Living Justice: Catholic Social Teaching in Action, 2nd Ed.

Living Justice: Catholic Social Teaching in Action, 2nd Ed. Massaro, T (2012). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Living fustice is a clear and comprehensive text presenting Catholic Social Teaching, particularly as it relates to social justice. Intended for classroom use, Living Justice provides an excellent history of the ideas that formed what we now refer to as "Catholic Social Teaching" by tracing the moral issues raised in the last one hundred to one hundred fifty years and the church's ongoing and cumulative response to them, resulting in a set a doctrines relating to social justice.

In the first chapter, Massaro links both alleviating human suffering and "establishing a right order of society" to the mission of the Church, providing a "both and" solution that addresses both justice and charity. He suggests that Catholic Social Teaching, "the Church's principled and often courageous stances on peace, justice, and human rights" (p.9), can serve as a unifying force in the Church. Chapter 2 examines public life in a secular society and the role of the Church in acting within the public life while actively shaping it. Massaro emphasizes the church's teaching that we are not only personally and collectively making moral social decisions, but we also have a responsibility to shape social policy, and ultimately social justice.

In Chapter 3 Massaro provides an engaging and detailed description of the way in which the Catholic Church "speaks" to both its members and to the whole world, particularly in documents that express positions related to the pressing social issues of the time. Of particular note in Chapter 3 is a clear description of the kinds of authoritative letters (encyclicals) and Church documents that continued the discussion and provided a dynamic reaction as society changed. Massaro outlines several civic and economic issues that emerged in the late 19th century and continue to the present, including changes in labor, globalization of the workforce, and increasingly unequal and divisive distribution of goods, and demonstrates the Church's responses to these injustices. For example, Karol Wyotola, a priest who survived Communism in Poland and was elected Pope John Paul II, took the opportunity of the fall of Soviet Communism and the breakup of the...