"Economic Justice for All" is the pastoral letter promulgated by the

United States Conference of Catholic Bishops The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) is the episcopal conference of the Catholic Church in the United States. Founded in 1966 as the joint National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) and United States Catholic Conference (US ...

in 1986. It deals with the U.S. economy and with

Catholic social teaching Catholic social teaching, commonly abbreviated CST, is an area of Catholic doctrine concerning matters of human dignity and the common good in society. The ideas address oppression, the role of the state, subsidiarity, social organizatio ...

in the U.S. context. It is a part of the tradition of

. The letter was written at a time when the

Reagan administration Ronald Reagan's tenure as the 40th president of the United States began with his first inauguration on January 20, 1981, and ended on January 20, 1989. Reagan, a Republican from California, took office following a landslide victory over ...

was implementing

libertarian Libertarianism (from french: libertaire, "libertarian"; from la, libertas, "freedom") is a political philosophy that upholds liberty as a core value. Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, and minimize the state's en ...

policies of

laissez-faire ''Laissez-faire'' ( ; from french: laissez faire , ) is an economic system in which transactions between private groups of people are free from any form of economic interventionism (such as subsidies) deriving from special interest groups ...

capitalism, and it may be interpreted as a reaction to what was seen as hostility towards the Catholic Church's teachings on

social justice Social justice is justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals ...

subsidiarity Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' defines subsidi ...

corporatism Corporatism is a collectivist political ideology which advocates the organization of society by corporate groups, such as agricultural, labour, military, business, scientific, or guild associations, on the basis of their common interests. The ...

and

distributism Distributism is an economic theory asserting that the world's productive assets should be widely owned rather than concentrated. Developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, distributism was based upon Catholic social teaching prin ...

. Archbishop

Rembert Weakland Rembert George Samuel Weakland (April 2, 1927 – August 22, 2022) was an American Benedictine monk who served as Archbishop of Milwaukee from 1977 to 2002. Shortly before his mandatory retirement at the age of 75, it was revealed in the pre ...

was asked to chair the U.S. bishops’ committee responsible for drafting the pastoral letter. He terms the experience “one of the most important and formative periods of my life”.Archbishop’s book details lifelong journey, struggle with sexuality
/ref>

References

External links

Link to the text of ''Economic Justice for All''
Documents of the Catholic Social Teaching tradition United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 1986 in Christianity 1986 documents 20th-century Catholicism {{RC-document-stub