Blackwell Reference Online

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The view that capitalism considered in isolation from a context of a humane community seems inevitably to shape people into greedy and insensitive human beings. While there has always been some reflection on the social and political implications of biblical teaching, within the last one hundred years there has developed a body of official Catholic Church teaching on social ethics known as Catholic Social Teaching. The insight of church teaching accepts the market economy but with a key qualification that the state intervene where essential to promote and protect human dignity. Most official church teachings are promulgated as pastoral letters of a national conference of bishops or as encyclicals, pastoral letters issued by the pope as the chief shepherd of the church. An encyclical's title is taken from the first two words in the Latin edition. At their best, church statements that reflect on and offer guidance to capitalist economies are attempts to be a moral force, ensuring that an acquisitive economy does not degenerate into an acquisitive society. For example, Pope Leo XIII in Rerun Novarum (1891) put the church squarely on the side of the workers in the struggle for recognition of labor unions. Monsignor John A. Ryan was most influential in Catholic circles, writing A Living Wage (1906) and Distributive Justice (1916). Ryan drafted a crucial document of the National ... log in or subscribe to read full text