THE
P RTAL
February 2018
Page 9
Catholic Social Teaching
The first in a new series of articles by Fr Ashley Beck
I am grateful
to my old friend Ronald Crane for inviting me to write a series for T he P ortal about
Catholic Social Teaching. Many laypeople and even clergy don’t know much about this: quite often people
say it is ‘the Church’s best kept secret’ or ‘the Church’s best buried secret’, so it is good to be able to share
something about it with you. I hope I can show that many contemporary issues show how we can share the
insights of our faith with one another and with others.
There is another reason. Catholic
Social Teaching is the Church’s
reflection and teachings about the
nature of society and the moral
and political issues which society
faces, developing in a particular
way within the Catholic Church
all over the world: but at the same
time there has been an important
tradition of teaching about social
justice within Anglicanism, part
of the heritage or patrimony of
the Ordinariate – so this is part
of what you can bring as gifts to
the whole Catholic community in
this country. Therefore in these
articles alongside what I will be
writing about Catholic Social
Teaching I will try to make the
links with the Anglican tradition.
I also want to make a shameless ‘plug’. At St Mary’s
University we have just started a new postgraduate
programme in Catholic Social Teaching, the first
course dedicated to social teaching taught face-to-face
on offer anywhere in the UK or Ireland.
If you would like to find out more about the course,
please email me on [email protected].
What do we mean by ‘Catholic Social Teaching’? It’s
part of Catholic moral theology; the phrase describes
the Catholic Church’s moral teaching about society
and the world, in particular since 1891. That was when
Pope Leo XIII (of Apostolicae Curae fame) issued an
encyclical letter called Rerum Novarum addressing
the needs of industrial workers from the standpoint of
moral teaching.
This set off a series of letters by subsequent popes,
right down to Pope Francis in the present day and his
2015 letter on the care of creation, Laudato Si’. What
was ground-breaking about what Pope Leo did was
that it was the first time the Church at this level had
specifically addressed an issue of
this kind.
In another sense social teaching
didn’t start in 1891. Social
justice has been a big part of
the Christian narrative, clear in
the Jewish scriptures, the New
Testament, the early Church
Fathers and theologians like St
Thomas Aquinas. There is clear
continuity – ways in which our
contemporary social teaching,
like the rest of the Church’s
discourse about morality, speak to
all of us powerfully of God’s love
made real for us in the person of
Our Lord Jesus Christ and in the
life of his Body, the Church.
One final point in this introductory piece – properly
understood Catholic Social Teaching is exciting, and
it is also dynamite. It challenges so many of our own
prejudices and ways of thinking, and because of that
it can make many people, including a good many
Catholics, feel very threatened and angry. So fasten
your safety belts!
Fr Ashley Beck is Assistant Priest of Beckenham
in the Archdiocese of Southwark and Senior
Lecturer in Pastoral Ministry at St Mary’s
University, Twickenham.
He is Dean of Studies of the Diaconate
formation programme for most of the
dioceses in southern England and Wales,
including the Ordinar iate.
Trained for the priesthood at St Stephen’s
House, he was Assistant Curate of St John’s,
Walham Green (1985-1990) and Priest-in-
charge of St Matthew’s, Camberwell (1990-
1994).He became a Catholic in 1994 and was
ordained two years later.