Understanding Catholic Social Doctrine: Key Concepts
Catholic Social Teaching: Principles and Applications
Catholic Social Teaching (CST): Sets forth the teachings of the Catholic Church, expounding and urging engagement with contemporary social questions. It emerged during a period known as the social question.
Nature of the Doctrine
Doctrine: Encompasses documents, studies, analyses, and pronouncements of an emissive character, forming a unitary corpus of knowledge that guides both understanding and application. As such, it has the immediate purpose of instruction. This instruction is ordered and functional in its practices, thus providing doctrinal exposure.
Object: Social
If it is social doctrine, it must also be social. It encompasses all areas of human coexistence. In reality, this is its object in a broad sense, extending in accordance with its significance in ordinary language. However, social refers primarily to a specific genre of activity corresponding to its peculiar theory and form of interpretation. This specific activity historically arose from the social consequences of the unfolding of industrialism, essentially the classic notion of the social question.
Social Question
There is some confusion regarding its content, often reducing the scope to economic activity.
Marxism (Communism)
Economy: Considered the instance in the last analysis of social life. It argues that the rest of the structure and superstructure are born from here: religion, science, philosophy. Therefore, all aspects of social life are blamed on economic activity, from a political, cultural, and juridical viewpoint.
Doctrinaire Liberalism (Capitalism)
The system relies on the equilibrium of the whole. Socialist economics depends on conditions such as fluctuations in capital investment. Adam Smith’s invisible hand theory (state non-intervention) suggests that spontaneous market self-regulation would be equivalent to a double-sided perspective of analysis. Social issues are reduced to economic issues, when the economy is just one aspect of life in our society. Therefore, the problem is not unique and not even of transcendence.
Doctrines and Regimes
Social activity, specifically human relationships with others, can be the object of specific regimes that are not equally comparable to political or economic doctrines or regimes.
Doctrine Politics
Theoretical analysis of the organization of society and politics, their internal order and international relations.
Economic Doctrine
Focuses on the organization of macro and microeconomic relations, the distribution of labor and production.
Political Regimes
Policy number organization, community, and territory on a determined date according to a model of participation and partnership.
Economic Regimes
Effective organization of economic relations of labor and capital.
Social Investment
Organization and conditions of the economic-political model that shapes society. The Church does not simply offer a theory about these issues but plays a normative role based on principles. Church doctrine not only offers possibilities for making the regime but retains its doctrinal precision. It conforms to a vocation with a particular regime or others in the future. It is also a criterion for trial and action, seeking a late interest by linking to practices.
Sources of Catholic Social Teaching
Natural Reason
Perspective: Conforms to the integral good of man and his dignity.
Interdisciplinary
Unites content from distinct sciences, centered on the anthropological, in contact with reality.
Revelation
Strong link between faith and reason: Faith supports natural reason.
Esteem for reason: To take it into account, neither overvalued nor undervalued.
Legitimacy Ad Intra
The Church cannot ignore or abdicate its role. Moral theology increases its purpose and audience.
Immediately: Faithful of the Church.
Extended: True Christian churches, not extra-Catholic.
Ad: Non-believers in God or those who do not believe in aspects of the Church agree on the need to work for the integral good of the human, non-believers and non-Christians alike, because they believe that man has theological foundations of dignity.