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Themes and Theologies in Catholic Social Teaching over Fifty Years
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
This article has three sections, covering three themes in CST. In the first I sketch out the development of an integral humanistic approach and then go on to suggest that the ‘flip’ side of this is an unduly anthropocentric stance on ecological issues by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict. In the second section I give an account of official Catholic teaching on justice for women and their equality with men. I suggest that over the past fifty years there have been major advances on this issue. But John Paul's concept of the complementarity of women and men raises great difficulties—particularly insofar as it is used as one of the main justifications for Vatican insistence that the Church does not have the authority to ordain women. In the third section I examine Vatican views on the appropriate means which Church authorities and the Church membership should use in working to promote justice. Should Church leaders limit themselves to clarifying the nature of authentic development, pointing out various forms of injustice, calling for change, and suggesting an alternative ‘economy of communion’? May they ever go further than such ‘education of consciences’, by encouraging the poor to struggle for justice, and by themselves confronting oppressive governments?
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- Copyright © 2012 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2012 The Dominican Council. Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA
References
1 In this broad survey of various topics in Catholic social teaching, I can only look quite briefly at some of the documents in which ecological issues are treated. For a more detailed account see ‘Joining in the Dance: Catholic Social Teaching and Ecology’ by Celia Deane-Drummond, elsewhere in this issue.
2 See Dorr, Donal, The Social Justice Agenda: Justice, Ecology, Power and the Church, (Orbis Books 1991) pp. 73–4Google Scholar.
3 Deane-Drummond, who has generously shown me the text of her article, reads this and similar passages in a more benign way, seeing the pope's account of ‘human ecology’ as particularly valuable. It would be inappropriate for me to respond to this in the present article. I propose to treat this whole topic in more detail in the greatly expanded new edition of my book Option for the Poor which is to be published by Orbis Books this year [2012].
4 http://tisk.cirkev.cz/en/vatican/brazilian-fraternity-campaign-this-year-about-defence-of-life/ (accessed 14 June 2011); cf. Address to ambassadors from six African countries: ‘human ecology is an imperative’http://www.theafricanews.com/news-italy/2674-pope-qhuman-ecology-is-an-imperative.html (accessed 14 June 2011).
5 Panksepp, Jaak, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, New York (Oxford University Press: 1998) p. 232Google Scholar.
6 Tina Beattie, ‘Feminism, Vatican Style’, The Tablet, 7 August 2004. On page 309 of her book New Catholic Feminism, Beattie suggests that there are resources within the Catholic tradition for ‘a maternal priesthood alongside the masculine priesthood’.
7 See John Allen's column in NCR website of 9 May 2011.
8 I hope to write more extensively about Deus caritas est in the forthcoming expanded edition of my book Option for the Poor.