He Picked the Two Things You Die Without | Catholic Daily No. 23

This is the fourth issue in the series on the Beatitudes — the eight steps of holiness in the Sermon on the Mount. We climbed from poor in spirit (the empty hands) to the meek (governed strength) to they that mourn (the honest grief that sees rightly). Today the ground steepens.

"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill." — Matthew 5:6 (Douay-Rheims)

Notice what the Lord reaches for. Of every appetite He could have named, He chooses the two no human being can survive without — hunger and thirst. You can live without comfort, without honor, even without company. You cannot live without bread and water; the body that lacks them does not merely suffer, it dies. And He attaches that life-or-death craving to one thing: justice.

He is not describing someone who would prefer a fairer world. He is describing someone who wants what is right the way a starving man wants food — desperately, bodily, unable to be at peace until it comes. Most of us have never wanted justice that badly. We want it when it costs nothing.

Aquinas defines the thing being hungered for with surgical precision. Justice, he writes, is "the constant and perpetual will to render to each one his due" (Summa II-II, Q.58, A.1) — to give every person exactly what they are owed: the worker his wage, the buyer a fair price, the neighbor the truth, God His worship. Not charity, which gives beyond what is owed; justice, which first pays the debt. To hunger and thirst after it is to be unable to rest while anyone is being denied their due.

And here is why this beatitude is the steepest step so far, and where Aquinas takes it next. On Augustine's ladder, which we have been climbing all series, the fourth beatitude pairs with the Gift of Fortitude (Summa II-II, Q.139, A.2). That is no accident. In a world that rarely rewards justice and often punishes it, wanting what is right is not enough — you need the strength to pursue it when it costs you. Fortitude is the gift that turns the hunger into action and lets a person keep paying the price of justice without giving up. Mourning needed the gift of knowledge; this one needs courage.

And the promise is the most generous in the set: they shall have their fill. Aquinas notes that of all hungers, this is the one that ends in saturation — the Latin is saturabuntur, filled to the full. Every other appetite, fed, returns. This one, fed by God, is finally satisfied.

"I hate, I despise your festivals… But let justice surge like water, and goodness like an unfailing stream." — Amos 5:21, 24

→ The Church could not have placed a better reading under this beatitude if she had tried. The prophet Amos stands in front of a people performing their religion beautifully — feasts, songs, offerings — and God says He cannot stand it, because their worship has no justice under it. Then the line that has echoed for twenty-eight centuries: let justice surge like water. Not trickle. Not appear when convenient. Surge, like a flood, like the very water the beatitude says we should be thirsting for. The Mass today preaches the Gospel before the Gospel is even read.

Markets are where justice is most often quietly skipped — and Aquinas saw it coming by seven hundred years.

In the same work, he takes up the just price (Summa II-II, Q.77): a sale is just when the price reflects the true worth of the thing and exploits no one's ignorance or need; to charge more because you can is not shrewdness, it is a species of theft. That is justice rendered to the man on the other side of a transaction — his due. The whole of honest finance is the daily decision to render each party what is actually theirs: the client real counsel and not a product that pays you more, the worker inside a holding a just wage and not a number to be cut, the counterparty a fair price and not a fleecing.

This is exactly why a values screen runs before the money in this system, and why it takes fortitude to keep it. To refuse a profitable position because it is built on someone's exploitation — to leave money on the table because the company underneath it does not render its workers their due — is to hunger and thirst after justice with actual cost attached. It is easy to want a fair market. It is fortitude to forgo an unjust gain.

The Tape — Tuesday, June 30 close. Scanner run after the close · BULL tape · system in cash. The leaders keep climbing; none has formed a clean base. Cash is the position.

The screen that comes before the price is justice with a cost — rendering each his due, and being willing to be poorer for it.

Justice is rendering to each one his due — and the beatitude blesses not those who admire it, but those who hunger for it enough to pay for it. Where in your work is justice being quietly skipped because doing it right would cost you something — and do you want what is right badly enough to bear the cost?

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He Picked the Two Things You Die Without — and Attached Them to Justice.