Dusting off the Church’s Social Dynamite

www.catholicworker.org.nz

Reprinted from The Common Good, Issue 1, Summer 1996

At a time when society is suffering much stress and social breakdown, clear analysis and a search for answers need to be undertaken if we are to provide hope for future generations. People need to believe in the fu­ture. The Christian Church can offer that hope.

Starting with the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s gospel and stretching through to the recent Poverty Statement of New Zealand church leaders, Christians are the inheritors of a rich vein of teaching on all matters of justice and social relationship, which flow from that simple command of Jesus ‘love one another.’ Collectively these offer great hope to our modern world.

Much of this teaching has re­mained concealed for too long, bound in volumes, stuck on dusty shelves, propping up pot plants. Someone once said that ‘the Word became flesh and didn’t remain newsprint.’ That’s true. And it was that wandering French phil­osopher, Peter Maurin, co-founder with Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker, who wrote ‘Scholars have taken the dynamite of the Church, have wrapped it in nice phrase­ology, placed it in a hermetic container and sat on the lid. It’s about time to blow the lid off.’ We do that in this issue with our article on workers.

In ‘The Common Good’, initially to be published quarterly, we will attempt to reflect something of the dynamism of those teachings in the light of contemporary life. Drawing on the spirituality and teachings of Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day, and on those who inspired them, like Benedict of Nursia, Francis and Clare of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Julianna of Norwich, Emmanuel Mounier and more contemporary prophets like Thomas Merton, Te Whiti o Rongomai, E.F. Schumacher, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, James K. Baxter and Pauline O’Regan, we will seek to share insights that have enhanced our lives and may be helpful for others. We plan not to charge a set sum for the paper, but will rely on peoples’ gener­osity to support it and our other works. Any feedback would be appreciated.

We chose ‘The Common Good’ as our name to reflect a much neglected teaching of the Church which has almost disappeared in our individualistic modern con­sumer culture. We see the common good as the social context in which each person can most effectively engage in living out the gospel demands as expressed in the spiri­tual and corporal works of mercy. The recent Poverty Statement defined it similarly: the common good is not what is best for the majority, nor what brings the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. It is what is best for each and every member of the community. ‘Taking a prefer­ential option for the poor’ is another phrase from Church teaching that is decidedly un­popular in the wider culture and in some sec­tions of the Church. It too forms a mandatory part of Christian teaching.

Putting the two together will give us a good lens to view life and our Christian par­ticipation in it. We would like to think that something of the hope and peace we feel about the future will permeate these pages and encourage others to find that abundant life which Christ promises.