Justice is one of the four cardinal virtues. As such, it is a virtue that can be practiced by anyone, unlike the theological virtues, which are the gifts of God through grace. The cardinal virtues are developed and perfected through habit. While Christians can grow in the cardinal virtues through sanctifying grace, justice, as practiced by humans, can never be supernatural but is always bound by our natural rights and obligations to one another.
St. Thomas Aquinas ranked justice as the second of the cardinal virtues, behind prudence, but before fortitude and temperance. Prudence is the perfection of the intellect ("right reason applied to practice"), while justice, as Fr. John A. Hardon notes in his Modern Catholic Dictionary, is an "habitual inclination of the will." It is "the constant and permanent determination to give everyone his or her rightful due." While the theological virtue of charity emphasizes our duty to our fellow man because he is our fellow, justice is concerned with what we owe someone else precisely because he is not us.
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Topic: Justice: A Cardinal Virtue (Read 551 times)