Sins That Cry to Heaven: Part 2

Cf. first part for the theological foundation of this category of sins.

1. Focus of The Article

Alas, each of peccata clamantia remains alive and well today. However, the sin we encounter most often in daily life is the fifth: injustice toward the wage earner. It is so pervasive that it has become a hallmark of our time.

So, we will examine it first. The blood of Abel – murder of the innocent – ranks second in urgency and will follow in Part III.

One further note: the remedy proposed below applies to all five sins, not only to the one under the spotlight.

2. The Fallen Market

In 2025, the situation in job markets is depressing. In the Global South, workers endure cruel exploitation, toiling in hellish conditions and wrecking their health in early youth for a pittance.

Child labor, slavery, and human trafficking – these should have been relics of a distant past, but regrettably they persist in our age.

The Global North is more humane, yet millions of educated, diligent people long for work and cannot find it. They face ghost listings, endless and meaningless interview gauntlets, absurd competition, incompetent HR, nepotism, and much more.

And those who claw their way into employment – North or South alike – meet underpayment, exorbitant rent, abusive practices. Managers routinely coerce overtime or force silence on violations, knowing the worker dreads dismissal.

In this sense, the entire labor market has become one enormous sin crying to heaven.

To see this, test it on yourself. If you:

• have no job despite sincere effort, as though the whole system were rigged against you; or
• do have a job, but its conditions are exploitative and unjust, with no means to improve them –

then you are living a public, structural and unpunished injustice: the very definition of peccatum clamans.

3. The Objection

Some may argue that no one is to blame: the current crisis is merely a convergence of societal transformations, mass migrations, yet another technological shift, and so forth. These circumstances developed naturally, there were no villains who deliberately orchestrated them.

Hence we may call it a misfortune, a tragedy, but not a sin.

I respond:

A complex situation can indeed arise by itself, but that does not abolish sin. The history and nature have always challenged humanity. That is why we have anointed a special class and endowed them with wealth, power, and status: so that they might safeguard the bonum commune, the common good.

It is their sole, direct responsibility to perceive injustice and end it.

If they fail – whether through greed, folly, or shortsightedness – the fabric of civilization begins to decay. That is a sin that cries to heaven and invokes the Lord’s wrath upon them.

This is exactly what is happening today.

Some may further object that those in power do not actively commit evil, they merely allow in to happen through inaction.

I respond:

At best. Many actively uphold and perpetrate the corrupt system. But even if not, passivity damns as well. When a person bears the duty to act and fails, it is peccatum omissionis, the sin of omission: no less grave than active malice.

4. What to Do

What could those in power do?

For example, they could limit and redistribute excessive wealth, regulate housing monopolies, legislate against abusive hiring practices and enforce fair ones. They could even experiment with a universal basic income.

Our blog is not about social manifestos, but this must be said: many measures are possible. Yet they take none. God be their judge – quite literally.

But what should we mere mortals do, having drawn the short straw of injustice?

The very phrasing of this question seems to imply the answer: “nothing” – for if we could act, we would not be so defenseless in the first place.

Many foretell recession, a new Great Depression, an implosion and hard reset of the economy. Alas, this is possible and to some extent already unfolding, but it is not an answer.

Some say: don’t play a rigged game, go entirely off-grid. These people learn in all earnest to grow their own crops, sew and mend clothes, and so on.

That sounds appealing, but full autonomy is almost unattainable. A single person, or even a community, cannot reproduce the recourses and skill-set of an entire civilization. It might work as part of the answer, but not the whole.

Others propose building from scratch a just system parallel to the dysfunctional one. De facto, that would require new states whose laws function as a public covenant. Their citizens would be only those who consciously accept their terms.

I believe sooner or later we will come precisely to this. Yet for now it remains utopian and would most likely devolve into techno-anarchism.

Alas, no free territories remain on Earth. Members of such structures would live atomized within existing states that would refuse to recognize their new “citizenship”, strangle with taxes and regulations, and restrict freedom of movement.

5. The Catholic Answer

So, is there any realistic course of action left for us? What response under heaven could be given to the cry of this peccatum clamans?

As a Catholic, I see none but God and His Church. In the end, every crisis of the modern and postmodern eras arose from the loss of moral compass. Earthly rulers broke their last restraints and began to stampede.

The Church must once again become society’s force of ethics and meaning. Every statesman, oligarch, CEO, billionaire, president or dictator must know from the cradle that there is a Sovereign above them all, before Whom each will be held accountable.

Likewise, the Church must be accountable to society and the public sphere: not subordinate to secular powers, but transparent and truthful before them.

This will fix the labor market, and much more.

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But here lies a problem: it all worked once, but then it stopped.

Why?

First, over the course of modern history, secular states have grown so vast and powerful that they ceased to fear the Church and now no longer take her seriously. They command armies and laws, while Church possesses only her witness and her word.

At the same time, the Church herself weakened and partly lost her vision. Her intellectual and spiritual strength has faded, and she often struggles to understand the modern world.

The Second Vatican Council tried to resolve this, but its aftermath was ambiguous and left the liturgical culture and sensus sacri – the sense of the sacred – gravely diminished.

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Still, the Church stands on a solid foundation, which, thanks be to God, has remained intact.

The good news is this: the more people enter the Church and her clergy, the more they will rouse her from slumber. In turn, the more the Church awakens, the firmer ground she will provide amidst the world’s mire, drawing even more souls to her.

Thus a virtuous cycle will begin.

Such is the answer. It is not a ready-made solution, but rather a direction of effort. Yet here we at least have a concrete plan, a tangible goal and realistic gains.

The Church must regain her vision and compel the world to take her seriously again. Coercion by fear will not work this time. She will never possess vast armies, the bombers or the missiles of secular states.

Yet she holds something unique that no one else can offer: transcendent truth, meaning, faith and hope, all within a structure disciplined and ordered.

That alone is enough to rebuild not merely a just economy, but an entire civilization, and not a poor one at that.

We had it once. Since then we may not have grown holier, but we have learned much and mastered far more. With that knowledge and skill, we can build not merely as well as before, but better.

Maybe it is time to try once more.