Social Justice in the Church must Proclaim Christ

There are many people in this world who are good hearted, and with the best of intentions they seek to help others. Many times words such as social justice are spoken in relation to these efforts. Within the Church, there are many who pursue social justice, but consequently in their pursuit begin to focus on purely temporal issues and neglect the proclamation of Christ. Therefore, I would like to just put up a little blurb by Pope Paul VI as a reminder to those who work in this field or to my brethren who may have to practice apologetics in relation to this issue.

Excerpt from Evangelii Nuntiandi:

32. We must not ignore the fact that many, even generous Christians who are sensitive to the dramatic questions involved in the problem of liberation, in their wish to commit the Church to the liberation effort are frequently tempted to reduce her mission to the dimensions of a simply temporal project. They would reduce her aims to a man-centered goal; the salvation of which she is the messenger would be reduced to material well-being. Her activity, forgetful of all spiritual and religious preoccupation, would become initiatives of the political or social order. But if this were so, the Church would lose her fundamental meaning. Her message of liberation would no longer have any originality and would easily be open to monopolization and manipulation by ideological systems and political parties. She would have no more authority to proclaim freedom as in the name of God. This is why we have wished to emphasize, in the same address at the opening of the Synod, "the need to restate clearly the specifically religious finality of evangelization. This latter would lose its reason for existence if it were to diverge from the religious axis that guides it: the kingdom of God, before anything else, in its fully theological meaning...."[62]

33. With regard to the liberation which evangelization proclaims and strives to put into practice one should rather say this:

- it cannot be contained in the simple and restricted dimension of economics, politics, social or cultural life; it must envisage the whole man, in all his aspects, right up to and including his openness to the absolute, even the divine Absolute;

- it is therefore attached to a view of man which it can never sacrifice to the needs of any strategy, practice or short-term efficiency.

34. Hence, when preaching liberation and associating herself with those who are working and suffering for it, the Church is certainly not willing to restrict her mission only to the religious field and dissociate herself from man's temporal problems. Nevertheless she reaffirms the primacy of her spiritual vocation and refuses to replace the proclamation of the kingdom by the proclamation of forms of human liberation- she even states that her contribution to liberation is incomplete if she neglects to proclaim salvation in Jesus Christ. -Pope Paul VI

Pure and simple... Social justice without Christ is incomplete and without this aspect is not the work of the Church and is in fact divergent from Her mission. Those who serve Holy Mother Church therefore need to remember this, unless their work is to be purely secular. It is also as Pope Paul says that without the proclamation of Christ, the work being done is just a temporal work. Ultimately, it must not compromise its message but be open to the divine Absolute. This also means that the work must be kept in accord with Holy Mother Church's teachings and should strive always to be moral. There is much more to be gained and the rest can be read here (Evangelii Nuntiandi).