Eclipse of Justice

A sociologist and a church historian provide a probling scholarly critique of Economic Justice for All, the American bishops' pastoral letter on Catholicism and the U.S. economy. McCarthy and Rhodes examine the letter's focus on poverty, inequality, and powerlessness in American society. They review classical concepts of social ethics and economic justice as applied by the bishops to analyze the social, political, and economic institutions of American. By examining reactions to the letter from both the political left and right, Eclipse of Justice opens up the full range of debate about the nature of social ethics. The first part of Eclipse of Justice presents the moral dilemma created by the bishops' critique of liberalism (they pronounced it a "social and moral scandal") and explores the antecedents--papal, episcipal, and lay--that provided the ideas and vocabulary for the bishops' letter. The second part analyzes the pastoral letter and locates it within the larger context of debates about economic structures in modern liberalism. The third part examines attempts of the bishops to relate Christian social doctrine to international political and economic issues, and probes the contributions of liberation theology and dependency theory.