Dealing with poverty is not a luxury to which our nation can attend when it finds the time and resources. Rather, it is a moral imperative of the highest priority. Decisions must be judged in light of what they do for the poor, what they do to the poor, and what they enable the poor to do for themselves. The Church fully supports the right of workers to form unions or other associations to secure their rights to fair wages and working conditions. This is a specific application of the more general right to associate.
Human rights are the minimum conditions for life in community.
In Catholic teaching, human rights include not only civil and political rights but also economic rights. This means that when people are without a chance to earn a living, and must go hungry and homeless, they are being denied basic rights. Society must ensure that these rights are protected. We have to move from our devotion to independence, through an understanding of interdependence, to a commitment to human solidarity. That challenge must find its realization in the kind of community we build among us.