Journal of Catholic Social Thought

Against the background of the 2022 national elections in the Philippines, in which the Church failed in the moral fight against the return of the Marcoses and the continuation of the Duterte regime in power, this article makes a social discernment as to why the Church has not succeeded in its social mission in shaping the social consciousness of the Filipino people. Why has the Catholic social tradition not taken root in the Philippine soil and in the Filipino soul? The author argues that the Church has located itself in the center rather than grounding itself in the margins. The author proposes a reappropriation of the Catholic social tradition from the margins to more dynamically transform Philippine society.

A more dynamic approach to Catholic social thought that encourages a prophetic discernment can critically challenge the official narrative presented in the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, which is widely popular in Africa. This article develops this argument by revisiting three key problems that CST encounters in the African reality: poverty, violence, and justice. Significantly, the postcolonial discourse of “anthropological poverty” serves as both a justification for and a critique of the Compendium. This article highlights how a prophetic discernment’s dynamic approach, through the lens of anthropological poverty, enriches or critiques official Catholic social teaching’s views on the problems of poverty, violence, and justice. The discussion that follows in the article establishes how a less hierarchical approach to contemporary social questions is both necessary and attainable, while showing that this approach is, in part, taking place in Africa.

Catholic social teaching frames a practical, political tradition, historically embodied and directed toward the dignity of the person, solidarity, and the common good as essential to social justice. It aims not only to convert the Church but to be an agent of change in societies globally. Yet despite over 130 years of condemnations by CST of violence, exploitation, and other forms of social injustice, scourges like poverty, war, racism, and sexism still blight human existence. The work of the Belgian theologian Johan Verstraeten offers resources for a view of social movements as agents of the transformation of social institutions and structures. Social movements can provoke and enhance the formation of justice as an institutional virtue, disposing institutions to better foster solidarity and the common good.

Religion does influence personal choices and behavior, even today. In a multireligious society, religions and religious groups influence social life and public policy considerably. Hitherto, Catholic social teaching, thought, and practice were essentially, if not exclusively, based on the Christian vision of socioeconomic and political realities, without paying much attention to the existence and role of the world’s great religions and religious traditions in this endeavor. To revitalize Catholic social teaching in today’s world, the Church must enter into critical dialogue with non-Christian religions and harness their contribution to sociopolitical transformation. The teachings of Pope Francis, especially in recent social encyclicals, emphasize the importance of such conversations and identify possible paths to pursue.

As Catholics, like all people of goodwill, work to confront the ongoing legacy of racism in the United States, they need additional resources to understand and challenge the suprapersonal aspects of racism at the social level. Building on existing Catholic analyses of racism as a form of cultural sin and incorporating recent refinements in the concept of structural sin, this paper argues that Catholic social thought can yield a more comprehensive account of systemic racism as a structural and cultural problem. This combined analysis provides the theological resources to help Catholics recognize a duty to confront racism and promote racial justice as a natural extension of their faith commitments.

In this article, the author argues that Catholic magisterial teaching in matters pertaining to criminal justice has been frozen since the Middle Ages in a legalist framework that has underwritten and continues to legitimate the violence of retributive justice by the state. The article will first provide the official Catholic position on criminal detention and punishment. This will be followed by a survey of the medieval, largely Thomist, account of the legitimacy of punishment as administered by the state, blessed by the Church, and dominant in Catholic teaching, to the demotion of the nonviolent, evangelical emphases that characterized the pre-Constantinian Church. Finally, the paper will urge the revoking of Catholic endorsement of inflicting willful suffering on criminal offenders found guilty in courts of law. In this way, the Catholic Church will maintain a consistent, life-affirming, and exemplary Christian ethic of criminal justice.

This paper offers a framework for teaching and learning Catholic social thought. Drawing upon theories of community engagement and justice education, the paper observes stages of student learning related to Catholic social thought. Finally, it draws upon Ignatian principles and pedagogy as an approach to teaching Catholic social thought to college students.

Pope Francis’s two encyclicals—Laudato si’ and Fratelli tutti—belong to the tradition of Catholic social teaching that began in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum. There have been continuities and discontinuities within the tradition of Catholic social teaching, but there has been a tendency to downplay the discontinuities. Francis’s two encyclicals show both discontinuities and continuities with the earlier documents. The final section criticizes these two encyclicals as being too overly optimistic in their approach to solving the problems facing the environment and the social, political, and economic orders.

Despite a growing body of literature that engages both Catholic social thought and the Capability Approach, little has been done to explore what these two traditions of thought might offer to a reassessment of the project of global democracy promotion. This essay brings Catholic social thought and the Capability Approach into conversation for this purpose. What emerges is a framework for thinking about and engaging in what the author calls democratic democracy promotion (DDP). DDP is based on a broadened conception of democracy and avoids a dogmatic commitment to the promotion of Western liberal democracy; it takes a needs-based approach to the allocation of externally driven democracy assistance; and it prioritizes education initiatives as central components of democracy promotion. Refashioned as such, democracy promotion has the potential to bring about more participatory democratic processes, a more inclusive global democracy, and a critical and caring mass of global democrats.

In Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis wonders why it took the Church so long to condemn slavery unequivocally. Indeed, the place of slavery in Catholic teaching provides a test case of change in official Church intellectual tradition. This paper examines the divergent arguments of four authors who have written about Church teaching on slavery: Pope Leo XIII, Fr. Joel S. Panzer, Judge John T. Noonan Jr., and Fr. John Francis Maxwell. It considers the statement on slavery in the Catechism of the Catholic Church in light of Pope John Paul II’s meditation on the nature of human labor in Laborem exercens, itself a meditation on Leo’s Rerum novarum (On the Condition of Labor), and offers a critique of the position that papal teaching, because it must be self-consistent, is therefore irreformable or unsusceptible to development. This provides one response to the pope’s provocative question.

This article is a critical race theology analysis that asserts that Catholic social teaching established in documents such as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, Populorum progressio, Caritas in veritate, and the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace’s Contribution to the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance justifies reparations for the state of oppression commonly called Jim Crow, or segregation society, from the US government because it denied African Americans “truly human conditions.”

John Lewis and Thomas Aquinas may seem like an unusual pairing for an essay. The first was a modern American congressman and civil rights activist, and the second was a priest, philosopher, and theologian from medieval Italy. Differences notwithstanding, their worldviews share a remarkable degree of overlap. This paper explores how each of these figures describes the development of right judgment and thus serves modern audiences seeking to understand how reason, emotion, and virtue operate in moral decision-making. Bringing them together, the author examines methods for rightly developing practical moral knowledge. Lewis’s political influence is studied theologically for how social formation, individual agency, and collective action function in perceiving and implementing natural law. Aquinas provides a theoretical framework for comprehending these concepts, by first defining synderesis and conscience, then discussing ways of knowing natural law, and, finally, explaining the virtue of prudence.

The novel coronavirus and its disease, COVID-19, have revealed how many health systems are ill equipped to respond to a population’s health needs. While the Catholic Church has nearly two thousand years of robust engagement in health care, it has been lacking in the realm of global public health. The Catholic Church’s health care ministries have been preoccupied with responding to illness by offering immediate relief to medical suffering. It is necessary to complement the focus on interpersonal healing by transforming the social structures that perpetuate patterns of illness. By drawing on their social teachings, Catholic health care ministries offer a unique contribution to global public health. This paper will develop four contributions for global public health and analyze them in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Debates about Catholic social doctrine often revolve around whether a given theory or practice is compatible with the magisterium or not. There is a body of scholarly literature on the nature and scope of the magisterium, but little has been written on the magisterium as it pertains to social doctrine. This essay explores what magisterial documents and scholarship say about the sources, levels, and scope of the magisterium in relation to social doctrine. It then considers how the levels of magisterium can help the faithful understand contemporary teaching on capital punishment. The better they understand the magisterium in relation to social doctrine, the more charitable and fruitful debate will be.