Comments on Fr. Dan Pattee’s Essay (2016) Social Justice and Catholic Social Thought

By Razie Mah

Father Dan Pattee, T.O.R., writes an essay on how the meaning of the term “social justice” changed over the past century. The phrase refers to “legal justice” in papal documents. However, the term expands to include commutative and distributive justice in late modern post-religious writings. Well, that’s to start.
These comments rely on the category-based nested form to diagram the relational structure of both virtue and institutions. This provides a frame for appreciating historical changes in the term “social justice”.
Moderns pose these questions: What suprasovereign religion will replace Christianity? What political system will substitute for Christendom?
Answers identify virtue with sanity (that is, sensible thought), allowing corporate institutions to be confounded with personal virtue. Organizational objectives determine the habits of good behavior. Institutional righteousness mixes with the cultivation of well-being.
In contrast to the modern question, papal documents address an ancient one: What is the best political system?
Classical philosophers concluded that the best political system is the one that produces the most virtuous citizens. Here, virtue is decided not by political institutions, but by divine guidance. Historically, Christendom (inadvertently) solved the classical question by containing both a suprasovereign religion and diverse infrasovereign institutions.
These institutions did not define virtue. Instead, institutions helped people to be virtuous.
Consequently, both modern thinkers and Catholic popes use the term “social justice” in completely different ways.
This is one of several conclusions appearing in these comments on the relational logic inherent in Fr. Dan Pattee’s excellent article.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Nov 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942824275

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

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Comments on Fr. Dan Pattee’s Essay (2016) Social Justice and Catholic Social Thought

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2016

Abstract

This 4400 word essay comments on an article appearing in The Catholic Social Science Review (volume 21, pages 99-115). The article is entitled, Social Justice and Catholic Social Thought. The author of the article is Fr. Dan Pattee, T.O.R, a theology professor at Franciscan University at Steubenville, Ohio.

Pattee’s article should be downloaded and read before the following comments.

Single quotes or italics designate ‘words that belong together’.

Table of Contents

Introduction 0001

Virtue and Institutions 0006

An Irony for Classical Political Philosophy 0025

St. Thomas Aquinas and Relational Logic 0049

Rounding Up 0072

Conclusion 0093

Introduction

0001 This work uses the category-based nested form to comment on Fr. Dan Pattee’s essay of the term social justice.

0002 The meaning of the word social justice has changed over the past century, consistent with a drift in the meaning of the word liberal over the same period, as detailed by Duncan Bell in 2014 (What is Liberalism? Political Theory 42(6):682-715.)

0003 Such historical changes pose a problem for the social sciences.

How can one figure out what is happening when the meaning of a word changes?

0004 I propose that the category-based nested form may serve as a template