Minimum Wage vs. Just Wage: A Thomistic Clarification of Catholic Social Teaching – Dr. Michael Krom

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This lecture was given on September 25th, 2025, at Louisiana State University.

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About the Speakers:

Michael Krom started reading Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae shortly after his conversion at the end of college. Upon learning about Flannery O’Connor’s “hillbilly Thomist” habit of reading Aquinas every night, he started studying two articles a day and completed the Summa while in graduate school at Emory University. As a professor at Saint Vincent College, he saw the urgent need for collegians and seminarians to receive a solid foundation in Aquinas’s philosophical theology. In 2020, he published Justice and Charity: An Introduction to Aquinas’s Moral, Economic, and Political Thought (Baker Academic Press), and teaches a Thomistic philosophy course each fall. In addition to continuing work on the moral, economic, and political topics covered in the book, his current research is on the influence of monastic spirituality on Aquinas; he is working on a monograph tentatively entitled Aquinas Among the Benedictines.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.
0:06.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:13.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:19.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.
0:25.1	I can tell that you all know how to have a good time,
0:27.2	because in order to prepare for an LSU football game,
0:30.3	you came here tonight.
0:31.5	So I know you all know what it means to have a good time.
0:34.0	We're going to have a great time tonight talking about justice.
0:37.1	So the question of,
0:38.3	you know, what do we owe our neighbor and what is justice in work? And the very short version
0:46.3	is that we want to make a clear distinction between a moral claim, which is also an economic claim about justice, what we owe each other, as distinct
0:56.3	from a political claim, which is about how does the government, or what is the government's
1:01.5	role in helping us to ensure justice for employers and employees. And one of the reasons I think
1:09.2	this is a helpful topic is because it can help to some
1:13.5	extent at least heal divisions that are unfortunate. We generally tend to think of kind of secular
1:19.9	world and Catholic world and the prominent divisions in our culture. But I'm really talking about
1:26.1	more among Christians,
1:28.0	and specifically within the Catholic Church,
1:30.5	that broadly we could say on one side there are the more people who call themselves
1:37.4	orthodox, conservative, or traditional Catholics,
1:41.3	whether they go to a charismatic mass or like an extraordinary form.
	...

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