The Father of Catholic Social Teaching
Last edited Sat Apr 30, 2016, 01:43 PM - Edit history (1)
"Charity is the Samaritan who pours oil on the wounds of the traveler who has been attacked. It is justice’s role to prevent the attack.” – Blessed Frederic Ozanam
April 29, 2016 by Mark Gordon
During the June Rebellion of 1832 in Paris, memorialized in Victor Hugo’s novel “Les Miserables,” many of the insurgents were students from the Sorbonne, still a college within the University of Paris system. In the rebellion, some 93 insurgents were killed, along with 75 members of the army and national guard. As one would expect, when classes resumed at the Sorbonne that year, there were symposia and colloquies examining the conflict, it’s origins, and likely long-term impact.
At that time, a young law student named Frederic Ozanam was one of the organizers of a discussion and research group called the Conference of History. Frederic and friends were Catholics, concerned with developments in France since the Revolution. At one debate in the semester following the June Rebellion they were challenged by a Socialist student. “You are right Ozanam when you speak of the past,” he said. “In former times Christianity worked wonders, but what is it doing for mankind now? And you, who pride yourself on your Catholicism, what are you doing now for the poor? Show us your works”
Frederic and his companions had to concede the point: the Church in France had for too long been a tool of worldly power. They determined to change things by putting themselves on the front line of serving the poor. By the spring of 1833, the Conference of History had become the Conference of Charity, and later the Society of St. Vincent de Paul, named for the 17th Century “Apostle to the Poor.” The movement quickly spread throughout Europe and within 15 years had reached the United States.
Frederic died in 1853 at the age of 40, but the last years of his short life were spent teaching at the Sorbonne, building up the Society, and developing a practical theology of social justice that has been acknowledged as a precursor to the modern body of Catholic Social Teaching. Embedded in Ozanam’s work were now-common – and commonly accepted – notions of a just wage, the dignity of work, and the rights of workers. In his homily given at the beatification of Ozanam in 1997, Pope St. John Paul II said of him,
“He observed the real situation of the poor and sought to be more and more effective in helping them in their human development. He understood that charity must lead to efforts to remedy injustice. Charity and justice go together. He had the clear-sighted courage to seek a front-line social and political commitment in a troubled time in the life of his country, for no society can accept indigence as if it were a simple fatality without damaging its honour. So it is that we can see in him a precursor of the social doctrine of the Church which Pope Leo XXIII would develop some years later in the Encyclical Rerum Novarum.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/thedorothyoption/the-father-of-catholic-social-teaching
