Editor:
A new understanding of social justice includes the belief expressed in Father Gregorio’s column, “Greed, the great American vice, got us here (June 12), in which he argues that poverty is an unnatural state that does not have to be. To objectify poverty as a construct that exists independently, somewhere out there in the ether, is to ignore Jesus’ words to his disciples (Mt. 26-11): “You have the poor with you always, but you will not always have me.”
Jesus does not convey in his words or his deeds that we are to relegate our interpersonal responsibility to a government that will take care of the problem for us. Jesus is speaking existentially to underscore yet again that we are responsible for one another. As long as we have free will the human condition will not be prefect but that freedom allows us to become more Christ-like.
If the idea that inequality is inherently unjust, no matter how it came about, is allowed to stand, then our traditional understanding is based on the reality that man has freedom of choice and it is those choices upon which the individual is judged. The basic message of the Gospels is the free and unconditional love of the Father. He makes it very clear that the only love he wants from us is a love freely given. With freedom comes responsibility.
Where governmental structures can assist, without impinging upon the individual’s right to choose where and when he may reach out to help his fellow man, to that extent society can act as an entity. To go beyond this dictum to eradicate poverty as “an unnatural state,” as Father Gregorio terms it, can only be accomplished by failing to acknowledge man’s free will and his God-given uniqueness.
Mena Kramer
Cherry Hill
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