"Economic Justice for All" is the pastoral letter promulgated by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in 1986. It deals with the U.S. economy and with Catholic social teaching in the U.S. context. It is a part of the tradition of Catholic social teaching. The letter was written at a time when the Reagan administration was implementing libertarian policies of laissez-faire capitalism, and it may be interpreted as a reaction to what was seen as hostility towards the Catholic Church's teachings on social justice, subsidiarity, corporatism and distributism.
A pastoral letter, often called simply a pastoral, is an open letter addressed by a bishop to the clergy or laity of a diocese or to both, containing general admonition, instruction or consolation, or directions for behaviour in particular circumstances. In the Catholic Church, such letters are also sent out regularly at particular ecclesiastical seasons, particularly at the beginning of fasts. In most episcopal church bodies, clerics are often required to read out pastoral letters of superior bishops to their congregations.
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 (USCC), it is composed of all active and retired members of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States and the Territory of the U.S. Virgin Islands. In the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, the bishops in the six dioceses form their own episcopal conference, the Puerto Rican Episcopal Conference. The bishops in U.S. insular areas in the Pacific Ocean – the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, the Territory of American Samoa, and the Territory of Guam – are members of the Episcopal Conference of the Pacific.
Catholic social teaching is the Catholic doctrines on matters of human dignity and common good in society. The ideas address oppression, the role of the state, subsidiarity, social organization, concern for social justice, and issues of wealth distribution. Its foundations are widely considered to have been laid by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical letter Rerum novarum, which advocated economic distributism. Its roots can be traced to the writings of Catholic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo, and is also derived from concepts present in the Bible and the cultures of the ancient Near East.
Archbishop Rembert Weakland 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”. [1]
Rembert George Weakland is 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 press that Weakland had conducted a sexual relationship with a male associate, Paul Marcoux, several decades before, and that the diocese had paid $450,000 to Marcoux to settle litigation arising from the affair.
