Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

epels them.“ 83 In difficult struggles these women will have to fight their way through to the
trust that God as goodness and love stand behind even this fate.
'The young Christian woman,“ said Pius XII on October 21, 1945, „who remains unmarried
against her intentions, but who firmly believes in the providence of the heavenly Father, recognizes
the voice of her Master amidst the vicissitudes of life: 'The Master is here and calls
you.' „Instead of convincing herself that she is condemned to a „useless, pointless life,“ she
enters courageously into public life and takes over „various combative tasks“ that many
women „who are taken up with the affairs of their families and the education of their children
or are subject to the holy yoke of religious observance would be incapable of fulfilling.“ In
earlier centuries it was believed that a woman needed the protection of a 'man or convent wall'
(aut maritus aut murus), so that she could chose between only two forms of life, the family led
by her husband or the convent surrounded by walls. Today her ever more consciously awakened
independence has led the woman out into the world. She no longer allows herself to be
forced into the domains of kitchen, children, convent and Church previously assigned to her.
The age of industrialism does in fact require not only the familial and cloistered, but also the
public work of women for its recovery. With a world population in the year 1980 of 4336
million people, 2515 million persons fell into the employable bracket between fifteen and
sixty-five years of age.
According to a communication of the FAG in Rome, 1815 million were gainfully employed.
Even if these figures are only very rough estimates, the 72% employment ratio worldwide
calculable on this basis should nevertheless give a certain overview of participation in working
life.
SECTION TWO: WORK AND PROFESSION
Human coexistence is decisively determined by the prevailing working and occupational conditions.
For social history teaches that the governmental and social system, such as slavery in
Antiquity, and the order established by the ruling estates in the Middle Ages (with serfdom
and villeinage), as well as the wage system of the industrial age, essentially represent forms of
organizing human work which determine at the same time the distribution of the economic
returns of work. It is no wonder that social revolutions are usually ignited by working conditions
that are considered exploitative. The task of this section is first to interpret the Christian
meaning of work and profession and then to apply the findings gained to the working conditions
of the industrial age.
CHAPTER ONE: THE CHRISTIAN MEANING OF WORK AND PRO-
FESSION
§ 1 Concept and Definition
1. Work is the conscious, serious, object-related activation of the intellectual or bodily faculties
of man for the appropriate realization of values that serve the divinely appointed fulfillment
of man himself (his 'self-performance') as well as human society and, ultimately, the
honor of God. As a consciously active process, work is a privilege of man, whereas the 'doing'
of animals is an instinctive action, so that one can speak of the 'work' of animals and machines
only in a figurative sense insofar as man takes animals and machines into his service. The
orientation to a value that is taken seriously, which does not lie in the experience of doing
itself, but is to be reached or realized transitively and objectively in a way that leads beyond
83 Ida Görres, Von Ehe und Einsamkeit (Donauwörth, 1949), 41.
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