Britain Ready for Catholic Moment: Catholic Social Teaching

An interesting article in the latest Catholic Herald that speaks about Catholic Social Teaching and the forthcoming encyclical on this topic by Pope Benedict XVI. Enjoy!

Pope John Paul II summarised the century of Catholic social teaching after Leo XIII in Centesimus Annus just after the fall of Communism (which he helped to bring about).

He wrote: "A person who is deprived of something he can call 'his own', and of the possibility of earning a living through his own initiative, comes to depend on the social machine and on those who control it." But man was not made for the machine, as the Terminator movies and The Matrix illustrate. There is a universal need to build a home and a family, and this implies the right to own property. But this also implies that a way has to be found to distribute productive property and wealth widely throughout society, and to give people more control over their own lives.

The Church's wisdom seems more attractive to people today than ever before. This may be a genuinely "Catholic moment" for our society, when the economic and environmental crisis, combined with the enormous strains caused by demographic shifts and immigration, have already convinced many of us that the status quo is doomed. The world is changing, and the Church is fast emerging as the most credible source of alternative political and economic ideas. To reflect this growing popular interest the Catholic Truth Society has launched a new series of booklets on Catholic social teaching (beginning with Edward Hadas on the credit crunch and Thomas Rourke on democracy and tyranny) and when the new encyclical appears there will no doubt be a flood of publications to help people understand and apply it in their own lives.

There is only one problem. Catholic social teaching - sensible as it is (and it is a lot more sensible than anything else on offer) - doesn't work. Or rather, it won't work unless we buy the rest of the package. We can't save ourselves, as St Paul reminds the Romans: "The evil I do not want is what I do" (Rm 7:19). Politicians may raid the Vatican website for new ideas, but if they apply them in the same old way, in the same old worldly spirit, they will have gone on making the same old mistakes, and failing to correct them.