Justice: The firm will to give your due to God and neighbour

Catholic Homilies by Fr Linus Clovis

So today we want to focus on the virtue of Justice. But to make it a little bit easier for the younger ones here, a little story that highlights the main elements. There was a young price called Prince Lapio. He was making a lot of mistakes in the kingdom because he didn’t have good judgement. He used to decide cases in favour of the person who was better looking, the best dressed, who was charming. A lot of people complained to the king, so he decided to send his son off Prince Lapio, with one of his councillors to settle various disputes in the kingdom so that the Prince might learn the nature of justice. First they got to this place where there were two tribes. The Minimums and the Maximums, these guys shared with each other food stuffs. The Minimums were hunters, so they provided the meat. The Maximums were the farmers so they provided the fruits and vegetables. But they didn’t know how to make a fair sharing. So the wise men asked the Prince to think about it and then to give his judgement. The Prince said, ‘well I think it’s just that there is equality, so everybody, we divide the food up so everybody gets the same share’. But the Maximums, they were terrified by this, they were very upset, because they were going to starve. Why? The tribe of the Maximums were a small tribe, but they were big men and they used to eat an awful lot. Where as the tribe of the Minimums, they were tiny little fellers, they didn’t eat a lot but there were thousands of them. So the Prince had to think about this again. He had to take counsel from the wise man. Then he came up with this decision ‘Get the food and divide to each person according to their condition’, in other according to as much as each person needs to survive… For Fr. Nicholas’ complete homily please listen to the Audio.