My Social Justice Path

During my formative years I was fortunate to have Marianist William Ferree as a role model and teacher. Since he is the author of An Introduction to Social Justice , I was fortunate to experience someone who was combining Marianist lore and history to modern approaches to social justice.

From Ferree’s writing I concluded that the act of social justice, i.e. how one does social justice, is to organize. To organize all aspects of one’s life is to act responsibly, to act justly according to his approach which was based on the great social encyclicals. It was a great conciliation to know that my responsibility toward some of the most complicated economic and social issues was to organize with others to address them rather than to individually fight them to my death. Ferree taught that modern management practice was an act of social justice. He was the first to allow the hundreds of young brothers in formation to organize themselves according to the Marianist three offices. He taught that the first place to practice social justice was within one’s own community. He completed his analysis of life’s social responsibility by also writing on social charity as well.

In An Introduction to Social Justice, Ferree lists his 10 laws of social justice, and the most important one is that social justice is never done alone. It has to be done in a group. So when I think I am acting very responsibly by doing an individual act, Ferree’s rules say, “hold on, you have only begun. If you want to act morally, you have to act socially responsible by joining with others. You cannot get off so easily as doing something alone”. Since instances of social injustice are structural, a solution to them must be sought socially, in some organization, some institution.

I try to apply these lessons in my classes by exposing my students to a talk by Ferree in which he tells students of the 1960s that protesting against some injustice is only the beginning. In protesting “you are only telling someone else what to do. Your responsibility does not stop there.” If you really want to be socially responsible and practice social justice, you need to join others in a common cause. It turns out that addressing issues of injustice is always very complex and, hence, the need for finding a social solution by joining with others.

Anyone who had the privilege of meeting Ferree received the gift of encountering a real genius of Marianist history.

By Bro. Phil Aaron, SM