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Social Justice
and the Fear of Hell
This article was originally published in Caelum Et Terra, Summer 1992, volume 2, no 3. and is used with the author’s permission.
To obtain permission to republish
this article, contact the author by clicking on the author's name.
Many
people look upon preaching about Hell fire as an old-fashioned and largely ineffective
way to deter would-be fornicators and drunkards. Now if such preaching does do anything to keep people from those
sins, that is fine with me, but there is another kind of sin I am thinking of
that the fear of Hell has also been known to prevent. These are sins against the commands of justice and the common
good, a type of sin widely denounced in Holy Scripture and in classical
Catholic preaching. Two of the four sins
that cry to Heaven for vengeance, for example, grinding the face of the poor
and withholding the wages of the workingman, are sins against justice. think,
therefore, that it is worth a closer look to discover whether a connection
between justice and the fear of Hell might indeed be useful to the common good
of society and help prevent injustices to the poor.
In
order to weigh one's conduct against the possibility of eternal punishment it
is necessary to know that one has done wrong. The Seventh Commandment, You
shall not steal, might seem fairly straightforwards in its meaning. Nowadays when we think of violations of this
Commandment we are apt to think only of auto thieves or burglars. But this was not always so. Despite the simpler economic life of the
Middle Ages, men of that time had a much more sophisticated sense of economic
sin than we have today. It was not just
obvious cases of theft which they considered to come under the scope of this
Commandment, but practices which turned economic activity away from its purpose
of serving the common good, such as lending money at usury, attempting to buy
up and control the entire supply of raw materials; selling products at an
unjust (generally too high) price; selling poorly made goods or food that was
not fresh, or in general, behaving in such a way that one forgot that economic activity
did not exist simply to enrich the individual person. The medievals even institutionalized safeguards against such
economic abuses by setting up the craft guilds, whose regulations often went
beyond the absolute demands of the natural law to try to prevent even the
beginnings of injustice, for example, by regulating the number of apprentices
and journeymen each master craftsmen could employ so that no one establishment
could grow too large and gain too large a market share, or (in some places) by actually
putting a limit on the amount of money a guild member could possess, requiring
the excess to be given for charitable purposes, or by prohibiting advertising
in order to prevent consumer deception, a restriction that obtained in France
into the 18th century.
No
doubt such an emphasis on justice and the common good seems like a paradise to
us who live in the midst of the dog-eat-dog free market system, but it is a
mistake to look at these regulations in isolation. They only make sense, and indeed, they will only check evil
conduct, when they are in the setting of a culture which takes seriously the
Gospel's demands for just conduct and believes that Almighty God will enforce
those demands by punishment after death, including the possibility of eternal
punishment in Hell.
It
is a commonplace today that one hardly ever hears sin of any kind denounced
from the pulpit. But even before the
present crisis in the Church, economic sins were rarely condemned in sermons. Consider these words of Fr. John Cronin,
written in 1950: "...sermons on
greed, avarice, selfishness in business matters, unwarranted ambition, and
unsocial conduct are as rare today as they were common in medieval times." Why was this the case? Had economic wrongdoing disappeared by 1950?
Unfortunately not. The reasons for the rarity of denunciations
of economic injustice by preachers were two, I think. The first reason is that
Catholics no longer took the trouble, admittedly more difficult as our economic
life became more complex, to understand the exact nature of economic
transactions and thus to be able to pronounce on their sinfulness or lack
thereof, with any degree of certainty.
Cronin, for example, writes further,
Our
moral theology texts were, in general, hopelessly out of date
in applying moral principles to
economic life. Apparently few
moralists knew enough about economic
facts to work out a
realistic and complete solution. Hence moral teaching generally
confined itself to obvious justice
and injustice and clearly
defined motives.
Richard Tawney says the same thing apropos of the
Protestant Church of England in the early seventeenth century, which initially
carried on most of the economic morality of the Medieval Catholic Church, but
which failed to adapt that teaching to the more complex commercial transactions
of post-Reformation England: "The
social teaching of the Church had ceased to count, because the Church itself
had ceased to think." Though a few
notable writers, even in the 20th century, such as Fr. John A. Ryan, worked out
exact and detailed analyses of economic transactions and questions of justice
and injustice, most writers on the Church's social teachings contented
themselves with general statements.
Unlike the dozens of pages of close and careful analysis that confessors
and preachers could consult on the Sixth and Ninth Commandments (say), there
was no such source for the multifarious forms that economic injustice can take,
especially since the desire for gain continually spawned complicated new types
of contracts and new schemes for getting rich.
But
the second reason why moralists and priests in general failed to emulate their
Medieval predecessors in preaching against injustice was, I am afraid, less
creditable. This was because, by and
large, in the most important countries of the Western world at any rate, most
Catholics had long ago accepted the basics of free market capitalism. What capitalism saw as virtues, they
generally saw as virtues, and what capitalism saw as vices, they too generally
saw as vices. Ecclesiastics accepted
large gifts for building churches and seminaries from the industrial magnates
of the late 19th century, instead of refusing to take money that rightfully
belonged to the workers and to the consumers of the products and services sold
by these monopolists. Of course, one
must except from this inditement the Popes themselves, who never accepted the
logic of the capitalist system, and invited competent Catholics to do the kinds
of detailed studies that were lacking.
But, alas, there was not an abundance of willing workers.
So
in order to restore the vibrant sense of economic justice and injustice that
existed during the Middle Ages, several things are necessary. First is a restoration of the sense of sin
in general, something that Pope John Paul himself has called for; second is the
difficult thinking about economic transactions and their consequences that is
necessary to distinguish between mortal and venial sin, imperfection and other
anti-social conduct, that which is not sin at all, and what sorts of conduct
should be encouraged and lauded. Until
this is done, few preachers or confessors will dare to pronounce with certainty
on the ethics of specific complex economic acts.
But
this will not be enough. This exact knowledge
of the morality of economic activities must be taught and made real to people,
so that pious Catholics have just as much horror of sins against justice as
they presently do of sins against chastity.
Both are horrible. Our Medieval
ancestors realized that the religion of Jesus Christ has as much detestation
for the one as for the other. Part of the problem lies in overcoming our
individualism and grasping the corporate and social nature of man. This is especially hard for us Americans to do,
but it is possible if we are willing to judge the American ideology by its
compatibility with the Catholic faith.
But granting that this tall order could
ever be accomplished, what could we hope for were our sense of economic
responsibility, and thus of economic sin, together with the requisite
knowledge, restored? What would happen were men ever again to fear that selling
harmful products or closing factories simply to increase profits, or any
other grave injustice might merit for them an eternity of horrible torture?
Fanfani
notes that during the high Middle Ages, with its increasing economic
complexity, the "number of individuals who yield to the lure of capitalism
increases, though there are few who fail to repent either on their death-beds
or during life...." And of course
it was precisely this fear of Hell that moved these early and tentative
capitalists to salutary repentance.
This healthy fear helped to make the guild regulations and the
prohibitions of the civil and canon laws respecting economic crimes something
more than a dead letter to be evaded whenever possible. They also moved those guilty of usury and
other injustices to give alms - sometimes in the form of magnificent endowments
of schools or churches - as they lay dying, in hope of avoiding Hell or
shortening their detention in Purgatory.
Very often the endowment was for a priest to say Mass in perpetuity for
the soul of the deceased usurer - and incidently provide free education to the
poor of the district. Anyone familiar
with the history of England before the Protestant Revolt will remember all the
good done by these chantry priests and their schools.
Despite the obvious imperfections of the Medieval period, it is nevertheless true to say that at that time men took the Gospel seriously enough to try to reshape the entire society according to its precepts. And unlike many modern disciples of Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, they did not confine their efforts to opposing sins against chastity and leave the economic realm to the Devil. Rather they took the words of our Lord and the Apostles seriously, and made an honest attempt to restrain man's appetite for pecuniary gain. Only if we come to realize that this appetite, like the desire for unlimited sexual pleasure, must be curbed for the sake of the common good, can we even begin to lay the groundwork for a Christian order. But if we begin to rise above our ingrained individualism and consider with St. Paul that if we have sufficient material goods, then we ought to be content with these, we might be able to be transformed by the grace of God into people who are really willing to let the spirit of the Gospel change their lives and their ways. And if the Church could combine clear teaching about what was sin and what not in the economic realm, together with a firm statement of the reality of death, judgment and Hell, then we might see some souls held back from acts of economic and financial injustice. This would not only help to relieve the poor and save souls from Hell, but aid the Church greatly in her credibility, perhaps attracting more people to the Body of Christ on earth. But primarily what this would accomplish would be to further the social reign of Christ the King, which, after our own salvation, is that for which all of us must pray and work the hardest.
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