Catholic social teaching

Catholic social teaching (CST) is an area of Catholic doctrine which is concerned with human dignity and the common good in society. It addresses oppression, the role of the state, subsidiarity, social organization, social justice, and wealth distribution. CST's foundations are considered to have been laid by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical, Rerum novarum, of which interpretations gave rise to distributism (formulated by G. K. Chesterton), Catholic socialism (proposed by Andrew Collier) and Catholic communism, among others. Its roots can be traced to Catholic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo. CST is also derived from the Bible and cultures of the ancient Near East.

According to Pope John Paul II, the foundation of social justice "rests on the threefold cornerstones of human dignity, solidarity and subsidiarity". According to Pope Benedict XVI, its purpose "is simply to help purify reason and to contribute, here and now, to the acknowledgment and attainment of what is just ... [The church] has to play her part through rational argument and she has to reawaken the spiritual energy without which justice ... cannot prevail and prosper." Pope Francis, according to Cardinal Walter Kasper, made mercy "the key word of his pontificate... [while] Scholastic theology has neglected this topic and turned it into a mere subordinate theme of justice."

Catholic social teaching is critical of modern social and political ideologies of the left and of the right, such as liberalism, atheistic forms of socialism and communism, anarchism, atheism, fascism, capitalism, and Nazism, which have been condemned by several popes since the late nineteenth century. It has tried to strike a balance between respect for human liberty (including the right to private property and subsidiarity) and concern for society, including the weakest and poorest. It has distanced itself from capitalism, with John Paul II writing:

Catholic social doctrine is not a surrogate for capitalism. In fact, although decisively condemning "socialism", the church, since Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum, has always distanced itself from capitalistic ideology, holding it responsible for grave social injustices. In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI, for his part, used clear and strong words to stigmatize the international imperialism of money.

Catholic social doctrine is rooted in the social teachings of the New Testament, the Church Fathers, the Old Testament, and Hebrew scriptures. The church responded to historical conditions in medieval and early modern Europe with philosophical and theological teachings on social justice which considered the nature of humanity, society, economy, and politics. During the era of mass politics and industrialization, Catholic social teaching needed to account for "the social question": the social dislocation, economic suffering, and political turbulence which arose from modernization. Since the early 19th century, a number of Catholic thinkers responded to the revolutionary tide begun by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era. A new synthesis of Catholic natural law primarily influenced by the writings of Thomas Aquinas, combined with the new social sciences of politics and economics, was embraced by the Vatican by the middle of the century; however, it took several decades for this synthesis to become established in Catholic social teaching. Pope Leo XIII, in a series of encyclicals spanning 20 years, formalized the modern approach to Catholic social teaching which combines evangelical teachings on love with natural law and social-scientific arguments about what constitutes human prosperity. These principles have been consistently reiterated by later popes over the subsequent century and more.

The publication of Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum novarum, on 15 May 1891 began the development of a body of social teaching in the Catholic Church. It was written when the once-agrarian populations of Italy and western Europe were undergoing rapid urbanisation in newly industrialized cities, with many living in squalor and poverty. Similar trends developed in the Americas. Pius IX (Leo's predecessor) had seen the end of church control of the Papal States, and become isolated in the Vatican. Pius had railed against the unification of Italy during the Risorgimento, which consumed the last years of his pontificate, and lost the faith of the Romans, who voted to join the newly integrated Italy in 1870. Scholars have written that Leo, when he became pope without being temporal ruler of three million mainly-rural subjects, saw that the new industrial working class was the responsibility of the church; Rerum novarum was a response to the competition of communism, which analyzed in works such as Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto the social conditions facing the industrialized poor. Rerum novarum begins by saying that "some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class ... so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the labouring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself."

Leo wanted to reject the solutions offered by communism: "[T]hose who deny these rights [private ownership] do not perceive that they are defrauding man of what his own labour has produced." He declared a "most sacred law of nature" that humans have the right to private ownership, inheritable property, and providing for their children "all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently"; the "main tenet of socialism, community of goods, must be utterly rejected".

He disputed a central idea of communism: that class war was inevitable, and rich and poor were inexorably driven to conflict. Leo stressed the need for justice as central to religion, with the church the most powerful intermediary to achieve justice and peace. That justice relied on the equality of rich and poor, and extended to all citizens of a country. It went beyond the principle that "the interests of all, whether high or low, are equal", to include a demand that "public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes".