In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 6.2 (2003) 15-36



[Access article in PDF]

The Church's Social Doctrine in the Twenty-First Century

George Weigel


CHRISTIANS HAVE BEEN THINKING through their relationship with the tangled worlds-within-worlds of politics, economics, and culture for nearly two millennia. The essential nature of that unavoidable entanglement and the distinctive character of the Christian's presence in "the world" came into focus early. As the subapostolic Letter to Diognetus reminds us, Christians are always "resident aliens" in the world, for while Christians honor just rulers, obey just laws, and contribute to the common good of whatever society in which they find themselves, a Christian's ultimate loyalty is given to a Kingdom that is elsewhere. Christians believe that history can be read in its fullness only in the light of faith in the Risen Christ, the Lord of history, and in that perspective, history is both the arena of God's action and the antechamber to our true home—the "city of the living God" (Heb.12:22). Those who know this about history live in history in a distinctive way.1

One might think that this two-edged conviction about the present and the future absolves Christians from responsibility for politics, economics, and culture, and some Christians have, in fact, chosen a [End Page 15] quiet withdrawal from the world and its affairs as a demand of discipleship. Catholic faith takes a different stance, however. The Catholic Church believes that it is precisely because Christians live their lives "in the world" by reference to transcendent Truth and Love that Christians can offer their neighbors a word of genuine hope amid the flux of history. Because Christians live both in time and ahead of time—because Christians are the people who know how the human story turns out (in the final vindication of God's salvific purposes)—Christians are in a unique position vis-à-vis history, politics, economics, and culture. As Hans Urs von Balthasar has put it, Christians are, amidst the world's accelerating development, the people who "can confront [that development] with a divine plan of salvation that is co-extensive with it, that indeed always runs ahead of it because it is eschatological."2

Over the centuries, there have been numerous Christian proposals for understanding the relationship of the Church to the world of politics, economics, and culture; H. Richard Niebuhr's classic, Christ and Culture, still offers a useful typology of the principal approaches.3 Surely, one of the most intellectually important Christian efforts to shed the light of the Gospel on public life has been the tradition of Catholic social doctrine. Reaching back to the classical and medieval masters for its inspiration while putting their insights into conversation with the realities of the contemporary world, modern Catholic social doctrine has always had a distinctive public quality to it, beginning with Pope Leo XIII's pioneering 1891 encyclical, Rerum Novarum. Unlike certain other Christian explications of the Church's position in the world, which speak essentially to the believing community, Catholic social doctrine has been thoroughly ecumenical in the full sense of the oikumene: Catholic social doctrine has understood itself as being "not for Catholics only." Although the phrase does not appear until Pope John XXIII, the social doctrine of the Church has always been addressed to "all men of good will." It is a genuinely public proposal, using analyses and [End Page 16] arguments about public goods and the means to achieve them that can be engaged by any intelligent person.

From the years prior to Pope Leo's Rerum Novarum to the present, Catholic social doctrine has evolved in a collaborative dialogue between the successors of Peter and theologians. Here, I would like to suggest where that dialogue and that papal teaching have led us at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium so that we can better understand the areas where Catholic social doctrine requires development in the years ahead.

The Contribution of Pope John Paul II...

pdf

Share