There’s an old Spanish expression: “¡hasta los zapatos!” meaning: “I’m so Catholic that even my shoes are Catholic!” Of course, we don’t need to have Catholic shoes in order to be good sons and daughters of the church. But this expression has an important symbolic meaning: that when we are Catholic, we must be so in all aspects of our life.

    This is especially true when we consider the fact that none of us can say that our happiness and salvation can be reached if we are isolated from everybody else, that it depends only on our “being good,” fulfilling some devotions and receiving the sacraments.
    Our life is like a tapestry that includes other people in it: our family, our community, our society, our country.

    As the Compendium of the Catechism explains: “together with the personal call to beatitude, the human person has a communal dimension as an essential component of his nature and vocation,” and for this reason “love of neighbor is inseparable from love for God.” (Compendium, 401)

    Our faith, then, must reach our neighbor, not only the one who lives close to me, but everyone else who is part of the same community, of the same society in which I live. In a mysterious but real way, all human beings share, to a certain degree, a common calling.

    Our Christian life, then, if it is authentic, must naturally have an impact on our surroundings, and must influence the building up of our world, according to the three words used by the Servant of God, John Paul II to describe it: “more fraternal, just and reconciled.”

    Pope John Paul II himself invited us in his encyclical Centesimus Annus to create a “human ecology,” that is, a society where not only social justice reigns, but also moral and spiritual values; a society that makes the world “non-toxic” for human beings, and instead, a place suitable for their integral development.

    As the Compendium explains: “Authentic human society requires respect for justice, a just hierarchy of values and the subordination of material and instinctual dimensions to interior and spiritual ones. In particular, where sin has perverted the social climate, it is necessary to call for the conversion of hearts and for the grace of God to obtain social changes that may really serve each person and the whole person.” (Compendium, 404)
    This text from the Compendium clearly establishes the profound relation between personal conversion and social change; between individual holiness and justice in the world.

    This is not a new reality. In Scripture, St. John in his first letter says that “whoever does not love a brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.”
    Charity, in fact, is the greatest social commandment because it leads us to work toward the common good.
    What is the common good? It is the sum total of those conditions of social life which allow people as groups and as individuals to reach their proper fulfillment.
    The common good involves respect for and promotion of the fundamental rights of the person, the development of the spiritual and temporal goods of persons and society, and the peace and security of all.

    To achieve balance in practicing justice is not an easy task. Let us think, for instance, about the complex and often emotional issues of immigration, medical ethics or capital punishment.
    But it is precisely in these kind of issues that Catholics are supposed not only to participate actively, but also to apply the teachings of the church, honestly seeking the good of all and the real balance between different interests that many times seem to be opposed to each other.

    Let us ask for the intercession of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, who always knew how to unite her personal holiness with work for a more just society and whose feast day we celebrated a few days ago, so that we may also be, in our daily life, seeds of a new society, built upon the foundation of charity.