31 August is the Australian Catholic Church’s Social Justice Sunday.
The 2025-2026 Australian Catholic Bishops Confernece’s Social Justice Statement is “Signs of Hope on the Edge: Serving Homeless People with Mental Ill Health”
Catholic Social Justice Sunday reminds us of the breadth of God’s love and concern for us and for our world. In our culture, the place of Religion and of the Church is increasingly narrowed to our private and individual lives. Faith and justice are then seen to be exclusively about our individual relationship to God and others.
This year’s Social Justice Statement invites us to look beyond ourselves and our immediate relationships to the world around us. It focuses, as does all Catholic Social Teaching, on the persons for whom God has a special care. The Statement describes poignantly the hard lives of people who are homeless and are mentally ill. Often, the two conditions run together. People with mental illness are often too poor to afford to own or rent places to live. The anxiety, isolation and ostracism of homelessness, too, contribute to mental illness.
God’s love for the poor and isolated, which we see in Jesus’ life and mission, invites us all to notice and to attend to people who are homeless and suffer from mental illness. Our Church should be a house of hospitality and relief. Social Justice, however, invites us also to attend to the government laws and social programs about work, family, housing and taxation, physical illness and the making of war. Through these things, society attends to the needs of persons in need which individuals cannot meet.
In particular, through stories and analysis, the Statement draws attention to the failure of our society to meet basic human rights to shelter, to health care. It fails to provide housing, to protect poor persons from being driven from their homes, to ensure human access to mental health services, and often penalises people forced to live on the streets or under shop shelters. They embarrass the comfortable.
The Statement embodies the two key principles of Catholic Social Teaching about the relationships between people, institutions and the environment. Its central principle is that each human being is precious, with a dignity not based on wealth, race, religion or usefulness. No one may be treated as a means to someone else’s ends. They must be respected.
The second key principle of Catholic Social Teaching is that we human beings are not simply individuals who are masters of our own lives. We rely on one another for birth, for education and for flourishing. For us to flourish as persons, we must help one another to flourish. This principle requires us to attend to the good of our whole society, and especially to our most needy members. We certainly have a right to personal property, but our rights must be measured to the needs of others.
The focus on human relationships in the Statement underlies its criticism of the impersonal character of the treatment of mental health and homelessness. People whose suffering is deeply personal need healing human contact. Delayed appointments, programs conducted electronically accentuate the loneliness of people’s conditions. Such treatment, which arises from inadequate funding, does not alleviate the need for care but exacerbates it.
The personal suffering of people with mental illness and in insecure accommodation must be met by human kindness as well as by technology. The Statement insists rightly on the call of local Churches to follow Christ in reaching out to the poor ad lists helpful ways in which this can be done.
The Statement recognises the human qualities of resilience, generosity and courage shown by so many people who live with homelessness and mental illness. It also honours the generosity of people who care for family members who are mentally ill and those who welcome homeless people into their homes. Such generosity encourages hope.
A Prayer for Pilgrims of Hope
O God, Source of all Life,
you created Earth as our home
and us in your image, out of love.
Set our hearts astir with that same love,
that we might build a culture of encounter
and systems that justly serve
those living in homelessness
and mental ill-health.
Jesus our Brother,
you noticed those living on the edge,
listened, healed and served them, out of love.
Move us from our embarrassment or discomfort
by those who show us your suffering face.
Instead, may we be taught by them,
offer our loving friendship
and share your good news together.
Holy Spirit, Source of all Hope,
you inspire our relationships
with transforming power, out of love.
Deepen our vision and enlarge our hearts
so that the fear and isolation
of homelessness and mental ill-health
may be countered by love’s warmth and certainty,
that we might walk together as pilgrims of hope.
Amen.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ writes for Jesuit Communications and Jesuit Social Services.
