Last Updated:Friday - 09/24/2010

A catechism of social teaching

Tucked away in Pope John Paul's recent exhortation The Church in America is a call to develop what could be a revolutionary document. The pope, based on advice from the bishops' synod for North and South America, has called for a Catechism of Catholic Social Doctrine.

The Church's social teaching finds its roots in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. Prior to that, there was little notion that the Church might have something of value to say about issues of economic justice. Today many still believe the Church should keep its nose out of the marketplace. But even that view is on the decline as it becomes more widely recognized that Jesus' teachings do in fact call people to respect human dignity.

While the Church's social teaching is 108 years old, it is only in the last 20 years that it has begun to come to maturity. Pope John Paul has taught an integrated approach to the human person and society, and has applied it in widely varied contexts. We have also seen the application of that teaching by the Latin American bishops and liberation theologians and a response to certain excesses in liberation theology by the Vatican. The Canadian bishops have also been at the forefront in applying Church social teaching.

The time is ripe for enunciating that teaching in a fuller and more systematic way than is found in even the papal encyclicals. Further, in a world of increased economic disparity and serious threats to the family, now is the time for making Church social teaching more accessible to the average lay person.

The pope says the starting point for this new catechism should be in the Catechism of the Catholic Church's treatment of the seventh commandment - thou shalt not steal. There we find a brief laying-out of the need for economic justice.

However, the Church's social teaching is not limited to issues of peace and economic justice. It cannot avoid entering the realm of the Church's teaching on the family - surely a major issue of social concern. The pope himself in 1981 declared, "The future of humanity passes by way of the family."

Social teaching also encompasses issues of human life - abortion, war, capital punishment and contraception. The role of the media, and more generally how we communicate with each other, also affect society. In the 20th century, it has become abundantly clear that issues of immigration and ethnic loyalty have global implications. Respect for law and authority are also vital to true social justice and democracy itself. Even how we act in the most intimate and personal realm of human experience, human sexuality, affects society.

None of these areas of concern can be omitted from a comprehensive Catechism of Catholic Social Doctrine. In the 1960s, the new left argued that the political is personal and the personal is political. This statement is profoundly true, even if not quite in the way it was originally intended.

One of the beauties of Catholic social teaching is that it transcends comfortable categories of "left" and "right" which have been a barrier to creative political dialogue for too long. But if Catholic teaching points the way out of the current political logjam, it doesn't provide anything like a political program. As the pope maintains, Church social teaching is but "a starting point in the search for practical solutions."

A Catholic laity inculcated with the Church's teaching in areas of major social concern are not likely to speak with one voice. And that's just fine. For the Church's concern is not with developing political forces, but with the preservation and enhancement of principles which respect human dignity in every culture. The proposed Catechism of Catholic Social Doctrine will be an important step to such a goal.

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