SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOLIDARITY

 Society ensures Social Justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or
individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and their vocation.
 Social justice is linked to the common good and the exercise of the authority. (CCC,1928)
 Society ensures social justice by providing the conditions that allow associations and individuals
to obtain their due. (CCC, 1943)
 Social justice can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man. The person
represents the ultimate end of the society, which is ordered to him: what is the stake is the
dignity of the human person, whose defense and promotion have been entrusted to us by the
Creator, and to whom the men and women at every moment of history are strictly and
responsibly in debt (CCC, 1929).
 Solidarity is manifested in the first place by the distribution of goods and remuneration for
work. It also presupposes the efforts for more just social order where tensions are better able
to reduced and conflicts more readily settled by negotiation (CCC, 1940)
 The virtue of solidarity goes beyond materials goods, in spreading the spiritual goods of the
faith, the church has promotes, and often opened a new path for, the development of temporal
goods as well so throughout the centuries has the Lord’s saying been verified: “seek first the
kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (CCC, 1939).
 Human Solidarity means that we are to think in terms of friendship and charity toward our
brothers and sisters in society. We are one. It’s like being connected by invisible threads to
every other person in the world. When one of us is suffering, that suffering is transferred down
those invisible threads to all of us. As a starting point, solidarity means distributing the world’s
resources so that each of us gets our fair share and no one is suffering because of physical need.
 As followers of Christ, we believe that solidarity is a highly Christian virtue. It reminds us to
practice the sharing of spiritual goods even more than material ones (CCC, 1948)
 Pope Francis is telling us the “Essential to attainment of these national goals is the moral
imperative of ensuring social justice and respect for human dignity. The great biblical traditions
enjoin on all peoples the duty to hear the voice of the poor. It bids us to break the bonds of
injustices and oppression which give rise to glaring, and indeed, scandalous social inequalities.
Reforming the social structures which perpetuate poverty and the exclusion of the poor first
requires a conversion of mind and heath