Barely Visible: The Child in Catholic Social Teaching

Abstract

The experience of working with socially displaced children, who live and work on the streets, is one that engenders a kind of indignation at the thwarting of their capabilities and at the impact not only on their own lives but also on the human community who are denied the gifts of children who never reach their potential. This author thus began to examine what Catholic social teaching actually says about such children. This examination of the treatment of justice for children in Catholic social teaching was given further impetus on reading a devastating conclusion from the Report by the Commission of Investigation into clerical child abuse in the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, known as The Murphy Report. The report concluded: ‘the welfare of children which should have been the first priority, was not even a factor to be considered’. Lack of concern for the welfare of the child is a recurring bleak motif in the Murphy Report. Why was the welfare of children not even a factor to be considered? Aware of the danger of resorting to mono-causal explanations in the face of the complexity of the crimes and scandals of child abuse, it is nonetheless interesting to consider why the principles of justice enshrined in Catholic social teaching were not the principles guiding the response of church authorities to children and adult survivors of child abuse. Before examining the visibility of children in Catholic social teaching, the absence of serious consideration of children as subjects or as moral agents in modern philosophical discourse about justice must be noted. In John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, the seminal text on justice in twentieth century liberal philosophy, there is no significant discussion of children in his conclusions about a just society. Rawls, influenced by the cognitive-development theories of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, considers children in terms of their moral development and their capacity to acquire a sense of justice, but not explicitly as subjects of justice. Amartya Sen, in Development as Freedom, discusses children more extensively in the context of his examination of the basic conditions of participatory freedom. In The Idea of Justice, Sen raises the question of the relationship between parental duties to their own children and a theory of justice that extends to the recognition that ‘other children may have similarly large and important interests at stake as one’s own children’. Children are barely visible in most contractarian accounts of justice, as are the poor, thus moving towards invisibility those who are both child and poor. Many key commentaries on Catholic social teaching contain no index reference to childhood or children. There are many fine Church statements on children, especially in relation to education, religious education and, most often, children are discussed in documents on marriage and family. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church asserts that ‘The Church’s social doctrine constantly points out the need to respect the dignity of children’. (244) In order to test the veracity of this assertion about the visibility of children in Catholic social teaching, bs_bs_banner