Christian social sense

We are told that this year is the Year of Social Concerns. Our Bishops declared this, I suppose, in a bid to help all believers to develop a genuine and effective social sense, infused with Christian faith and charity.

In this life, a Christian faithful is not only a member of the Church. He is also a citizen of a country. He is not only an individual person, he is also a social being.

Thus, Pope Benedict recently said that the Christian identity is not only an “I” but a “we”, since it does not consist simply with our individual identities, but also with our permanent awareness that we are children of God and that we are all brothers and sisters.

God and others necessarily enter into one’s Christian identity. We need to link our individual identity with this requirement. And a Christian social sensibility is one way of doing this. That’s the challenge we have now.

This is a lofty and noble goal that should not be trivialized, treating it as a mere social event in the Church. The challenges that it can tackle are many, complicated, daunting.

In this regard, two aberrations need to be corrected: the drift to what is called as secularism, on the one hand, and the tendency to clericalism, on the other. Both are irregularities regarding God’s role in society.

Secularism is marked at least by indifference to God. God is seen to have no role to play in our social life. Our earthly affairs, especially those with social dimensions, like our business and politics, are purely ours.

In this frame of mind, we need not bother about moral considerations that have God and his commandments as basis. Everything depends on us. We make our own rules.

Since this is highly subjective, it will favor the strong, the rich, the clever, and disparages the weak, the poor and those who are naturally lowly endowed. This can be very discriminating and can lead to scandalous cases of injustice and inequality. We don’t have to look far to find proofs of this.

This anomaly can have many causes: atheism, agnosticism, skepticism, to mention a few. But even underlying these aberrant systems are the usual culprits: pride, greed, vanity, ignorance, confusion, etc. These are the ones that should be tackled directly.

Clericalism, on the other hand, is when faith in God is turned into a social or political ideology. There is an illegitimate marriage between religion and politics, a poisonous mix between our spiritual and social dimensions.

In this attitude, God is often portrayed as partisan in issues that are open to many, even conflicting but reasonable and moral opinions. The duty to put God in our business and politics is wrongly understood and applied.

We would be quick to call God to our side in matters that are just for us to agree on. To exaggerate a little, it’s like asking God to side with us in a boxing match, or in a debate about what color of uniform should be used by students.

In reality, the problem of clericalism is quite common and hard to cure. It’s deeply ingrained through the centuries of misunderstanding the role of God in our business and politics. It can afflict all of us, both clergy and laity.

In my view, clarifying the social dimension of our life should be the underlying goal to pursue in the celebration of the Year of Social Concerns. All pertinent programs and projects should spin around this purpose.

I imagine that a lot of catechesis, especially on the social doctrine of the Church, should be made. There’s a crying need to have this doctrine assimilated properly by our leaders—bishops and priests, politicians, teachers, parents, etc.

Given the strong cultural and historical conditionings of our social life, it would be good if we can undertake an ongoing, deep and systematic effort of clarifying social issues under the light of the social doctrine of the Church.

We should be brave enough to point out the good and bad traits of our culture insofar as these impact on our social life, the right and wrong turns we made in the past. Etc., etc.