Justice University

No, really, this is about the Just Third Way.   Back in the early twentieth century, Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson published a satirical novel (that many people have mistaken for some kind of prophecy), lambasting the “new things” of socialism, modernism, and the New Age from a “Catholic” point of view.   Despite the overtly religious nature of the novel, however, it delivers a universal message about the dangers of shifting away from the human person to the abstraction of “humanity”:

One of the things that we discovered early on in the Global Justice Movement is that there are a lot of definitions of “social justice” floating around.   A frequent problem, then, is that we often get into arguments with people who insist that social justice means one thing, when we clearly mean something completely different. . . .

Oh, no!   Not another Catholic video podcast!   You’re right, it’s not . . . at least, not very much.   You’ll notice the clever way we inserted a discussion of how Catholic social teaching and the economic justice principles of Louis Kelso and Mortimer J. Adler come together in the Just Third Way of Economic Personalism. . . . Besides, we wrote the foreword and it's almost wholly Just Third Way:

Yet again it looks as if we’re not only getting explicitly religious here, but we’re picking on Pope Francis.   Neither assumption would be correct, however.   The fact is that Pope Francis’s recent encyclical contained some statements regarding private property that appear to be at variance with the natural law, and we want to make certain His Holiness gets a chance to explain them.   Then we can pick on him. . . .

Okay, we know exactly what you’re thinking.   What is this Catholic monarchic conspiracy video doing on the Just Third Way blog?   Well . . . everything, actually.   You see, it turns out that what Pope Pius XI called “the Reign of Christ the King didn’t really have anything to do with establishing monarchy, and is a natural law concept, not really religious, per se.   It seems that Pius XI was countering the socialist idea of heaven here on earth with a somewhat different notion. . . .

Yes, we realize that it’s so much easier to tell others what they’re doing wrong and demand that they do it right, but face it.   Do you think people really want to do things wrong?   Maybe it’s just that nobody bothered to tell them there’s a right way . . . our Just Third Way. . . .

Back in 1984, two representatives of the Center for Economic and Social Justice (CESJ) testified before the Lay Commission on the Economy that attempted to advise the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops on the draft of their pastoral on the economy.   Remarkably, not one word of what was said made its way into the final document. . . .