The Perspective of Justice

On Behalf of Justice

We as a Church are dedicated to the search for a better world, but today’s liturgy challenges us to push that dedication to its limit. Ask for a better world, Jesus says, and you shall receive; seek a better world and you shall find; knock at the door of a better world and it shall be opened to you. “For whoever asks, receives; whoever seeks, finds; whoever knocks, is admitted.”

The problem is in part lack of faith in the God who “gives power and strength to his people.” The problem is also a lack of Christians personally committed to the pursuit of justice and peace.

What if there were only fifty people working for justice? God would not let us be destroyed. What if there were only thirty people working for peace? God would not let us be destroyed. What if only ten were working for justice and peace? God would not let us be destroyed. The problem is that there are not even those ten.

“Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?” He will indeed, and those who do not join in that ‘action with justice’ will suffer the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.

Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church’s mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.

Synod of Bishops, Justice in the World: 1971:6

Gerald Darring

**From Saint Louis University