Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church

Aware of the power of Christianity to renew even cultural and social realities^{1105Cf. Congregation for the Clergy, General Directory for Catechesis, 18, Libreria Editrice Vaticana, Vatican City 1997, pp. 21-22.}, the Church offers the contribution of her teaching to the building up of the human community by bringing out the social significance of the Gospel^{1106Cf. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris Missio, 11: AAS 83 (1991), 259-260.}. At the end of the nineteenth century, the Church's Magisterium systematically addressed the pressing social questions of the time, creating “a lasting paradigm for the Church. The Church, in fact, has something to say about specific human situations, individual, and communal, national and international. She formulates a genuine doctrine for these situations, a corpus which enables her to analyze social realities, to make judgments about them and to indicate directions to be taken for the just resolution of the problems involved”^{1107John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 5: AAS 83 (1991), 799.}. The intervention of Pope Leo XIII in the social and political reality of his time with the Encyclical Rerum Novarum “gave the Church ‘citizenship status' as it were, amid the changing realities of public life, and this standing would be more fully confirmed later on”^{1108John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 5: AAS 83 (1991), 799.}.

In her social doctrine the Church offers above all an integral vision of man and a complete understanding of his personal and social dimensions. Christian anthropology reveals the inviolable dignity of every person and places the realities of work, economics and politics into an original perspective that sheds light on authentic human values while at the same time inspiring and sustaining the task of Christian witness in the varied areas of personal, cultural and social life. Thanks to the “first fruits of the Spirit” (Rom 8:23), Christians become “capable of discharging the new law of love (cf. Rom 8:1-11). Through this Spirit, who is ‘the pledge of our inheritance' (Eph 1:14), the whole man is renewed from within, even to the achievement of ‘the redemption of the body' (Rom 8:23)”.^{1109Second Vatican Ecumenical Council, Pastoral Constitution Gaudium et Spes, 22: AAS 58 (1966), 1043.} In this sense the Church's social doctrine shows how the moral basis of all social action consists in the human development of the person and identifies the norm for social action corresponding to humanity's true good and as efforts aimed at creating the conditions that will allow every person to satisfy his integral vocation.

This Christian anthropology gives life to and supports the pastoral task of inculturation of the faith, which aims at an interior renewal, through the power of the Gospel, of modern man's criteria of judgment, the values underlying his decisions, the way he thinks and the models after which his life is patterned. “Through inculturation the Church, for her part, becomes a more intelligible sign of what she is and a more effective instrument of mission”^{1110John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris Missio, 52: AAS 83 (1991), 300; cf. Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Nuntiandi, 20: AAS 68 (1976), 18-19.}. The contemporary world is marked by a rift between the Gospel and culture, by a secularized vision of salvation that tends to reduce even Christianity to “merely human wisdom, a pseudo- science of well-being”^{1111John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Redemptoris Missio, 11: AAS 83 (1991), 259-260.}. The Church is aware that she must take “a giant step forward in her evangelization effort, and enter into a new stage of history in her missionary dynamism”^{1112John Paul II, Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici, 35: AAS 81 (1989), 458.}. The Church's social doctrine is situated within this pastoral vision: “The ‘new evangelization', which the modern world urgently needs, ... must include among its essential elements a proclamation of the Church's social doctrine”^{1113John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Centesimus Annus, 5: AAS 83 (1991), 800.}.