Individual sympathy is good and virtuous, but it doesn't necessarily change the social, economic, and political structures that unfairly victimize some people and unduly privilege others.

We need to be fair and good of heart, but we also need to have fair and good policies.

Jim Wallis, speaking more-specifically about racism, puts it this way:

When we protest that we are not implicated in unjust systems by saying things like: "I have black friends", we need to challenge ourselves: It's not just what's in our hearts that's at issue; it's also what's at the heart of public policy.

We can have black friends but if our policies are racist there's still no justice in land. Individual good will alone doesn't always make for a system that's fair to everyone.

And it's precisely on this point where we see the crucial distinction between charity and justice, between being good-hearted as individuals and trying as a community to ensure that our social, economic, and political systems are not themselves the cause of the very things we are trying to respond to in charity.

What causes poverty, racism, economic disparity, lack of fair access to education and health care, and the irresponsibility with which we often treat nature? Individual attitudes, true.

But injustice is also the result of social, economic, and political policies that, whatever their other merits, help produce the conditions that spawn poverty, inequality, racism, privilege, and the lack of conscientious concern for the air we breathe.

Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with a story that's often used to distinguish between charity and justice.

It runs this way: There was a town built alongside a river, but situated around a bend so that the townsfolk could see only that part of the river that bordered their town. One day a few of the children were playing by the river when they saw five bodies floating in the water.

They quickly ran for help and the townspeople they alerted did what any responsible persons would do in that situation. They took care of the bodies.

Pulling them from the river they found that two were dead and they buried them. Three were still alive.

One was a child for whom they quickly found a foster home; another was a severely ill woman, her they put in a hospital; the last was a young man and, for him, they found a job and a place to live. Continue reading

• Fr Ron Rolheiser OMI is the President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas.

How true! This has been going on since the beginning of time and is showing few signs of disappearing any time soon. We still do violence and evil and justify them in God's name.

We see countless examples of this in history. From the time that we first gained self-consciousness, we've done violence in God's name.

It began by sacrificing human persons to try to attain God's favor and it led to everything from actively persecuting others for religious reasons, to waging war in God's name, to burning people for heresy at the Inquisition, to practicing capital punishment for religious reasons, and, not least, at one point in history, to handing Jesus over to be crucified out of our misguided religious fervor.

These are some salient historical examples; sadly not much has changed. Today, in its most gross form, we see violence done in God's name by groups like Al-Qaida and Isis who, whatever else might be their motivation, believe that they are serving God and cleansing the world in God's name by brute terrorism and murder.

The death of thousands of innocent people can be justified, they believe, by the fact that this is God's cause, so sacred and urgent that it allows for the bracketing of all basic standards of humanity, decency, and normal religion. When it's for God's cause, outright evil is rationalized.

Happily, it's impossible for most of us to justify this kind of violence and murder in our minds and hearts, but most of us still justify this kind of sacral violence in more subtle modes.

Many of us, for instance, still justify capital punishment in the name of divine justice, believing that God's purposes demand that we kill someone.

Many too justify abortion by an appeal to our God-given freedoms.

Not least, virtually all of us justify certain violence in our language and discourse because we feel that our cause is so special and sacred that it gives us the right to bracket some of the fundamentals of Christian charity in our dealings with those who disagree with us, namely, respect and graciousness. Continue reading

• Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI is the President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas.