Joseph Cardinal Höffner CHRISTIAN SOCIAL ... - Ordo Socialis

great thing if I could make shoes. ..Everyone should have his office. ..“ 92 8 The manifold tasks
to be fulfilled in society require a great number of services (professions) that can be classified
into four groups according to the different realms of value:
a) The intellectually active person serves the holy (priest, religious), the true (scholar, researcher),
the good (educator, teacher), and the beautiful (artist). Many of these services are
frequently united in the same person and in the same profession, even if a certain focal point
is recognizable.
b) The helping person stands in the service of the physical and mental health of people (doctors,
nurses, attendants). In modern society, those serving professions that attend to people in
a nursing and caring way, such as service in the house- hold or service of the sick, are not
very popular. That may be conditioned in part by the public opinion influencing the young
person that usually connects service in the household and in the hospital with the concepts
'overwork', 'lack of free time', 'constant social control', and the like. But secret connections are
also hidden here. Whereas -particularly among young people -there is a great interest in those
service professions that are more practically and objectively oriented and clearly circumscribed
in their functions (e.g. in the office), selfless personal service does not rank very high.
And that is a disturbing phenomenon. It would be disastrous if hospitals were indeed furnished
with the best and most modern equipment, but the people whose duty it was to care for
the sick were lacking or would see in their activity only a paid profession, as in other service
occupations.
c) The ordering person operates professionally in the realm of the political in the classical
sense. He or she serves the social order in government, administration, justice, military affairs,
police, self-government etc.
d) The person managing economic affairs makes material consumer goods avail- able. Although
the economy forms the lowest storey, as it were, in the hierarchy of values, most people
nevertheless exercise their paid profession in this realm where three sectors can be distinguished.
One usually designates labor-intensive primary production in agriculture and mining
as the primary sector. Whereas in the pre-industrial age more than four-fifths of the population
earned their living in the primary sector, farmers form a minority in the developed industrial
society. The number of those occupied in mining did indeed rise considerably with the
beginning of industrial development, but nevertheless constitutes only a small percentage of
the gainfully employed in the modern industrial states. Characteristic of the secondary sector -
as the realm of handicraft and industrial manufacture proper - is the astounding increase of
productivity effected by mechanization, modernization, and automation. Although almost half
of the gainfully employed are occupied in the secondary sector, the economic centre of gravity
is shifting more and more in the developed industrial society to the tertiary sector of services.
Here it is a question of those services that are related to the planning, the design, and
the sale of the material goods produced in the primary and secondary sectors and that are delivered
in drawing rooms, in advertising departments, in shops and department stores, in the
transport of the goods, in banks and insurance agencies etc. Those services that do not belong
to the realm of 'economic affairs', but to that of 'intellectually active', 'helping', and 'ordering'
people, are to be distinguished from these economic ones.
5. Work as Penance.
All peoples and times have been familiar with the drudgery of work felt by the intellectually
and physically active, the employer and the employee. An old Russian proverb says: „Work
92 Text in F Vetter, Die Predigten Taulers (Berlin, 1910), 179.
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