Social Concerns Ministry
The Social Concerns Ministry is rooted in the Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching.
Our primary ministry objectives are:
Prayer
Leverage current ministries to engage in prayers that lift up the Seven Key Themes of Catholic Social Teachings, the Prayers of the Faithful at the weekly liturgies, notices in the bulletin, and via the STA social media channels.
Outreach and Learning
Engage in understanding core issues of justice that are appropriate to the context and timely. This could include a purposeful parish reflection on Gaudium et Spes, Open Wide Our Hearts, Evangelii Gaudium, Laudato Si, Fratelli Tutti, and other pastorals that will guide us in our journey toward understanding systemic and social challenges that will lead toward action.
Offer a morning and/or evening of Reflection during Advent and Lent that focuses on a principle of Catholic Social Teaching and social analysis.
Develop and publish a quarterly social justice newsletter to be included as part of the parish bulletin and promote the offering of a series of reflections as part of the pastor’s letter to the parish community that highlight an area of Catholic Social Teaching.
Connect with other parishes in our deanery to bring collective learning opportunities together, as appropriate.
Action:
Engage in legislative advocacy that uplifts core Catholic Social Teaching principles in collaboration with efforts aligned with Catholics Confront Global Poverty, and issues of concern in our local community as promoted by the Archdiocese of Newark’s Social Concerns Office, the Archdiocesan Commission on Peace and Justice, and efforts at the deanery level.
Align charitable activity that already occurs through the parish (e.g., the Beyond Cornerstone Ministry, Advent Giving Tree, and food pantry efforts) with a legislative action around homelessness, housing, or hunger.
Please see this list of resources for service and healing in solidarity with all those who are vulnerable. Visit the USCCB website to learn more about Catholic Social Teaching.
Anyone interested should contact us at the email address below. We welcome those prayerfully concerned about God’s merciful love being part of their life’s journey and who are open to sharing reflections on and evangelizing with, other STA parishioners about Scripture’s call to mercy and justice and the Catholic Church’s Seven Key Themes of Catholic Social Teaching (CST).
Contact Us
Barbara Albert
socialconcerns@stachurchbloomfield.org / (201) 247-2798
7 Key Themes of Catholic Social Teaching
1: Life and Dignity of the Human Person
2. Call to Family, Community, and Participation
3. Rights & Responsibilities
4. Option for the Poor
5. Dignity of Work and the Rights of Workers
6. Solidarity
Theme 6 - U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops: “SOLIDARITY”
We are one human family whatever our national, racial, ethnic, economic, and ideological differences. We are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers, wherever they may be. Loving our neighbor has global dimensions in a shrinking world. At the core of the virtue of solidarity is the pursuit of justice and peace. Pope Paul VI taught that “if you want peace, work for justice.” The Gospel calls us to be peacemakers. Our love for all our sisters and brothers demands that we promote peace in a world surrounded by violence and conflict.
Scriptural References
Psalm 72 - Living in right relationship with others brings peace.
Zechariah 8:16 - These are the things you should do: Speak truth, judge well, make peace.
Matthew 5:9 - Blessed are the peacemakers, they will be called children of God.
Matthew 5:21-24 - Be reconciled to one another before coming to the altar.
Romans 13:8-10 - Living rightly means to love one another.
1 Corinthians 12:12-26 - If one member of Christ’s body suffers, all suffer. If one member is honored, all rejoice.
1 John 3:16-18 - The love of God in us is witnessed to by our willingness to lay down our lives for others as Christ did for us.
Tradition
“In today’s world, the sense of belonging to a single human family is fading, and the dream of working together for justice and peace seems an outdated utopia. What reigns instead is a cool, comfortable and globalized indifference, born of deep disillusionment concealed behind a deceptive illusion: thinking that we are all-powerful, while failing to realize that we are all in the same boat.” (Pope Francis, On Fraternity and Social Friendship [Fratelli Tutti], no. 30)
“Solidarity means much more than engaging in sporadic acts of generosity. It means thinking and acting in terms of community. It means that the lives of all are prior to the appropriation of goods by a few. It also means combatting the structural causes of poverty, inequality, the lack of work, land and housing, the denial of social and labor rights. It means confronting the destructive effects of the empire of money… Solidarity, understood in its most profound meaning, is a way of making history, and this is what popular movements are doing.” (Pope Francis, On Fraternity and Social Friendship [Fratelli Tutti], no. 116)
"To love someone is to desire that person's good and to take effective steps to secure it. Besides the good of the individual, there is the good that is linked to living in society: the common good. It is the good of 'all of us', made up of individuals, families and intermediate groups who together constitute society. … To desire the common good and strive towards it is a requirement of justice and charity." (Pope Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth [Caritas in Veritate], no. 7)
"At another level, the roots of the contradiction between the solemn affirmation of human rights and their tragic denial in practice lies in a notion of freedom which exalts the isolated individual in an absolute way, and gives no place to solidarity, to openness to others and service of them. . . It is precisely in this sense that Cain's answer to the Lord's question: 'Where is Abel your brother?' can be interpreted: 'I do not know; am I my brother's keeper?' (Gen 4:9). Yes, every man is his "brother's keeper", because God entrusts us to one another." (St. John Paul II, The Gospel of Life [Evangelium Vitae], no. 19)
"[Solidarity] is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all." (St. John Paul II, On Social Concern [Sollicitudo rei Socialis], no. 38)
"Interdependence must be transformed into solidarity, based upon the principle that the goods of creation are meant for all. That which human industry produces through the processing of raw materials, with the contribution of work, must serve equally for the good of all." (St. John Paul II, On Social Concern [Sollicitudo rei Socialis], no. 39)
"We have to move from our devotion to independence, through an understanding of interdependence, to a commitment to human solidarity. That challenge must find its realization in the kind of community we build among us. Love implies concern for all - especially the poor - and a continued search for those social and economic structures that permit everyone to share in a community that is part of a redeemed creation (Rom 8:21-23)." (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Economic Justice for All, no. 365)
"The solidarity which binds all men together as members of a common family makes it impossible for wealthy nations to look with indifference upon the hunger, misery and poverty of other nations whose citizens are unable to enjoy even elementary human rights. The nations of the world are becoming more and more dependent on one another and it will not be possible to preserve a lasting peace so long as glaring economic and social imbalances persist." (St. John XXIII, On Christianity and Social Progress [Mater et Magistra], no. 157)
Witness Statement
I was a witness and actor--as one of four public interest attorneys--in the 1980s in Downtown Jersey City in collaboration with Sisters of Charity at St. Bridget’s parish. We collectively were in “solidarity” with income-vulnerable tenant households who were being displaced from their neighborhood by governmental action.
The sisters’ prayer-life was an encounter with Jesus which bore fruit in their solidarity with vulnerable persons by “accompanying” them in service to their material needs, but it was more than that. It included an emphasis on the empowerment of poor and low-income people to make a difference in their own communities. We too are called to this dual (service and social justice) form of solidarity with vulnerable persons. We do this by accompanying them in advocating for just public policies and community self-help projects as examples of social justice. See, for instance, “How to Make Service Truly Transformational”, USCCB website, https://www.usccb.org/offices/justice-peace-human-development/making-service-transformational
The background for this community struggle was the planned city, state and federal governmental displacement of approximately 470 largely African-American and Latina/Hispanic income-vulnerable households who resided in a very large neighborhood adjacent to the parish. The Downtown area was undergoing gentrification and many affluent newcomers were moving into the area. Although the displacement of these households was ostensibly designed to create new and rehabilitated rental housing, there was no guarantee that these vulnerable households would be the recipients of this redevelopment designed by federal, state and local governments in conjunction with private developers.
Once all of the households were displaced, there was no location that the households could gather in order to organize and advocate for their return to the neighborhood in the newly developed rental housing. These households were scattered throughout Jersey City and beyond, including Central America and the Caribbean.
This is where the Sisters of Charity came into the picture with their act of solidarity with these vulnerable households. The sisters proactively permitted the displaced households and their tenants’ organization to use the convent as an organizing site for tracking and locating displaced households and for conducting community organizing and legal advocacy for over two years. The displaced households then had a site that they could use in their creating a non-profit corporation and in applying for funding to private donor organizations to advance their self-help social justice objectives.
The Sisters’ hospitality and solidarity was the occasion for successful federal fair housing litigation and other advocacy that included winning the right to return to the neighborhood from which they were displaced. Their ability to return ensured that there would be racial and economic integration in a neighborhood that would otherwise be gentrified.
This solidarity by the Sisters resulted in social justice for these vulnerable households which displayed a preferential option for the poor which is another key theme of Catholic Social Teaching. Their solidarity was also a form of evangelizing the families that were parishioners and non-parishioners which affirmed their dignity which is another CST. A former pastor of the parish recently stated that this solidarity advocacy and self-help action helped to revive the parish once the displaced households returned to the newly constructed and rehabilitated affordable rental housing.
I witnessed that solidarity of the Sisters of Charity as an attorney for the displaced households.
Stephen St. Hilaire, Member of STA Social Concerns Ministry