The Truth in Full (Catholic Social Teaching), by Stephen P. White

I just finished spending two weeks studying the Church’s social teaching with a group of young men and women in Krakow, Poland. The students came from all over the world: predominantly the United States and Poland, but also Cameroon, the Philippines, Finland, Hungary, Ukraine, and Slovakia.

One of the biggest challenges in teaching students Catholic social teaching is helping them understand that the Church’s social teaching is more than a collection of moral exhortations and prohibitions, though it certainly includes both. As I always emphasize to my students, the Church’s social teaching is descriptive before it is prescriptive.

That is, if we want to understand what the Church says about what we owe to one another as persons, or how we ought to order our common life in service to the common good, we must first understand what it means to be a person and what it means to be part of a society, and what the Church means by the common good. …

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