CNS STORY: Seminar on Catholic social justice teaching draws students, faculty

SEMINAR-TEACHING Jun-8-2010 (950 words) xxxn

Seminar on Catholic social justice teaching draws students, faculty

By Beth Griffin
Catholic News Service

NEW YORK (CNS) -- Interest in pursuing social justice and humanitarian development is alive and well among students at Catholic colleges and universities, as evidenced by their enthusiasm for seminars and coursework on Catholic social teaching.

The demonstrated interest of the Catholic students is at odds with well-publicized advice offered in March by Fox News personality Glenn Beck. He told television viewers and radio listeners to "run as fast as you can" from churches that advocate social justice or economic justice, which he said were code words for communism and Nazism.

Brendan Cahill, director of Fordham University's Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs, told Catholic News Service that Beck "is absolutely lacking in reality. What he says goes against the nature of being young.

"Everything we're seeing belies what Beck is saying. I wonder if, before he made his comments, he went out to speak with anyone between the ages of 18 and 22 at a Jesuit university," he added.

Efforts to reach Beck for a response were not successful.

Cahill said Fordham has developed an undergraduate minor in humanitarian affairs, in response to student interest. "The program marries the theoretical and the practical," Cahill said. "Students are interested in how you can provide service both outside the university gate and on the other side of the world."

He said students are drawn to Fordham and other Jesuit schools because they share a commitment to social justice. "The idea that we are here to help those who are most vulnerable is one of the things that makes us different from a public university," Cahill said.

He pointed to the second national meeting of the Jesuit Universities Humanitarian Action Network held June 4-6 at Georgetown University. More than 250 students and 50 faculty members from Jesuit colleges and universities attended the event. The network was formed in 2008.

Cahill said its purpose is to coordinate the response of its member universities to create an efficient, well-informed response to humanitarian crises, as well as to raise awareness on campuses across the nation on the meaning of humanitarian response and its implication for the Jesuit ideology of "men and women for others."

He said the network allows students to interact with like-minded students around the country and share their social justice experiences.

Fifty-seven students from more than 30 schools participated in the fifth annual "Catholic Social Teaching" seminar in New York, hosted by the Path to Peace Foundation and the Vatican's U.N. mission. The theme of the May 23-28 conference was "Freedom, Truth and Charity: Promoting Human Development as a Vocation."

Participants immersed themselves in Catholic social teaching and studied its relationship to local and world events and the work of the Vatican's U.N. mission.

"The students get to see how Catholic social teaching comes to life and how the U.N. agenda juxtaposes principles of justice," said Msgr. Robert Meyer, former legal attache to the Holy See mission. "For students already conversant with Catholic social teaching, it's a way to confirm and validate what they know. For others, studying it for the first time, it's a way to connect the dots," he said.

Father Meyer said participants understand the notion of justice, but may not have thought of it as a Catholic teaching before the seminar. "They've always known about it, but never knew what it was called," he said.

The seminar program included presentations by ambassadors, representatives of international Catholic organizations, academics and Catholic and Jewish specialists in interreligious affairs.

In a panel discussion on creating an economically just society, professor Charles Clark of the St. John's University department of economics in Queens, N.Y., said Catholic social teaching has universal relevance. "It goes beyond the Gospel because it's grounded in the tradition of natural law," he said.

Clark said, "Catholic social teaching encourages us to ask deeper questions about the nature of economy and its purpose. Economy should be about improving human lives."

He said economists erred by excluding ethics from their analysis of the country's financial situation. "Ethics is fundamental to economics and economic policy."

Clark said growing economic inequality and the growth in artificial wealth contributed to the financial crisis. "Unethical wealth creation defrauded the poor and it defrauded the investors," he said.

He quoted Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical "Caritas in Veritate" ("Charity in Truth"), which he said insisted that justice and morality must be part of all economic decisions, "Without truth, without trust and love for what is true, there is no social conscience and responsibility, and social action ends up serving private interests and the logic of power, resulting in social fragmentation, especially in a globalized society at difficult times like the present."

Ambassador Oscar de Rojas of the Knights of Malta's U.N. mission, said charity and justice are central pillars of Catholic social thought and go hand in hand in creating international solidarity. "We will not be able to arrive at a durable international system until nations feel there is justice underlying it all," he said.

De Rojas said, "Any system that concentrates accumulation of goods and wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many runs counter to Catholic social teaching."

Professor Amy Uelmen of the Fordham University School of Law said Catholic social teaching is "a lens for looking at the world and thinking about how humanity is put together and how we are related to each other."

She said if people are defined through interpersonal relationships rather than by their professions, they are drawn together into communities where they care for and about one another. "It's not only about problem-solving, but about asking who we are in living our Christianity. It's a different way of thinking about identity," she said.

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