The Importance of Keeping the “Faith” in Justice
Editor’s Note: The Weekly Word’s summer recess is over, and so we open our new season with this fitting essay from Fr. Michael C. McCarthy, SJ, Dean of the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry.
In his Pulitzer-winning biography of Martin Luther King, Jonathan Eig observes that many people fail to mention MLK’s faith when trying to explain what gave him the courage to promote justice.
An exception is King’s contemporary, the Reverend James Lawson, for whom the best explanation is his calling from God. “It’s the deep-down-inside awareness that connects your life up with the life force of the universe, the God who created the heavens and the earth, to quote the Hebrew prophets” (184).
Eig’s own book frequently returns to the significance of Dr. King’s relationship with God in his fight for civil rights. When he feels weak and afraid, he hears Jesus in his own kitchen telling him: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness … And, lo, I will be with you until the end of the world” (186). Taking his mission not just to change laws but to redeem the nation’s soul, he specifically believes it is the Word of God he preaches that will turn hearts (288-9).
This link between faith and justice, so evident in a life such as King’s, can easily be ignored.
Even before I entered the Jesuits in 1983, I was moved at how the Society of Jesus described its own mission today: “the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement” (General Congregation 32, Decree 4 #2). The service of faith and the promotion of justice was not just to be a special work among many: it was to be the “integrating factor” of everything Jesuits do—in schools and universities, parishes, and so on.
In fact, the link between faith and justice is rooted in the Gospel. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls blessed those who hunger and thirst for justice, and in his parable about final judgment, he invites into eternal life those who cared for the poor: “For I was hungry, and you gave me food” (Mt. 25:35).
The Second Vatican Council dramatically emphasizes the Church’s own mission to work for justice and decries an attitude whereby a Christian may “content himself with a merely individualistic morality” (Gaudium et Spes, 30). True faith, all these sources assert, bears fruit in the world. A Christian’s commitment to the Kingdom of God, which was at the heart of Jesus’ preaching, requires compassionate action with all those who suffer throughout the world, a sense of responsibility for the common good, and a dedication to fostering conditions of peace. A deepening of Christian faith, in other words, goes hand in hand with a growing commitment to justice. For it is “a faith that does justice.”
As hallowed as that phrase, “a faith that does justice,” has become, however, I have often heard it used in a way that minimizes faith.
On the one hand, I get it. Most of my life I have worked at Jesuit universities, where not all students and colleagues share a mutual faith. For people of good will, coming from diverse beliefs, there may be more common ground in a commitment to justice than in religious conviction and practice. You don’t need to be a person of faith to seek what is right, and a great value of secular society is that we can pursue shared goals for the good of all while espousing different creeds or none at all.
In some contexts, however, the expression “a faith that does justice” is used to pay lip service to an underlying principle of the Church (or the Jesuits) while dismissively hurrying past the beginning of the phrase (faith) to its end (justice).
On the other hand, consider what is lost if we don’t maintain an integral link between faith and justice. Or if, in a stated effort to avoid doctrinal claims, we ignore some important aspects of faith. Quickly, let me note just a few.
Faith can offer motivation.
In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si, Pope Francis speaks to all people of good will about the urgency of fostering a care for our common home. And yet he does so specifically as a religious leader and is at pains to show how faith convictions provide a crucial motivation for environmental action.
While the simple fact of being human should move all people, for Christians, taking responsibility for the environment is an essential part of their faith in the Creator. Therefore, Francis says, “it is good for humanity and the world at large when we believers better recognize the ecological commitments which stem from our convictions” (Laudato Si, 64).
Not only does faith in God, who freely creates the world, provide a deep ground for the pursuit of environmental justice, but belief that all human beings are made in God’s image and likeness offers a particularly strong rationale to fight for human rights, because the dignity of persons as persons is held as sacrosanct.
Faith can temper partisanship.
In recent times, it has been clear how often politics shapes a person’s religious life rather than vice versa. What kind of church one belongs to frequently reflects and reinforces an individual’s
Increasingly, people’s core identity is based on political affiliation rather than more transcendent religious principles.
While this dynamic may seem natural, it also intensifies the polarized condition of society and can reduce religious belief and practice to a political platform. A more robust faith can provide the ground for more complex reasoning.
At the June 2026 meeting of the USCCB, Archbishop Shelton Fabre of Louisville reflected on the need to re-orient the formation of Catholic consciences through a “faith-first lens.”
The Diocese of Manchester, New Hampshire, for instance, has issued a 1-pager on principles for “Voting as People of the Eucharist.” It makes clear that our political action should witness to the presence of the Risen Lord, that love (rather than partisanship or ideology) must guide all political decisions and actions, that our communion with one another in the Eucharist binds us more powerfully than political affiliation does.
It is also true that people can be divided on the grounds of theological positions, but strong faith communities grounded in charity, prayer, and a genuine search for God can offer better space to engage differences productively than political parties. The depth of Catholic social teaching stretches most people to consider multiple sides of issues.
Faith can point to a wider horizon.
During his lifetime, many people who admired Martin Luther King questioned or disagreed with his commitment to non-violent resistance.
In the later years of his life, some of his advisors urged him not to oppose the Vietnam War as strongly as he did. Not only, they said, did it risk losing his focus on civil rights, but, at least in the earlier years of the conflict, it went against public opinion, which supported military action in Vietnam.
As a person of faith, however (who incidentally had recently been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize), King’s primary identity was as a follower of Jesus, who calls us to be peacemakers.
Such an identity looks far past what might be politically expedient toward what God desires for the world. The scope of such a vision enables other
The faith that does justice truly is faith. And it does justice. When we deepen our faith, we reflect on its quality as a gift that gives greater and greater life, which is a life of justice.
Finally, the promotion of justice enables believers to reflect back on their faith. Their experience of justice informs what they understand “faith” to be in the first place.
Michael C. McCarthy, S.J., is Dean of the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry.
Comments