Our Duty to be Socially Useful Through Work

Having discussed work as a social duty, we now address our duty to be socially useful through work.

The concept of work as a social duty involves: 1) recognizing the fact that we are social beings and therefore our work always involves and includes others; 2) ultimately realizing that our cooperation with each other in our work must ultimately conform to God's plan. We've seen how work done in the past provides a "connecting link" in binding together the past and the future with our present work. Our duty to be socially useful through work expands on this social nature of our work. Essentially this consists of our work providing the means to help our neighbors.

Here we're not talking about work that is designed to help others in the form of so-called "social work." The fact is we are all continually receiving help from others in the material goods produced by others, as well as the moral, cultural and even national legacy into which we are born. In the natural order or things, the sacrifices of others benefit all our lives. In a real sense, we owe a debt to the others simply because of the fruits of their labor.

In Working Your Way into Heaven, Cardinal Wyszynski points out that the Christian, on the other hand, improves, in a sense, on this natural order:

We must pay our debt by helping our neighbors through the fruits of our work. And this is how work is shared among men. Our work sets out to be useful, which means that it sets out to respond to our neighbors' need, to keep pace with the multitude of services we have received from them.

This conscious aim of helping other through our work distinguishes the Christian philosophy of work. Here's how our everyday work fulfills the tenets of this philosophy:

...the fruits of our work are intended first of all to satisfy the personal needs of every man. This is not selfishness, but charity properly apportioned. Yet we are not entitled to the whole of these fruits. We share them with our family and with those close to us to whom we are bound by the duty of charity and justice. Within the boundaries of the family we include not only children and relations, but the entire household, everybody who works with us and helps us to achieve the fruits of our work...

I think most of us, whether we've thought about it before or not, would understand and assent to this Christian view of how our normal, everyday work helps others. But there's another step we need to take, and it goes beyond family and those others in our "inner circle":

Any further yield from our work must be shared especially with those who are incapable of work and who, through no fault of their own, cannot earn the necessities of life...

Or as Psalm 9(10) teaches us:

To thee is the poor man left: thou wilt be a help to the orphan.

So, to summarize and be clear, it's not only those who dedicate their lives specifically to helping the poor and needy who bear responsibility to be socially useful. All of us, share this duty. And the means we use to fulfill this duty is our everyday work - that which provides first for our ourselves and our families, then for those others close to us whom we identify as needing our help, and finally to the broader spectrum of all who live in need of our help.

We continue our discussion of our duty to be socially useful through work next time...