Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church

The documents referred to here constitute the milestones of the path travelled by the Church's social doctrine from the time of Pope Leo XIII to our own day. This brief summary would become much longer if we considered all the interventions motivated, other than by a specific theme, by “the pastoral concern to present to the entire Christian community and to all men of good will the fundamental principles, universal criteria and guidelines suitable for suggesting basic choices and coherent practice for every concrete situation”^{194Congregation for Catholic Education, Guidelines for the Study and Teaching of the Church's Social Doctrine in the Formation of Priests, 27, Vatican Polyglot Press, Rome 1988, p. 33.}. In the formulation and teaching of this social doctrine, the Church has been, and continues to be, prompted not by theoretical motivation but by pastoral concerns. She is spurred on by the repercussions that social upheavals have on people, on multitudes of men and women, on human dignity itself, in contexts where “man painstakingly searches for a better world, without working with equal zeal for the betterment of his own spirit”^{195Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 4: AAS 58 (1966), 1028.}. For these reasons, this social doctrine has arisen and developed an “updated doctrinal ‘corpus' ... [that] builds up gradually, as the Church, in the fullness of the word revealed by Christ Jesus and with the assistance of the Holy Spirit (cf. Jn 14:16,26; 16:13-15), reads events as they unfold in the course of history”^{196John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, 1: AAS 80 (1988), 514; cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2422.}.