Pope Encourages Reflection on Justice during Lent season

Written by ANiSA Associate

As a mark of the new Lenten season, Pope Benedict XVI released a letter inviting the Church to spend this time reflecting on the theme of justice with the words of Paul in Romans 3, 21-22: “The justice of God has been manifested through faith in Jesus Christ.”

In this message, his Holiness evoked the common idea of justice, which implies rendering “every man his due,” expressed by Ulpian, a Roman jurist in the third century. Instead, his Holiness wrote that this classic definition does not specify what should be “due” as well as the notion that everything a person needs cannot be provided by the law. Distributed “justice” cannot render human beings their “due” simply because what people need in order to live life to the fullest is love, which only God can communicate and provide.

The letter goes to say that many modern ideologies believe that the causes of injustice come from “outside sources,” which must be removed in order for justice to be distributed. However, his Holiness claims Jesus’ instruction that this way of thinking is “shortsighted” and that injustice not only has external roots but rather has its roots in the human heart. Thus true justice can only be extended through the divine grace of Jesus Christ found in his death on the cross.

“Thanks to Christ’s action, we may enter into the “greatest” justice, which is that of love, the justice that recognizes itself in every case more a debtor than a creditor, because it has received more than could ever have been expected,” wrote Pope Benedict. “Strengthened by this very experience, the Christian is moved to contribute to creating just societies, where all receive what is necessary to live according to the dignity proper to the human person and where justice is enlivened by love.”