Appearing with Stephen Schneck on the O\’Reilly Factor, Vincent Miller pointed out to Bill O’Reilly that the “Catholic church speaks about distributive justice.” O’Reilly then said, “The Catholic church teaches about distributive justice. I’ve never heard that. I went to sixteen years of Catholic school. I never heard that.” Oh, really, O’Reilly? If that’s the case, then someone fumbled the ball when he attended Chaminade High and Marist College. It would be interesting to find the textbooks that were used during the 1950s and 1960s when he was in school. Textbooks that were used in Catholic high schools and colleges earlier in the twentieth century–on morality, politics, economics, social reconstruction–by the likes of John A. Ryan and Virgil Michel, OSB typically devoted a chapter to justice, with subheadings referring to commutative justice, distributive justice, retributive justice, legal justice, and social justice. Quotes on the topic are also frequently found in these texts from papal encyclicals, including Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum: “Among the many and grave duties of rulers who would do their best for their people, the first and chief is to act with justice–with that justice which is called in the Schools distributive–towards each and every class” (no. 27, emphasis in original, quoted in John A. Ryan and Francis J. Bolland, CSC, Catholic Principles of Politics, rev. ed. [Macmillan Co., 1958], p. 142).
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I have been laughing about that line all week, but of course, it isn’t really a laughing matter. I imagine O’Reilly is not alone in feeling like he’s had sixteen years of Catholic education but never heard about really important concepts.
I’ve had other occasions this year to reflect on the dearth of understanding about Catholic teaching – for instance, when writing a short “ethics prompt” for business school faculty that included several key terms in Catholic social teaching, like subsidiarity, solidarity, universal destination of goods, common good, and the like. Most of them had not heard of any of those – though they were glad to have some way of engaging economics conversations more deeply.
I doubt the dearth comes from people not having taught these things. But clearly some issues figure more prominently in US discourse than others – abortion being key. I noticed that O’Reilly made sure immediately to ask Professor Schenk about Planned Parenthood funding – and then since the latter appeared to be on the “right” side of things, O’Reilly dropped that line of questioning.
I’d love to see Catholics in the US become schooled to discuss distributive justice in similar ways to how they see abortion now – and leave neither behind.