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Washington D.C., Jun 22, 2016 / 03:51 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- “To defraud anyone of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven.”

This statement from Pope Leo XII's 1891 encyclical “Rerum Novarum” is jarring, especially in an economy that appears to have as much to do with Church teaching as spiders do with spelling bees.

But the Church's view on wages and compensation has a long history reaching back centuries – and remains relevant today to employers and employees alike – say businesspeople and theologians seeking to find a moral response to today's changing economic landscape.

“The Church starts really from the perspective of the human person, and wants to see why the relationship between the employer and the employee is more than just an exchange of money for a certain part of time,” said Fr. Dominic Legge, OP, who teaches systematic theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.

“It’s a personal relationship, and that means that there are rights and duties on both sides of that.”

The Church's stance on wages as bound to the concept of justice reaches back centuries. Teachings against defrauding workers of wages can be found in Catholic Catechisms for families as far back as the 1600s, and the principles of justice within Catholic teaching reach back even further, to the Bible itself. The development of Catholic thought on how wages and compensation for work should be considered is rooted not in laws of supply and demand, but in the human person and natural law.

“It’s not just reducible to the market. Just because the market would allow you to pay someone less does not mean that you have a right in justice to do that. Nor does it mean that it is just, for a laborer, to charge an extravagant amount of money for his work,” Fr. Legge told CNA.

He explained that the teaching surrounding the just payment of workers received substantial attention as part of St. Thomas Aquinas’s work elaborating upon the nature of justice. What's striking, he said, is that St. Thomas Aquinas uses just wages as the first “and most obvious” example of what justice actually is.  

However, the the concept of just compensation is clearly not the most obvious example of justice to contemporary thinkers, “which is a way of telling us that the way we think about wages now is very different from the way that someone like Aquinas in the Middle Ages thought about it,” Fr. Legge said.

Instead of viewing it as a situation where the employee, the business and the state were the only parties involved in making a person’s livelihood, the Church’s thought on just wages also incorporated all of the relationships and institutions an employer and employee interacted with.

“There’s a much richer texture to human life, and the Church has always respected the place of family, private organizations, the family, local organizations, the Church.”

Fr. Legge said that until the 19th century, “you often had people who were tied to their employment, their employer through lots of bonds – family, community, history.”

In many circumstances, employees were incorporated into their employer’s family structure and physical needs were taken care of both by their employer as well as by community supports, such as the parish. “We wouldn’t imagine that the person providing daycare would be lodged in the family home, and would remain there even after the children are grown,” he said.

How the nature of work changed

This interplay of different supports for workers, however, is largely absent from contemporary approaches to work.

“Once you get to the Industrial Revolution, work changes radically for the worker,” said Fr. Thomas Petri, OP, Dean of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate conception.

Shifts in labor and mass-production made it more difficult for some to see the dignity of work and the importance of the worker as a person.

“There’s a problem in markets when workers are depersonalized,” he told CNA. “It takes away in some way the dignity of the worker and makes work into some sort of a monotonous, humdrum thing.”

In part as a response to the changes facing the world during the Industrial Revolution, Pope Leo XIII wrote “Rerum Novarum,” outlining the Church’s teaching on the proper relationships between people, the state, labor and capital. Along with discussing the role of private property, unions, and a worker’s duties to their employer, Pope Leo XIII emphasized the importance of an employer’s duties to their employees.

The document, Fr. Petri said, aims “to remind people that work still has dignity,” as well as to serve as a reminder to all that business should serve the common good.

It also states that while “the state has to be involved in the adjudication of just wages,” Fr. Petri said, “there has to be communal support for the person.” The Pope emphasizes that institutions like the family, the Church, other institutions along with the state can help provide a living for workers.

“Minimum wage isn’t the only thing that can help support families,” Fr. Petri said.

While the state has a role in making sure all its citizens receive what they need for a good and virtuous life, “it seems to me that the Church’s social justice teaching suggests that this should also work in business,” he said.

Fr. Petri pointed to examples of company towns that provided housing, the provision of healthcare or education benefits, or employee-ownership of companies as examples of ways a business could expand its provision for its employees.

However, while the Church’s teaching, both in “Rerum Novarum” and other documents do not provide strict prescriptions for all the ways employers can provide for their employees, not all contracts or payment is morally acceptable.  

“Just because an employee agrees to work for a certain wage does not therefore make the wage inherently just,” Fr. Petri said.

“Sometimes people work for a pittance because they’re socially forced to or they have no other opportunities for a greater income. Leo XIII speaks about that as an evil.”

He pointed to many companies' practice of hiring of undocumented workers for very low wages as an example of this kind of mistreatment. To compound the issue, Fr. Petri said, illegal immigrants can't speak up about their mistreatment without fearing for deportation or other consequences.

In cases were businesses are acting immorally, “I think the government has a right to exert legislative authority in those cases where it’s clear that they are mistreating their workers,” Fr. Petri said.

“That’s what unions were supposed to do, that's why unions were started.”

He added that citizens can both approach legislators to take action as well as avoid patronizing companies that do not provide just compensation for their workers.

What should things look like now?

And business leaders themselves can and should put these principles into practice today, said Bill Bowman, Dean of the School of Business and Economics at the Catholic University of America.

“The purpose of business is the human person. It's not to trade the human person like any other commodity,” he told CNA.

Bowman said that the Church shies away from a “one-size-fits-all” approach, instead setting principles around which an employer can balance people’s needs – such as a city's expensiveness or an employee’s family size, with the needs of the company is able to sustain itself. The result is that all businesspeople should be able to provide their workers with a just wage if they look towards innovative solutions.

He suggested that every businessperson should look carefully at what “a just wage really look like for this particular city where we're working. What would it look like for this employee, with a big family or a person with no family at all. If what we really want to do is provide enough money so that you can live a life and maybe put a little away on the side.”

“To just say 'well I can't afford it,' is, to me, to unnecessarily give yourself a 'get out of jail free' card.”

For entrepreneurs or startups facing tight budgets, Bowman noted that employers could work with employees to step up base pay with a company's growth or other “innovative” solutions he has seen from employers such as incorporating family size into bonuses or covering certain expenses like college tuition.  

He directed business leaders to look to the Church's “rich doctrine” and writings on wages and business, such as in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, papal encyclicals, and a short document called “The Vocation of the Business Leader,” put out by the Church's Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace, among other sources of Church teaching on the topic.

“As a Catholic business man or woman, he or she should really be challenging themselves to orient their businesses in this way,” he said.

Bowman also criticized companies who avoid considering how they can better provide just wages to their employees. He said that companies, particularly large ones with shareholders, should not frame paying their employees a just wage as a “competitive disadvantage.”

“If a company clearly can afford to pay it, its idea of a 'competitive disadvantage' is largely nonsense,” he said.

“What it generally translates to is 'my share price might go down a bit and that's going to hit me in the wallet. Well, the Church has completely rejected the idea that a business is about shareholder returns.”

In addition to it being the right thing to do, providing just compensation to workers is a sound business strategy, Bowman said. He's found in practice that providing employees with the compensation they need to take care of their families properly decreases both an employee’s likeliness to leave and their sloppiness on the job, which are “enormous” costs to business.

“The return on investment of these programs is enormous,” he said, adding that within a year in some cases, the programs “paid for itself.”

Above all, employers should keep in mind the role the Church has laid out for laypeople in prescribing its moral directions on wages and work, Bowman said: to figure out how to implement Church teaching in daily life. By taking to heart this approach, businesses and their employees can focus back on virtues and the goal of business in the first place.  

“We understand that the purpose of business and the purpose of everything else in life is really the human person.”

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Vatican City, Jun 22, 2016 / 04:37 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- In a video message sent Wednesday to a gathering of advocates for abolition of the death penalty, Pope Francis welcomed their efforts as a way to promote the right to life of all persons.

“Nowadays the death penalty is unacceptable, however grave the crime of the convicted person,” the Pope said in his June 22 message to the Sixth World Congress against the Death Penalty, which is being held in Oslo this week. More than 1,000 people are in attendance from governments, international organizations, and society.

Capital punishment “is an offence to the inviolability of life and to the dignity of the human person,” Pope Francis continued. “It likewise contradicts God’s plan for individuals and society, and his merciful justice.”

He expressed his “personal appreciation” to the participants for their “commitment to a world free of the death penalty.”

That “public opinion is manifesting a growing opposition to the death penalty, even as a means of legitimate social defence,” he called a “sign of hope.”

In addition to being offensive to the inviolability of human life, Pope Francis said that the death penalty is not “consonant with any just purpose of punishment.”

“It does not render justice to victims, but instead fosters vengeance. The commandment 'Thou shalt not kill' has absolute value and applies both to the innocent and to the guilty.”

Recalling the Jubilee of Mercy being celebrated currently, the Roman Pontiff said the year is “an auspicious occasion for promoting worldwide ever more evolved forms of respect for the life and dignity of each person.”

“It must not be forgotten that the inviolable and God-given right to life also belongs to the criminal,” he exhorted.

In addition to calling for an end to capital punishment, Pope Francis called on the participants to work for the improvement of prison conditions “so that they fully respect the human dignity of those incarcerated.”

He reiterated that rendering justice “does not mean seeking punishment for its own sake, but ensuring that the basic purpose of all punishment is the rehabilitation of the offender.”

The question of justice should be answered “within the larger framework of a system of penal justice open to the possibility of the guilty party’s reinsertion in society,” he said.

“There is no fitting punishment without hope! Punishment for its own sake, without room for hope, is a form of torture, not of punishment.”

Pope Francis' video message echoed earlier calls he has made for an end to the use of the death penalty. His immediate predecessors, Benedict XVI and St. John Paul II, also spoke out against its use in modern society.

In a March 2015 letter to the president of the International Commission against the Death Penalty, Francis went so far as to say that “life imprisonment, as well as those sentences which, due to their duration, render it impossible for the condemned to plan a future in freedom, may be considered hidden death sentences, because with them the guilty party is not only deprived of his/her freedom, but insidiously deprived of hope."

The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that the death penalty may be used “if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” However, it adds, such cases today “are very rare, if not practically nonexistent.”

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Washington D.C., Jun 22, 2016 / 04:54 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- The Obama administration has rejected a challenge to the State of California’s requirement that health care plans include abortion coverage. A major federal budget amendment intended to protect abortion foes does not apply, it ruled.

Leaders with the U.S. bishops’ conference said it was “shocking” that the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services allowed the State of California to force all employers, including churches, to fund and facilitate elective abortions.

“Even those who disagree on the issue of life should be able to respect the conscience rights of those who wish not to be involved in supporting abortion,” Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York and Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore said June 21.

The cardinal chairs the U.S. bishops’ pro-life committee, while the archbishop chairs the conference’s ad hoc religious freedom committee.

California’s mandatory abortion coverage rule responded to the efforts of two Catholic universities, Santa Clara University and Loyola Marymount University, which had sought health care plans that did not include elective abortion coverage. However, some faculty members objected to the exclusion of the coverage and their allies sought state intervention.

In August 2014 California’s Department of Managed Health Care ruled that the plans must cover the procedure. A 1975 state health care law and the California constitution, it said, prohibits health plans “from discriminating against women who choose to terminate a pregnancy.”

The insurers and the universities agreed to comply with the state’s requirements, the Los Angeles Times reports. However, Alliance Defending Freedom, the Life Legal Defense Foundation and the Catholic Bishops of California filed several federal legal complaints against the rule. The complaints charged that the state rule discriminated against those who object to abortion.

The complaints cited the Weldon Amendment, first passed in 2005. It bars federal funds to state or local governments if they discriminate against institutional or individual healthcare entities that decline to pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions. The amendment defines healthcare entities as individual physicians or health care professionals, a hospital, “a health insurance plan, or any other kind of health care facility, organization or plan.”

In response to the complaints, Jocelyn Samuels, director of the Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, said it “found no violation of the Weldon Amendment and is closing this matter without further action.”

The civil rights office ruled that the complaining entities are not “healthcare entities” that object to abortion. The seven health insurance firms involved themselves have no objections to providing abortion coverage.

Samuels’ letter added that the civil rights office’s approach avoids “a potentially unconstitutional application” of the Weldon Amendment. It cited a 2012 U.S. Supreme Court decision, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, that said conditions attached to federal funds under the Affordable Care Act were so coercive that they deprived states of meaningful choice.

The U.S. bishops said the ruling was “contrary to the plain meaning of the law.”

A spokesman for the Catholic conference of California said that forcing an objecting faith-based organization to pay for abortion violates the free exercise of religion.

“Forcing organizations and individuals to violate their religious convictions is a threat to fundamental human liberties,” Edward Dolejsi, executive director of the California Catholic Conference, said June 22.

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.), Co-chair of the Bipartisan Congressional Pro-Life Caucus, said the Weldon Amendment in fact protects against “state-imposed abortion mandates.”

“This decision illustrates the far reaches of Obama’s radical pro-abortion ideology – forcing churches and communities of faith that have pro-life convictions to participate in and pay for a practice that dismembers and chemically poisons unborn children,” he charged.

“Congress must not let this discrimination stand,” Rep. Smith continued. “We must take this issue out of the hands of the Obama Administration by moving enforcement of current conscience protections to the courts. Congress needs to enact legislation so churches and other victims have a ‘private right of action’ so they can have their day in court.”

Cardinal Dolan and Archbishop Lori called on Congress to pass the Conscience Protection Act, saying this would “stop further discrimination against people of faith and against all who respect unborn human life.”

Dolejsi said the state rule is “clearly discrimination” and the Catholic conference will continue to advocate for relief.

At the time the California Catholic Conference filed its complaint, Bishop Robert McElroy said Catholic beliefs about life and human dignity “animate and shape our Catholic ministries.”

“It’s why we oppose abortion, but it is also why Catholic schools provide education, Catholic hospitals care for the poor and vulnerable and why Catholic social services provide assistance to people and families in need,” he said. “It goes to the core of our moral beliefs.”

Photo credit: www.shutterstock.com.

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IMAGE: CNS photo/L'Osservatore Romano via Reuters

By Carol Glatz

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI's decision to retire and live a life fully dedicated to prayer represents one of the most important lessons he gives the world's priests, Pope Francis said.

In retirement, Pope Benedict shows "in an even clearer way" the core of priestly ministry is a life fully immersed in God, something "that deacons, priests and bishops must never forget," Pope Francis said in a written preface to a new book.

"The primary and most important service is not the management of 'day-to-day business,' but praying for others without interruption, body and soul, exactly like the pope emeritus does today -- constantly immersed in God."

The new book, "To Teach and Learn God's Love," was to be released in German, Spanish and Italian June 29 -- the 65th anniversary of Pope Benedict's ordination to the priesthood. Pope Francis was scheduled to join Pope Benedict celebrating the anniversary during an audience June 28 in the Apostolic Palace.

The new book, a collection of homilies focusing on the priesthood, was to be published in English by Ignatius Press. Cardinal Ludwig Muller, prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote the book's introduction.

Writing the book's preface, Pope Francis said every time he reads his predecessor's writings, it becomes more and more clear how Pope Benedict followed and still practices a "theology on his knees."

"On his knees because, before being a tremendous theologian and teacher of the faith, you see that he is a man who truly believes, who truly prays. You see that he is a man who embodies holiness, a man of peace, a man of God."

Benedict "exemplarily embodies the heart of all priestly action," which is to be deeply rooted in God, he said.

Without a strong, constant relationship with Christ nothing is true and all organizational prowess and all "presumed intellectual superiority, all money and all power prove useless," Pope Francis wrote. Without Christ everything becomes routine, priests just draw a paycheck, bishops turn into bureaucrats and the church becomes an NGO that is ultimately "superfluous," Pope Francis wrote.

Pope Benedict renounced "the active exercise of the Petrine ministry" and fully dedicated himself to prayer, the pope said. "It is perhaps today, as pope emeritus, that he gives us more clearly than ever one of his greatest lessons of 'theology on his knees.'"

"With his witness, His Holiness Benedict XVI shows us what true prayer is -- not the occupation of some people held to be particularly devout and maybe considered little suitable for solving practical problems," not something to do off-hours or during one's "free-time," not something meant to soothe one's conscience and not a means for getting from God what "we believe we need."

"No. This book tells us and Benedict XVI gives witness that prayer is the decisive factor" and it is what the church and the world needs now more than ever, he wrote. "Without prayer, the world very quickly loses not only its bearings but also the authentic source of life."

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WASHINGTON (CNS) -- A federal agency has determined that California can continue to demand that all health plans under the jurisdiction of the state's Department of Managed Health Care -- "even those purchased by churches and other religious organizations" -- cover elective abortions for any reason.

The coverage includes late-term abortions and "those performed for reasons of 'sex selection.'"

The chairmen of two U.S. Catholic bishops' committees June 22 said the administrative ruling issued a day earlier by the U.S. Department of health and Human Services fails to respect the right to life and religious freedom.

"It is shocking that HHS has allowed the state of California to force all employers -- even churches -- to fund and facilitate elective abortions in their health insurance plans," said Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan of New York and Archbishop William E. Lori of Baltimore.

The cardinal is chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Archbishop Lori chairs the USCCB's Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty.

"Even those who disagree on the issue of life should be able to respect the conscience rights of those who wish not to be involved in supporting abortion," they said in a statement.

The chairmen called for an immediate federal legislative remedy, urging Congress to pass the Conscience Protection Act introduced by lawmakers last March. Supporters of the measure, who include the USCCB, say it would address the situation in California by closing several loopholes in current law.

In 2014, the state began demanding all health plans under its Department of Managed Health Care cover elective abortions. The state allows no exemption of any kind.

The California Catholic Conference and other churches and religious organizations filed a complaint about the policy with the Office of Civil Rights at HHS asserting that California's reinterpretation of state law violated the federal Weldon Amendment, which was enacted in 2005 to protect the conscience rights of physicians and nurses who choose not to participate in abortions and hospitals that do not offer them.

"This (HHS) administrative ruling fails to respect not only the rights to life and religious freedom, but also the will of Congress and the rule of law," Cardinal Dolan and Archbishop Lori said, adding that passage of the Conscience Protection Act would "stop further discrimination against people of faith and against all who respect unborn human life."

The cardinal and archbishop wrote a letter in March to House members urging that they vote for the measure, and in April a group of 26 organizations sent a letter to lawmakers stating their support.

H.R. 4828, as the bill is known in the House, "is very similar to the abortion nondiscrimination provision that for the last three years has been part of the House's Labor/HHS appropriations bills," the letter said. "It takes the core policy of Weldon -- protecting those who decline to perform, pay for, refer for, or provide coverage for abortion -- and writes it into permanent law. It clarifies the protections of Weldon, and adds a private right of action to enforce this law and other long-standing conscience laws on abortion."

Besides the USCCB, signers of the letter included the Christian Medical Association and Catholic Medical Association; the National Council of Catholic Women; the March for Life Education and Defense Fund; the National Association of Evangelicals; the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission; the Knights of Columbus; National Right to Life; and several associations of physicians and nurses.

The measure was introduced in the Senate May 12; S. 2927 has been referred to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

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Copyright © 2016 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. www.catholicnews.com. All rights reserved. Republishing or redistributing of CNS content, including by framing or similar means without prior permission, is prohibited. You may link to stories on our public site. This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To request permission for republishing or redistributing of CNS content, please contact permissions at cns@catholicnews.com.

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