Catholic Social Teaching: Themes

As I mentioned in my last post, Catholic Social Teaching is one of the things that brought me back into the Church in my late twenties. But it’s a big topic, and trying to understand it all at once is daunting.

Even more daunting, it seems, is how it can be divided up into smaller chunks that are more easily digestible.

That difficulty isn’t unique to CST; many other bodies of doctrine within Catholic teaching are equally difficult to divide. That’s because of the nature of Revelation itself: it’s a whole, not a sum of parts. Because of this, it’s not easy to explain anything about our practices and beliefs, although it’s always worth trying. Divisions of any body of doctrine, then, need to be viewed as what they are: tools for understanding, not a series of lessons to be learned.

In light of that, it’s hardly surprising that there are many different ways to present the themes of Catholic Social Teaching:

• St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, quoting Caritas Canada, identifies ten (PDF Link), beginning with the dignity of the human person.
• Seton Hall University lists nine, starting with the dignity of the human person and human rights.
• The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lists seven; the first is the life and dignity of the human person.
• The Diocese of Corpus Christi has a list of four, beginning with the dignity of the human person.

That’s just from the results of a ten-minute Google search. I’m sure that if I were to spend longer researching the question, I’d find any number of ways to separate Catholic Social Teaching into a list of themes. It’s enough to make anyone question the unity of the doctrine; how can it possibly have so many different approaches? But there’s a common root to every single one of them, which I’ve listed above: the life and dignity of the human person.

For the sake of consistency, in this series I’m going to use the USCCB’s list of themes, since seven themes are a manageable number but also give sufficient detail to study them with more consideration:

1. The life and dignity of the human person;
2. A call to family, community, and participation;
3. Rights and responsibilities;
4. Preferential option for the poor and vulnerable;
5. The dignity of work and the rights of workers;
6. Solidarity; and
7. Care for God’s creation.

“The Catholic Church,” says the USCCB, “proclaims that human life is sacred and that the dignity of the human person is the foundation of a moral vision for society. This belief is the foundation of our social teaching.” They go on to explain that this doctrine is inherent in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Testament*, moving from there to a number of official papal statements, and clearly articulate a teaching that “people are more important than things” and that every institution should be evaluated in terms of whether it threatens or enhances the life and dignity of individual human beings.

The implications of this particular teaching are profound; there are a lot of things that impact people’s lives. We’ll explore some of the most prominent issues in the next post.

* These terms are, in my mind, more accurate than the traditional language of the “old” and “new” testaments.