Perhaps not obviously, we have already begun to address the third argument I mentioned above: that some Church teachings are so nebulous as to be undefinable. The easiest way to make clear what I mean is through an example.
Say you’re a Catholic with no partisan affiliation speaking with a self-identified Republican Catholic. You make the point that, while you agree abortion is an important issue, that it cannot be used to excuse a variety of problems that are made worse by Republican policies. You note that jobs have been taken away because of trade laws that benefit the rich; these jobs have now been brought to other countries where sweat shops are common. You mention that, while the unemployment rate is quite low, this is a result of laws favoring companies like Uber that, while calling themselves “side jobs” often entice people to work insane hours for fairly-low pay. You mention that many people take these kinds of jobs along with others, meaning they work nearly every hour they are not sleeping, even though they continue barely to get by. You note how detrimental this is to family life. You note that the failure of banking regulators, in part because of their alliance with GOP politicians and other interest groups, has negatively impacted millions of Americans; in the most recent extreme case, during the Great Recession, but in many different ways in recent years. Your interlocutor responds that, for one, it’s not clear what “an unjust wage” or “oppressing a worker” is. Better to work on issues we can pin down, like abortion. Further, private property is very important; envy drives these people who want more without working harder, not to mention how necessary freedom is. It is up to a boss how much he thinks he should pay based on the market. If that’s not enough for people they ought to move and find a better job, or at least live in a place with a lower cost of living.
There are many things worth noting here, but I’d like to concentrate on one, for the sake of time (this piece is already rather long!): note how two of the Sins that Cry Out to Heaven for Vengeance are spoken about as if they were impossible to define, and thus could be thrown away in favor of some more important, absolute moral problem.
On the surface, this seems fair enough; it is hard to know what exactly these ideas mean. This, however, is not enough. Taken to its logical conclusion, we can effectively disregard these problems, since they’re so opaque, so nebulous. That can hardly be what the Church desires! A little bit of work makes these things clear enough; we must stop pretending that just because defining the terms takes a bit of work that such definition is impossible.
Admittedly, what is “unjust” by the standards of American conservatism may not be what is “unjust” by the standards of the Church; this can, I suspect, cause a bit of doubletalk. We, however, know that it is what the Church says that matters, not what modern ideologies do. Thus, we should only consider this. When we do so, and especially when we do so in light of documents already quoted, we can see that these issues, while requiring some thought, are far from hopelessly nebulous. In fact, to be blunt about it, this is precisely the work being done by Pope Francis in the aforementioned document; he takes the categories developed by various theologians, including his predecessors and some saints, and tries to fit them to modern, lived reality. I recommend it too any Catholic interested in seeing what contemporary applications of these ideas might look like; the pope goes into great detail as regards banking, global financial systems, and the relationship between capital and labor.
An “unjust wage” is one that requires a worker to work so much or in such a way that he or she does not have adequate time for family, friends, religion, or any other semblance of a life. This includes wages that make it nearly impossible to live without taking other jobs that will seriously impact one’s familial, personal, or religious life. “Oppressing the poor” includes much of the same, if one’s workers are poorer people. It, however, also means 1. Holding private goods in excess while others around you are starving, destitute, or otherwise impoverished (especially if you are in a position to help them yourself, i.e. you hold goods in great excess), 2. Treating workers or other people as means to moneymaking rather than ends in themselves, and 3. Blaming poverty en masse on laziness, especially when one generates much of one’s own income from usurious activity, the original lazy mode of wealth accumulation. These are sins, actual sins in need of confession; they are not sad realities we ought to bemoan in the abstract but do nothing about in concrete terms. When bishops speak out about them, they do simply what the Old Testament prophets did, what they Apostles did.
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