Charity goes beyond justice, because to love is to give, to offer what is “mine” to the other; but it never lacks justice, which prompts us to give the other what is “his”, what is due to him by reason of his being or his acting. I cannot “give” what is mine to the other, without first giving him what pertains to him in justice. If we love others with charity, then first of all we are just towards them. Not only is justice not extraneous to charity, not only is it not an alternative or parallel path to charity: justice is inseparable from charity[1], and intrinsic to it. Justice is the primary way of charity or, in Paul VI's words, “the minimum measure” of it[2], an integral part of the love “in deed and in truth” (1 Jn 3:18), to which Saint John exhorts us. On the one hand, charity demands justice: recognition and respect for the legitimate rights of individuals and peoples. It strives to build the earthly city according to law and justice. On the other hand, charity transcends justice and completes it in the logic of giving and forgiving[3]. The earthly city is promoted not merely by relationships of rights and duties, but to an even greater and more fundamental extent by relationships of gratuitousness, mercy and communion. Charity always manifests God's love in human relationships as well, it gives theological and salvific value to all commitment for justice in the world.The fascinating thing about this passage is that he captures perfectly the promise and the problem of Ayn Rand's philosophy. The reason why her work is so attractive to so many is her clear eyed perception of the tendency towards injustice in the modern world to the great and the good. We live in an age characterized by the instinct described by Screwtape of the dictator flicking the tops off of grass which stands above the rest, discouraging genius and greatness in the name of central planning. She was in full rebellion against the Communist move to falsely level the playing field, to prevent any man from becoming rich in the name of justice, when wealth can be the just reward for skill and labor.
But she sought merely justice, strict justice, justice absent charity or mercy. She failed to make the leap to the second half of the equation, or to understand, as John Zmirak pointed out in his piece commenting on the encyclical, that all human beings inherit vast quantities of gratuitous, unearned social capital such as language, technical knowledge, and so forth. She remains a powerfully attractive force by means of those truths she saw so clearly and articulated so forcefully in a time which mirrors much of the decay she described in Atlas Shrugged, but she failed to understand man. She didn't know mercy, or care for the weaker and less fortunate--though her characters are usually better than her philosophy, and her philosophy better than its practitioners. She had half the insight of the Pope. She knew the necessity of justice, but failed to see that it acts as the foundation of charity.
Once the great and the good of society are granted the basic, elemental charity of just pay for excellent, superlative work, then due to the life, skill, and the cultural riches transmitted from ages past which come as gift, the excellent of society have an obligation to "give back" a little in return for what they have received. Scripture even suggests that such a gift ought to be proportional when it states that "Those to whom much is given, much will be expected."
The next step is not looting in the name of altruism, but rather a recognition of the fundamental dignity of all human beings deriving from their common humanity. That dignity lays obligations upon others to respect human rights and freedoms, to love their neighbor as themself. Further, we are all part of a common human family, and so stand in a relationship of love and care to the rest of humankind. When we fail to recognize this relationship, we sin.
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