As St. James writes in his epistle, faith must be accompanied by good works. To help Catholics act upon this obligation, the Church guides her believers to a wealth of teaching and experience, known collectively as Catholic social teaching.
In addition to providing a Catholic perspective to addressing the world’s social and economic issues, the Church’s social doctrine also has a practical application in the life of every believer. At its essence, Catholic social teaching provides a blueprint for how the faithful can live out the Gospel. It is how we put our faith into action.
To help re-introduce the Church’s social doctrine with Catholics — or perhaps share it for the first time — MCC has published a new edition of its Focus publication that walks through the seven themes within Catholic social teaching and invites readers to contemplate incorporating these principles into their lives as missionary disciples of Jesus Christ.
Beyond merely serving as an educational reference guide, it is a resource Catholics can take to prayer to examine the extent to which they, for example, recognize the dignity in every human person, including specifically the homeless, the undocumented immigrant, the unborn, and the otherwise poor and vulnerable among us.
Catholic social teaching is at the heart of MCC’s mission serving as the public policy voice for the Church in Michigan. The nine advocacy principles that make up MCC’s policy platform — known as A Blueprint for the Common Good — are grounded in the tenets of Catholic social teaching. By reading Focus, Catholics may better understand what animates the work and mission of the Michigan Catholic Conference.
While Catholic social teaching is important in any age, it has recently seen renewed interest from the Holy Father himself. Pope Leo XIV credited the choice of his papal name to the previous Pope Leo, who was perhaps best known as the author of Rerum Novarum, the defining document on Catholic social doctrine.
The current Holy Father, in noting that Rerum Novarum was written to address the social issues related to the Industrial Revolution at the time, said at the beginning of his pontificate, “in our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defence of human dignity, justice and labour.”
Catholic social teaching is more than a set of principles or the Catholic position on issues. It is a call to practice what we preach and to live our lives fully in accordance with the Gospel.
The Christian faith demands more than just lip service; it requires action. The principles of Catholic social teaching show us what that action looks like; they also help us to engage more deeply with Jesus’s instruction to “love thy neighbor.”
To learn more about Catholic social teaching and how it helps each of us to see Christ in others, particularly those in need or on the margins, please see the digital edition of Focus at micatholic.org/socialteaching or in print at your local parish.
The Word from Lansing is a regular column for Catholic news outlets provided by Michigan Catholic Conference, the official public policy voice of the Catholic Church in this state.
