ABSTRACT
Modern Catholic social teaching is expressed in papal, conciliar, and other official documents of different levels of Church hierarchy and lay movements dealing with the economic, political, and social order of society. It has its origins in the late nineteenth century, when industrialisation and social change in Europe led to the ‘social question’: The presence of a poor and excluded working class that began to organise social movements questioning the existing social and economic order. At the beginning this teaching of the Church, challenged by the misery of the poor, formed a rather closed system of general social principles such as personality, solidarity and subsidiarity. Its central arguments were related to natural law and neo-scholastic theology, proposing a kind of ‘third way’ between liberal and socialist ideologies. With the changes introduced by the Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican (1962–1965) – that is the new insistence in a dialogue of Church and society and a very sensible awareness of modernity – the social teaching of the Church became more open to biblical roots, ecumenical and inter-religious exchange, social sciences and modern philosophical thought. Furthermore, while the Catholic Church began to be a global religious institution present in all countries of the world (cf. Kruip 2006), the particular perspectives of local Churches in poor countries became increasingly important and found their response even in papal documents. Without neglecting the social teaching of local Churches or of lay groups within them, this chapter will refer to some important documents published by the Popes and to the final document of the Roman Bishops’ Synod of 1971, 2 because this text titled ‘Justice in the World’ is the most important one when trying to learn something about the global perspective in the social teachings of the Catholic Church. 3
