphia, new relationships were borne. I came to care deeply for the homeless women, children and men I met week after week. I was blessed to know them and some even trusted me with their struggles. Sometimes their pain overwhelmed me.
Sitting in church on Sunday, I prayed for a world filled with so much preventable suffering. I was desperate to understand how my Church could help me to do something more than talk about the Kingdom of God. I needed a faith that would give me the inspiration and guidance to actually try and build the Kingdom, and I didn’t know where to look. It wasn’t until a Jesuit friend gave me a tattered copy of The Long Loneliness, the autobiography of Dorothy Day, that I began a faith-journey that filled my life with purpose.
Dorothy Day was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. Passionately devoted to serving the poor and oppressed, Dorothy modeled a life of simplicity, profound faith, and action on behalf of social justice. Hers was a vision of life deeply rooted in the Gospel. Dorothy and others like her opened my eyes to the prophetic mission which all Catholics are called. If we love Christ, we must love the poor and oppressed, and we must move from the pew out into the world. Such was the beginning of a vocation that has set the course of my life.
In time I learned about Catholic Social Thought, jokingly referred to as ‘our best kept secret’. These church teachings elaborate a Catholic approach to social justice that guides the faithful to action on some of the most difficult issues of our time. Our faith calls us to fight injustice and requires, as fundamental to Christian life, our participation in the transformation of the world (Justice in the World, 1971).
Though many of us are dismayed by the bitter partisanship of our leaders and the futility of politics as usual, Catholic Social Thought gives us hope in a new way, the way of faith-justice. As Catholics we do not fit into one-dimensional profiles: we are republican and democrat, we are pro-life and pro-immigrant, we are pro-family and pro-organized labor, and we believe in peace with justice. We come in every age, color, ethnicity and way of life. We can change the world precisely because we are universal Church.
The Gospel instructs us to stand together and insist upon a culture that protects the dignity and life of every person. Every political and economic decision we make, whether personal, professional or political, should be informed by this identity. As followers of Jesus, we must “fight the good fight” for political, social and economic justice. We must never believe that such work is just a liberal or a conservative issue. It is bigger — we are bigger — than that. We are, in the words of Archbishop Romero called to be “prophets of a future not our own.”
As a Catholic Christian, a minister and a synod delegate, my prayer is this: we will expand our faith-filled action beyond the narrow scope of ‘left’ or ‘right’ and emerge as a passionate community struggling for peace and justice. It is time we begin to challenge the radical individualism of our culture and the complacency of our society. We must begin to take risks for others; Jesus did and so must we.
Sean Sanford is the synod delegate and pastoral associate for social justice ministries at St. Charles Borromeo Church, Skillman. He also serves as the associate director of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Princeton and is pursuing a Ph.D. in religion exploring the religious and political identity of American Catholics.
Phase II Speak Up Sessions continue until June 17 at specific locations throughout the diocese. For schedule, registration and more information, visit www.diometuchen.org/synod/ or call the Synod Secretariat at (732) 562-2454.
*The attached/referenced article was originally published in The Catholic Spirit, the official newspaper of the Diocese of Metuchen, and is protected under U.S. and international copyright law