v 1.0
By Scott Steinkerchner OP
This statement from a working document of a 1971 worldwide synod of bishops aptly sums up the problem still facing the Church today. To live like Dives with Lazarus at the gate is not even perceived as sinful. This problem has been with us since the dawn of civilization, but we feel it particularly keenly today. Ever since Pope Leo XIII's landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum, the Church has been trying to articulate a coherent and compelling vision of how our faith calls us to create a more just society. We use words like "social sin" and "social justice" to articulate our insights, but we have had limited success. This essay presents the approach taken by John Paul II and others following in his footsteps and then suggests a direction in which to develop this thought, a direction that may perhaps be more useful in our struggle to understand and to be understood. It also ends with a bare bones, pragmatic summary, and information on the author.
In Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, John Paul II places the analysis of social problems in the light of the gospel in their global context while still maintaining their roots in individual actions. Rather than using the concept of social justice as his centerpiece, his approach centers on a broader understanding of human sinfulness, showing how societal structures can lead people into sin and how people's sinful actions can create societal structures that can be properly called sin:
This is not merely social analysis. It is intimately associated with human sin:
Linking social justice and human sin is the centerpiece of John Paul II's approach. Where he uses the term "structures of sin," others who follow in his footsteps prefer the more direct "social sin." For instance, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton in his letter "Peacemaking as a Way of Life" offers a definition created by Bryan Hehir: "Social sin is a situation in which the very organization of some level of society systematically functions to the detriment of groups or individuals in society"(307).
Whichever terminology one prefers, the message is the same; societal structures can function directly to oppress the powerless and thus can be properly called sinful. Yet they do not have a life of their own. They are created by individual human actions and are perpetuated by still other individual human actions. This connection is important because it shows the personal responsibility of all those involved. As Richard Gula says, "By participating in these structures we sustain them and help to produce their effects, whether we want to or not" (120). With this view of social justice, we are called to analyze every societal mechanism in terms of its effect on the poor and powerless.
Structures of sin not only implicate those who have created them and who sustain them, they actively spread sin in our world. They do this in three ways. The first way, we have seen, is by directly perpetuating the poverty of the poor and powerless. The second way is by appearing to be an overwhelming obstacle, thus leading people to despair from even trying to overcome them. By their grand scale and entrenchment in the fabric of society, individuals can be made to feel that they are powerless against them and thus are not responsible to even try to change them, as if the gospel dictates no longer applied. The third way is the ability of structures of sin to obscure true awareness of the universal common good. They offer an alternative picture of reality which tries to claim legitimacy by its mere existence. Being as interwoven as they are into the fabric of society, it is difficult to grasp them in their totality and thus to point to a specific reason as to why they are sinful. They function to the benefit of some, and so in that sense they are good. It is not always easy to see how a particular mechanism is tied to the poverty of others and to be able to then balance this against the benefits this particular mechanism offers. As Hayek pointed out, modern societies are incredibly complex. Yet John Paul II challenges us to make the effort to fight social sin lest it abound all the more. We can never cease from exposing the relationship between personal sin and structures of sin if we are to remain faithful to our call to be God's loving presence here on Earth. "John Paul II rejects the notion of social sin which allows blame to be put on the group or the system rather than on the individual. He favors a sense of distributive moral responsibility" (Gula 119). We are each responsible for our own part in creating and perpetuating structures of sin. Indeed, naming these structures as sin has its own power in itself. As John Paul II says,
We name social mechanisms which perpetuate evil as sin in order to fight sin. Expanding our view of sin beyond individual actions allows us to directly address the ills in our society. For instance, Gumbleton points out that while previously we may have stressed that individuals need to act justly in their personal relationships with African-Americans, we were not able to directly name theologically how racism itself functions as sin in our society and thus we were less effective in our ability to fight this evil. This was a contributing factor to the American church's inability to speak uniformly and powerfully against slavery before the Civil War, while in the 1980's we had no trouble in standing firmly against Apartheid in South Africa.
John Paul II's analysis of social sin is right on the mark. The image of Dives feasting with Lazarus starving at the gate is a perfect scriptural image for the situation that confronts me every day in the newspapers and on the streets here in St. Louis. But it is not enough to only stress the influence of personal actions on a given unjust mechanism. I take for an example the situation named above by John Paul II as paradigmatic of social sin; the first world's economic enslavement of the third world. The situation is so complex that individuals really are powerless against it! Any unilateral action attempting to solve the problem would be completely ineffectual. The system has built-in mechanisms to counteract such minute perturbations, or it would have been corrected long ago. There are after all some people who see the problem and are trying to fix it.
It is important to see that although this analysis is good as far as it goes, because of this reason it lacks the ability to be transformative. To address such large issues requires the coordinated efforts of many people, key figures representing each group involved or affected by the structure. Being precisely a group problem, it requires a group solution. To make social sin unilaterally dependent on personal sin seems therefore to be counter-productive to solving these big issues. It leads us to address them on an individual basis which is ineffectual.
I therefore propose that we take the next step and place social sin on equal footing with personal sin, recognizing that each is dependent on the other and that each is applicable in its own sphere (personal and social). I agree with Hehir's useful and concise definition: "Social sin is a situation in which the very organization of some level of society systematically functions to the detriment of groups or individuals in society" (Gumbleton 307), but I would add an ontological caveat: that social sin is every bit as real as personal sin. I believe that these two kinds of sin are mutually dependent. John Paul II stresses that social sin is ultimately dependent on personal sin, but I would add that personal sin is also dependent on social sin. This mutual definition would more clearly show the dialogical relationship between how our actions affect others in society and how the society we live in affects our actions. It would also allow us to make sense of group phenomena precisely as proper to a group rather than as a net effect of the summation of individual phenomena. It does these things for a theological reason: we are made in the image of the trinitarian God who is equally one and three. My argument has pragmatic consequences, but it is ultimately theological.
We are created as images of God and strengthened in our task to live as images of God by the revelation of Jesus Christ in the Spirit. In struggling with sin, we struggle with all of the things which keep us from following this call. It is therefore very important to know about God whom we are called to image. However we choose to express this, we as Christians believe that God is both one and three. Catherine Mowry LaCugna in God For Us details the richness or our trinitarian theological tradition and contrasts this with the recent past where we seem to have lost this richness. She points out that the doctrine of trinity could and should inform every aspect of our theology. We have become functional unitarians at the expense of the richness of trinitarianism. We can only understand the social nature of sin by reflecting on the social nature of our trinitarian God.
In some sense, God is One. Thomas Aquinas expressed this as ipsum esse subsistens, existence itself, the self-grounding foundation of all being (I a. 3. 4.). For Thomas, this entailed that God as pure act is absolutely unchanging (I a. 2. 3.). Elizabeth Johnson in She Who Is criticizes this view as only one way of speaking of the unimaginable mystery of God. She favors symbolizing God as ultimate livingness, seeing perfection as dynamic rather than static (192). God is the ultimate actor. Aquinas also has insight in this area. It is precisely the divine nature as ipsum esse subsistens that allows for the the ultimate nature of divine actions. For Thomas, divine actions spring from the unity of the divine nature. In either case, the implication I wish to draw for sin is that whether we see God as act or action, to be more God-like we need to examine our own actions. This is personal sin - what we do or do not do as measured against the divine standard, revealed particularly through Jesus Christ.
In some sense, God is three. Thomas Aquinas expressed this as "subsistent relations" (I a. 23. 2.). Catherine LaCugna cites many other ways of expressing this, the most helpful to me being perichoresis, "a dynamic model of persons in communion based on mutuality and communion" (271). LaCugna reminds us that however we image or explain the divine nature, we can never lose sight of the oikonomia, God's salvific action in the world. If we believe in the specific revelation that is Jesus Christ, we cannot divorce our theologia, our understanding of the divine nature, from our oikonomia, God's presence in our world as trinity. She would have us begin our theology with the concrete revelation of trinity rather than the abstract notion of unity. Elizabeth Johnson balances the unity and trinity of God by reminding us that "Trinitarian communion itself is primordial, not something to be added after the one God is described, for there is no God who is not relational through and through" (227). However we choose to describe it, all Christian theologians acknowledge the incredible revelation that God is three persons eternally related to each other. Relationality is as essential to the nature of God in Christian revelation as is unity.
Some have used divine relationality as a basis for personalist philosophy, holding that relationality is fundamental not only to divine nature but to human nature as well (LaCugna 256). Certainly our baptism joins us to the one body in such a way that even if we were essentially unrelated to each other before baptism, that is no longer the case after (RCIA par.1). Just as God is relational through and through, we members of the ecclesial body are relational through and through. Relationality is as essential to us as being and acting. This is the basis for naming sin as social sin?a brokenness in the way we are related to one another.
Things both act and are related to other things. Thus we name sin both as wrong action and wrong relation. Because we image the God who is equally one and three, we name sin equally as personal and social. This gives us a coherent way to think of social sin as social, that is, proper to a group rather than an individual, just as we understand personal sin to be proper only to individuals. So often we pit our individuality against our relatedness.
There is a diabolical dialog between these two forms of sin. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki in The Fall to Violence explains this condition as analogous to our ancient concept of original sin; "To be human is to be embroiled in sin before one even has the means to assent. The embroilment, in a relational world, means that one has internalized attitudes that lead to actions of ill-being" (129). Our sinful actions carry through our relationships and work to destroy them, to break them, to make them sinful, while our sinful, broken relationships lead us toward acting in a sinful manner, completing the cycle of sin.
One implication of defining social sin as being in a sinful relationship is that it makes clear how anyone involved in a sinful relationship is implicated, that is, connected to sin, and is therefore responsible for healing the relationship. This is true whether or not his or her particular actions contributed to the brokenness. This is not the same as blaming the victim or assigning guilt for the brokenness in the relationship. Blame and guilt belong to personal sin, sinful actions, and establishing them is important for dealing with sin, but it is only part of the story. It is good and necessary, but we cannot stop there. Naming sin as social reveals a further question that needs to be addressed; simply, am I in a sinful relationship? This is a crucial distinction between this understanding of social sin and that of John Paul II. Being images of God here on this earth, we are called to address social sin in all of our relationships irrespective of our responsibility in creating or perpetuating the sinful relationship. We must look at all of our relationships and ask if they function to the detriment of anyone. Assigning blame for the brokenness does not let anyone "off the hook."
This takes seriously the damage inflicted on those who have been sinned against, the powerless victims of society, who through no fault of their own, find themselves suddenly plunged into sin. Though innocent, they are in need of reconciliation every bit as much as those who have sinned against them (Vincie 40). As Suchocki says, "For good or for ill, there is an entwining of victim and violator through the very nature of the violation" (147). Through the effect of sinful actions working in their relationships, the violated have become cut off from being able to realize their full potential as images of God. If we cannot heal this sort of sin, we have failed in our role as a reconciling community (Vincie 40).
Another implication is that we can see how Jesus Christ entered into our world and broke the cycle of sin. By becoming human, Jesus, though completely innocent and blameless, entered into a new and sinful relationship with us, taking the full weight of this sinfulness upon himself at his crucifixion yet never responding in sinful action. As Paul writes, "For our sake [God] made [Christ] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2Cor 5:21). Before Christ, we were born into this cycle of sin against which we were powerless. But Jesus was not powerless. Through the incarnation he became implicated in social sin, yet he never responded with personal sin. Thus he overcame the cycle of sin. Through the power of the Spirit we can share in this righteousness.
We cannot avoid being caught in social sin. Simply by being born, we enter into a complex web of social relationships, some of which are overtly sinful, all of which probably have some sinful aspect. But that is not the whole story. We are called by our baptismal vows to break the cycle of sin that holds our world bound. We are responsible for our actions in breaking the deadly cycle of sin that grips the world. To do this, we need to not only be committed to the gospel, we need to become insightful about the manifold ways in which sin invades our world. In some way we are all living like Dives with Lazarus at the gate. The revelation of Jesus Christ can illumine this darkness for us, if we would only open our eyes to see.
This is a tough issue to understand. Perhaps no one can fully wrap their mind around the complex collection of theological and sociological factors involved. Certainly, we cannot expect this of most people. Yet the basic understandings and their implications on how we should live our lives is not that difficult to understand. The argument can be broken down into a few, easily grasped, fundamental insights:
1. Simply the definition: "Social sin is a situation in which the very organization of some level of society systematically functions to the detriment of groups or individuals in society." We know that social sin exists because we can see the victims of its violence in the poor, the homeless and the disadvantaged. Take for an example Juan, a worker on a large coffee plantation in Guatemala who works twelve back-breaking hours every day while his children starve to death because he is too poor to feed them. It is very hard to understand the complexity of the situation and harder yet to know how to heal such sin, but we can at least see the problem. Although Juan is doing everything he possibly can, he cannot feed his family. This is not God's plan for the world.
2. Everyone involved in a sinful structure or relationship is involved. Some are also guilty. Obviously those who are responsible for setting up an unjust structure or actively work to maintain it for personal benefit at someone else's expense are guilty of personal sin. But this is not the whole story. Once we become aware of social sin we are obliged to do what we can to heal it or we can become guilty of sustaining it. Even if we are powerless to heal it, we are called to disengage ourselves from the sin if possible. An example might help. Remember Juan? The coffee he picks is sold around the world, much of it to the United States of America, where it ends up on our grocer's shelf. Perhaps it is the least expensive brand, since it has such low production costs. This makes it attractive to American consumers who buy it en masse and thus perpetuate the system. But picture Betty, a shopper who just went into the store to pick up some groceries. In this morning's paper she read a story about Juan and how the BrewKing Coffee Company has just been implicated in paying him sub-poverty level wages. She usually buys BrewKing coffee, but today she has a dilemma: to buy BrewKing or not. She realizes that her purchase of one pound of BrewKing coffee is not going to make a difference in Juan's life, yet she chooses to go with another brand anyway because she refuses to be a part of the unjust structure that is killing Juan and his family. She may even feel like writing a letter to her congressman or start campaigning for human rights, but at the least she can refuse to be a part of this sinful situation, no matter how small a part she would be. Even if because of the many other responsibilities she has in her life she is unable to help poor Juan, she can at least refuse to be a part of his oppression. Her decision does not have to rest on her ability to understand her part in Juan's oppression. She simply needs to recognize that there is an economic connection, however obscure it is, that it is detrimental to Juan, and then choose not to participate for her own sake as well as for Juan.
3. Personal sin (individual sinful actions or omissions, the stuff we are used to confessing) and social sin always go hand in hand. When we commit sinful actions, we not only hurt ourselves, we hurt our community. Our sinful actions and lack of care for our neighbor create social sin. In a reciprocal relationship, social sin indirectly but causally leads to personal sin. Those who live in environments ripped through with injustice are much more likely to act out sinfully. Our sinful relationships don't force us to sin, they don't take away our freedom to choose not to respond sinfully, but they do lean us more in the direction of personal sin. We take as our model of breaking this cycle of sin Jesus himself, who though enmeshed in social sin never responded with personal sin. If we as a community are serious about following our baptismal call of imaging God in our world, we are must not only to repent of our own personal sins, but heal our social sins as well.
Coleman, John A. Ed. One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Thought: Celebration and Challenge. New York: Orbis, 1991.
Gula, Richard M. Reason Informed by Faith: Foundations of Catholic Morality. New York: Paulist, 1989.
Gumbleton, Thomas J. "Peacemaking as a Way of Life." One Hundred Years of Catholic Social Thought: Celebration and Challenge. Ed. John Coleman. New York: Orbis, 1991.
The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. Iowa Falls: World Bible, 1989.
John Paul II. Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. Internet http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/church/papal/jp.ii/jp2solli.txt.
Johnson, Elizabeth A. She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. New York: Crossroad, 1992.
LaCugna, Catherine Mowry. God For Us: The Trinity and Christian Life. San Francisco: Harper, 1993.
Leo XIII. Rerum Novarum. http://listserv.american.edu/catholic/church/papal/leo.xiii/rerum.novarum.html.
McCormick, Patrick. "Centesimus Annus." The New Dictionary of Catholic Social Thought. J. A. Dwyer, Ed. Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 1994.
Murphy-O'Connor, Jerome. "The Second Letter to the Corinthians." The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice, 1990.Pius XI. "Quadragesimo Anno." Catholic Social Thought: The Documentary Heritage. New York: Orbis, 1992.
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Chicago: Liturgy Training Pubs, 1988.
Suchocki, Marjorie Hewitt. The Fall to Violence: Original Sin in Relational Theology. New York: Continuum, 1995.
Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. Internet http://www.knight.org/advent/summa/.
Vincie, Catherine. "Reconciliation for the Victim: the One Sinned Against"' Liturgy: Ritual and Reconciliation 9/4:35-41.
Dives is the name ascribed in tradition to the rich man of Luke 16:19-31 which follows:
"There was a rich man who dressed in purple garments and fine linen and dined sumptuously each day. And lying at his door was a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who would gladly have eaten his fill of the scraps that fell from the rich man's table. Dogs even used to come and lick his sores. When the poor man died, he was carried away by angels to the bosom of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried, and from the nether world, where he was in torment, he raised his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he cried out, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.' Abraham replied, 'My child, remember that you received what was good during your lifetime while Lazarus likewise received what was bad; but now he is comforted here, whereas you are tormented. Moreover, between us and you a great chasm is established to prevent anyone from crossing who might wish to go from our side to yours or from your side to ours.' He said, 'Then I beg you, father, send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment.' But Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets. Let them listen to them.' He said, 'Oh no, father Abraham, but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.' Then Abraham said, 'If they will not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded if someone should rise from the dead.' " (NAB translation)
Scott Steinkerchner, O.P. is a member of the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) who completed his theological studies at Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, Missouri. More information is available at his home page, http://www.op.org/steinkerchner/