What is Catholic Social Teaching?
When people refer to "Catholic Social Teaching," they are usually referring to a set of ten or so Letters from the Pope to all the Churches in the world ("Papal Encyclicals," if you want to get technical), written over the last 150 years or so. This is a fine way to use the phrase, and we’ll come to those Encyclicals in a moment. But Catholicism, of course, has always had a social teaching. Or rather, I’d prefer to say that it has always been
a social teaching. Not just for 150 years, but for 2000 years.
You can’t read the Sermon on the Mount without seeing that just about every word of it is about how people should live with one another. The Fathers of the early Church knew this very well, and preached and wrote continually about topics such as war, the economy, poverty, education, and community life. They taught so much on the topic, in fact, that volumes of extracts have been made and divided among various subjects. And this does not include the social teaching of the Middle Ages, or of the early modern period. There was no beginning to Catholic social teaching, because it is just part of the Faith itself. Indeed, to make separate books devoted to it might wrongly imply that it is something “in addition” to what we all
receive at our baptism. That is not so. A central aim of the Center for Catholic Social Thought is to be attentive to the fullness of this tradition, and not just its more recent aspects.
THE INDUSTRIAL TURN
Nevertheless, when you hear of “Catholic Social Teaching” today, not infrequently it will be employed in that narrower sense of the teaching contained in those Letters from the Popes, which arose from a particularly modern set of circumstances. By far the most important of these is the Industrial Revolution, begun in the 19th century and continuing to revolutionize society to our day. You know it, because we live in it – the modern world: free trade, machines, mobility, capitalism, communism, industrial warfare, computer technology, and a host of other changes that have reorganized society in the last 200 years more profoundly than any other time in history. Beginning in the late 1800’s, then, the Church has commented on various aspects of this situation, usually by issuing one of these Encyclicals every 20-40 years or so. The topics it has covered are various: communism, capitalism, socialism, just wages, work and labor, technology, the environment, education, and others. I will treat some of these major themes as Easy Essay topics, but it is perhaps a useful introduction to say a little more about its first teachings, because these in some ways lay the base for what followed.
A NEW KIND OF POVERTY
The Industrial Revolution allowed humans to do amazing things. Railroads connected the world with unimagined speed; agricultural products limited the toil that making food had always involved; factories produced goods that made life increasingly convenient. There were great gains involved in all of this, and people were rightly awed at our ability to bend nature to our purposes. At the same time, there were unintended and unforeseen consequences. People no longer toiled in fields on their own land, but in dark and dangerous factories owned by others. Cities became dirty and congested, and both levels and quality of poverty in society as a whole increased exponentially. Work became scarce, and wages were often too low to support oneself, much less one’s family. Widespread destitution, rather than simply the ordinary poverty of peasant or farmer, arose for the first time in history. The images of the Great Depression in America became all too characteristic of many places the world over. Traditional moral and religious orientations of people often changed with their environment, and sometimes went out entirely with the old world.
TWO MAJOR RESPONSES
Broadly speaking, governments of the world responded to these developments in one of two ways. They either opted for free trade or laissez-faire ("no rules") capitalism, thinking that more liberty would eventually smooth out these negative wrinkles, or for communism (or socialism), thinking that it would take a strong state to organize trade effectively. Both modern capitalism and communism, which, obviously, are still with us to this day, were responses to industrialism – they did not exist in anything like the same form prior to it. Catholic social encyclicals originated as, and in many ways continue to be, a commentary on this brand-new world in which we live. What, in particular, did the Church say?
First, while acknowledging the many benefits of the advance of science and technology, it deplored conditions under which so many people were now living. Such oppression, the Church said, is contrary to the Gospel and anyone involved in treating people as mere animals made for others’ comfort and production, stand under God’s judgement. There is, in other words, a significant critique of the new industrial world for its manifest injustice. This critique took issue with both capitalist and communist alternatives.
CRITIQUES OF CAPITALISM AND COMMUNISM
Regarding the capitalism of his time, Pope Leo XIII in particular charged that (as least in those conditions) it was unjust not to pay a worker, not just a living wage, but a family wage. In other words, full-time employment must be compensated sufficiently to provide fully not just for the worker, but also for his entire family’s subsistence, and provide them a little extra for savings. Anything less is contrary to divine law, and defrauds the worker of his just wages. This was obviously directed against the laissez-faire capitalist tendency to pay workers as little as possible. So the Church reaffirmed its teaching, stretching back to the Fathers of the Church, that the world is meant for everyone, and it is sinful for some to hold so much while so many have so little.
The Church also took issue with communism, which organizes society entirely around its material outputs, and denies the holding of private property. Everything, for communism, is organized, and owned by, the State. However, the Pope said, private property, though it can be abused and unequally distributed, is itself a natural right of every person. Because we are made in the image of God, we all ought to be able to freely choose to press that image into some creative work, which then becomes “ours” because it has our stamp on it. Compulsory factory work is the opposite of this free creativity. It makes the human being into a mere cog in a society that is reduced to a machine, thinking only in terms of what it can produce. Like the Borg in Star Treck (if you’re old enough, and dorky enough, for the reference), the individual, made uniquely in the image of God, is assimilated entirely into a national collective. Communism, the Church said, is not a workable solution.
THE CATHOLIC ALTERNATIVES
What, then, should we aim for? This is where the fun began, and begins, because part of the nature of Catholic social teaching, is that it doesn’t tend to micro-manage local situations. The Popes have made some general pronouncements, excluded some practices as un-Catholic and immoral, but left plenty of room for local adaptation and interpretation (and this, intentionally so– see below). In the immediate context of late 19 th century industrialism, Leo XIII recommended a restoration of something like the ancient craft “guilds”, the creation of forms of intermediate (i.e., not state or individual) solidarity, living and even family wages, and, in general a return to a Christian concern for one’s brothers and neighbors. Some have seen this, as well as the developing tradition to which it gave rise, as suggesting an amended and somewhat regulated form of capitalism. Others, particularly in England and Europe, taking a different angle, have seen a reformed or democratic socialism as most true to the papal vision. Still others have advocated what is sometimes called “distributivism”, seeking to divide up the centralized bureaucracies that tend to dominate both socialist-leaning and capitalist-leaning economies today into more “distributed” forms of wealth and political authority, such as was found in the Middle Ages.
SUBSIDIARITY
There is much fruitful as well as complicated debate to be had between these major options, and we’ll comment more on these in future Easy Essays. But one principle that becomes prominent, that we can see functioning in all three approaches, and that often distinguishes all of these Catholic approaches (however different they are from on another) from their secular alternatives, is what has sometimes been called “subsidiarity.” This is just a fancy word for the notion that what people can do for themselves at a local level they should not “outsource” to a larger collective. If a neighborhood can take care of a poor family, for instance, the city should not try to manage it for them. If a city, alternatively, can deal with its crime, it should not call in the state or county to do so. If local farms can organize fair prices at a town hall meeting, there is no reason for the state to regulate what they can do. Notice the high value subsidiarity places on people’s own creativity and ability to figure out how to live well for themselves. It is a vision that trusts in people’s own prudence, and doesn’t worry about managing or controlling all of life from a central bureaucratic tower. Another name for subsidiarity might be “localism.”
A UNIQUE TRADITION
These are some of the issues that gave rise to the Catholic social tradition in its modern guise, and they continue to be foundational to and frame its basic vision today. As I mentioned, the Church would go on and develop this tradition in various directions, taking up matters of war and peace, environmentalism, labor, education, colonialism, technology, and a variety of other topics. So there is much more to explore. And the unique and remarkable thing about this tradition is the way that it consistently seems to give each of us, no matter where we tend to stand on the social or political spectrum, both something to stand up and cheer about, and something to be a little uncomfortable with. Over and over again the tradition refuses simple and one-sided solutions, as well as the dominant solutions on offer from the world, seeking an alternative Christian approach to social concerns that is neither simply “left” nor “right”, but truly Catholic.
WHAT CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING IS AND IS NOT
Before closing, it's worth commenting on a few issues of interpretation and application. Because most of the Church’s social pronouncements treat society-wide, "issue," kind of things, it is necessarily very limited in both scope and depth. This is on purpose, because it is the local church’s job to respond to its own environment, and so official teaching does not very often regulate things from the top. Catholic social teaching doesn’t micro-manage. This just makes good sense: it would be ludicrous for the Pope to claim to know what practical solutions are best in America and the Congo and India. That’s why we have local churches there. So its pronouncements tend to be very general, and leave it up to the faithful to figure out creatively what that means for them.
Relatedly, but importantly, Catholic social teaching is not meant to replace, but to compliment, the usual sources of Revelation, such as Scripture, the Mass, and the Catechism. There’s only one Revelation, after all. In other words, it’s not like there’s one way for Catholics to behave in their private lives, say, by reading the Bible, and another way to behave in public when, say, by reading the social encyclicals. Put differently, all Church teaching is social teaching – meant to be lived out together in the world. The primary way that most of us will engage “society” is simply by being the Church. The Church is Christ’s presence to the world, and the Sermon on the Mount is Catholic social teaching, too. What is sometimes formally called Catholic social teaching – the Encyclicals – just presents the same thing from another, society-wide angle.
SMALL SCALE, BIG PICTURE
Compared with this, most of us usually act on a much smaller scale: our family, our office, my son, this stranger asking for a buck. Practically, then, the social teaching that will determine most of our action most of the time will not be found in the Encyclicals. Why do I say this? Because there is a temptation to see what they say for society as a whole, and then come up with our own social or political strategies for how to get there, ignoring the fine details and practical commands of what Jesus says. It can be tempting to create an alternative discipleship, based not on Jesus and the sacraments but on your own strategy for winning certain political battles. But the point, of course, is that the Encyclicals are just meant
to be a picture of what society might look like if everyone put Jesus' words into practice in their own lives. In other words, Catholic social teaching is not meant to turn us into activists and lobbyists, but rather into personal agents - mustard seeds, if you will - of Jesus' alternative politics.