Catholic Social Teaching: What is it? UPDATED Nov 9

As I write this, we have the first solid indications of a conclusion to an election year that has been ... interesting.

One of the especially interesting features to me was how many times during the final weeks of the campaign President-elect Biden used the phrase "Catholic social teaching." That's not to say that his party's platform truly reflects those social teachings in any kind of consistent way (neither did the other party's), but at least it gives us something substantial to refer to.

Talk of "Catholic social teaching" can make some Catholics nervous, especially when it seems like it the term is being used to cover over, rather than to address, key matters. However, social teachings have been a pivotal part of the faith since the early Church (read the Church Fathers!). It is nothing other than a spelling out of the Gospel implications for a particular culture. Naturally, that will vary across centuries as well as continents, though some of the warnings of saintly pastors like St John Damascene are still (uncomfortably!) fitting.

In the last 130 or so years papal teachings since Leo XIII's On the Condition of the Working Classes  (Rerum novarum: "New issues") have tried to apply the Gospel to, well, "new issues" in social life, so that "the split between Gospel and culture" that Pope St. Paul VI lamented in 1975 would not harden into an absolute chasm in society. It became a custom for Popes to issue updated documents on significant anniversaries of Rerum novarum: Pius XI's Quadragesimo Anno (Forty Years); Mater et Magistra (Christianity and Social Progress) by St John XXIII;  Octogesima Adveniens (On the coming Eightieth anniversary) by St Paul VI; Laborem Exercens (On Human Work) and  Centesimus Annus (The Centenary) by St John Paul II. 

In each of those anniversary documents, and in other major social documents (like Paul VI's Populorum Progressio; John Paul II's Evangelium Vitae, or Pope Francis' Laudato Si' ) and Fratelli Tutti, the application of the Gospel had to be applied not only to changed social, political, and even scientific conditions, but also to changes in intellectual frameworks: to the mindset with which people of different cultures approached matters such as knowledge, truth, human rights, the definition and limits of progress, etc.

One of the most important documents you can study in terms of Catholic social teaching is the book-length Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church. Sometimes called the "Social Catechism," this really is a companion volume to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, but focused on issues of Catholic social teaching. (Order a physical copy of the book with this affiliate link: https://amzn.to/38nP8Hc.)

Since our President-elect professes himself indebted to Catholic social teaching, this might be a good time for all of us to pursue a personal program of study from the very best of sources: the one issued from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace under the authority of Pope St John Paul II in 2004.

Professor Diana Duesterhoeft of St Mary's University (San Antonio) prepared a handy web page of references on Catholic Social Teaching: https://lib.stmarytx.edu/c.php?g=288002&p=1920734

Nov 9: I had forgotten to list the most recent of Church social documents: Pope Francis' Fratelli Tutti, so I inserted that in the list above. Today is one of your last chances to order the paperback version of the document with the pre-order discount; God willing, they should be shipping out later this week.

God's Plan for Politics

All this fussing about masks and rights and policies and the jabs of politicians on either side trying to score points with their most radical believers. It makes me want to self-isolate.

A friend of mine wrote about the suffering she feels keeping her children "socially distanced" while neighbors spurn further calls for caution as politically suspect. In her diocese, the Mass is once again being offered in public and she is worried about the elderly priests who may be putting themselves in harm's way by their closeness to their (maskless) people for such extended periods of time. And those priests, in turn, can become vectors of illness themselves (as happened in Houston where an entire community of priests had to quarantine themselves after learning that three members who had been presiding at liturgies tested positive for the coronavirus).

Meanwhile on Twitter, intellectual types get lost in political theory, analyzing things under every sort of optic but one. I say this, because that "one" optic is the one Jesus has been trying to get across to me during these long weeks of cloistered life. Because I tend to think that things generally work best if we just go with logic. For me, logic implies order, predictability, reasonableness. (Small wonder that my TV hero in grade school was Spock!) But Jesus reminded me this week that there is already order in the universe. It is built in. The universe works just fine.
God is looking for more.

That is why humans are here. God's priority is for human life to reflect Trinitarian life. All our social structures are meant for this — but only the family is the real deal. (This is why, in Catholic social thought, civil society should serve the family constituted by a man and woman and their children.)

This is the missing optic on much of Catholic Twitter's political discourse. We get "right" and "left" but not "Trinitarian life." Every single policy and whole systems could ideally be seen under this lens: Does this system help human life to more readily engage in the Trinitarian style of self-giving love, or does it promote discord, isolation, competition (which is as anti-Trinitarian as you can get)?

Raising the question to the Trinitarian plane (our eternal destiny and our infinite model) would take certain Catholic conversations out of political discourse associated with a saint —who became a saint not because of intellectual achievements in speculating about divine topics, but by living the Trinitarian life in a human way.

As we were created to do.

This, by the way, is basic Theology of the Body applied to politics.

Thank you for listening to my TED talk!