All our
activities in this world should have as goal the forming of community. The
building of this world, the effort to make it a better place to live in, our
individual works and enterprises, all must have this goal in view, otherwise
they depart from God’s order.
Ruth Burrows, To Believe in Jesus
Reflection – ‘Write your blog posts while
ye may…’ My time in Vancouver is going to be quite heavily scheduled, it seems,
and there will be some long stretches of no blogging at all as I travel hither
and yon without benefit of wifi. So, I thought I would do what I can in the
days I have.
We are
reading this fine book for our post-lunch spiritual reading at MH, and these
particular sentences jumped out at me with considerable emphasis as I read it.
It really does seem to me that in two relatively short sentences, 48 words,
Burrows has encapsulated the entire social doctrine of the Catholic Church.
All our activities in this world have as their
goal the forming of community. That is a very penetrating insight.
And, while perhaps many reading this have never heard it put that way, it
really is hard to argue against it, if one is starting from a point of Catholic
theology.
Take, for
example, an aspect of life people associate least with this formation of
community, namely the running of a business. So a man or woman starts a business:
they have a product or service of some kind, develop it to the point where
people will pay money for it; they secure facilities, hire employees,
advertise, market, execute; the business, if it is successful grows or at least
turns a profit; the business owner and the employees are able to live off of
the revenues/salaries they earn.
There – did
I get it right, more or less? I have never operated a business, but that’s the
gist of it, isn’t it? I probably forgot the part where they have crushing bank
loans and spend the first few decades maxed out on debts and so forth. But
that’s the basic thing, right?
So what does
that have to do with the formation of community? That’s where this business is
either in God’s order, or it is not. How does the owner treat the employees?
Merely as cogs in a wheel, or as human beings? Yes, human beings who have to do
the jobs they are hired for or be let go, but nonetheless, there is a
difference between treating people like dirt and treating people like… well,
people. And everyone who has had bad bosses and good bosses knows exactly what
that difference is.
How do those
running and working in the business treat their clientele? Like wallets that
happen to be attached to human beings, or like human beings first, revenue
sources second? Again, we all know the difference, and it does not need to be
belaboured. Is the idea to gouge the customer out of every cent possible, or to
provide a real good or service at a fair market price?
And so on
and so forth. Every business exists in a matrix of other businesses and
corporate entities, a life of a community. Do the business owners see
themselves as a vibrant part of that community, someone who by virtue of being
a profitable business can make a real contribution for the good to the life of
the community, or is it just a sort of robber baron attitude where the idea is
to bleed the community dry and get out of town before the crash happens?
The whole
Catholic understanding of commercial life is indeed summed up by the (I admit)
rather over-simplified and hackneyed phrase ‘people before profits’. Not, I
would stress, ‘people instead of
profits’, but ‘before’. Obviously, a business that does not turn a profit is a
business that will not exist next year, with consequent harm and loss of
employment to everyone involved in it. Business owners have to be able to earn
a profit, but not at the expense of the human dignity and rights of others.
That is what makes community, you know – always privileging the person over the
thing, ‘who’ over ‘what’. And if the profits have to be a bit smaller in
consequence of that privileging, so be it.
So that’s just
one example of this—an entire book could be written (not by me, though – this is
definitely not my bailiwick!) to show how these few words of Burrows really
present the whole social vision of the Church. Politics, family life, the whole
matrix of human activity in all its variety—all is subordinated to the building
up of the human family, the human community, or it is alienated most seriously from
God’s order.
Of course,
this means that an awful lot of human activity in our world today is indeed so
alienated, and we have a lot of work to do to re-humanize and evangelize the
world in its social realities. Today, at least, let our activities be at the
service of that task.
Interesting that this topic of 'people before profits' has made its way into the light in your blogging... working in the transportation industry,- moving goods from one point to the next. one can feel as if he or she is just 'filling a seat', with no thought or concern for their dignity as a 'person'... the transportation industry could do well to focus on such a mantra... 'people before profits'. i would wager to then bet we would see a difference in the 'attitude' of the nations most valuable, (if i may say that) and yet under-valued work force... the truckers.
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