Catholic Social Teaching, Part Six

The writer I rely on for the most solid presentation of the social teaching is Rodger Charles S. J. and this excerpt from the Action Institute’s book review of his major work (available online from England), "Christian Social Witness and Teaching: The Catholic Tradition from Genesis to Centesimus Annus", explains why his work is the definitive work in the field.

Book Review:
Christian Social Witness and Teaching:
The Catholic Tradition from Genesis to Centesimus Annus
Rodger Charles, S.J.
Leominster, England: Gracewing/Folwer Wright Boooks, 1998
Volume 1: 472 pp. + xiv
Volume 2: 407 pp. + xvii
Review by Raymond J. de Souza
Seminarian for the Archdiocese of Kingston, Ontario
Pontifical North American College, Rome

Commentators on Roman Catholic social teaching often say the tradition began in 1891 with Pope Leo XIII’s pioneering encyclical on the condition of workers, Rerum Novarum (“new things”). This contention is partially true, as witness Rodger Charles’s two volumes on the Catholic tradition of social doctrine, which uses a twofold division: the Old Testament to the late-nineteenth century and the modern period from Rerum Novarum to the present day. The main contribution of these volumes consists in showing that the Catholic tradition of social doctrine stretches back to the Book of Genesis, and that it develops in response to the Church’s lived experience. Both points are frequently neglected in treatments of Catholic social doctrine.

Charles’s contribution is accessible to lay readers, while remaining thorough and–more shall be said about this later–scrupulously fair-minded. A course on Catholic social teaching–which these volumes are intended to accompany–would be well-served by using them as principal textbooks. The author’s literary and rhetorical skill saves the study from being dull, for he manages to impart a great amount of historical detail without losing sight of overarching themes. Books on Catholic social doctrine are generally not page-turners, but Charles’s treatment demonstrates that they need not be boring.

Careful attention ought to be paid to the title, Christian Social Witness and Teaching. These volumes are a corrective to the tendency–pronounced among specialists in Catholic social doctrine whose focus typically centers on 1891 to the present–to see the Church’s social teaching as a mere intellectual exercise in which the principal task is the study of magisterial texts. Charles reminds us that the Church develops her social teaching not in the manner of a speculative seminar but as a witness to the concrete historical situations she faces. Rerum Novarum concerns developments that were new in its day, yet the same could be applied to the whole corpus of Catholic social doctrine. The Church first lives, then teaches. The historical content of these volumes provides ample testimony to this reality.

Rodger Charles, an Oxford Jesuit who has been teaching Catholic social doctrine for several decades, set himself an ambitious task in these volumes: nothing less than a thorough presentation of the development of the Church’s social doctrine from its beginning in Genesis until the present day. Convinced that the part cannot be separated from the whole, these volumes aim to provide a survey of a broad range, for Charles does not limit “the social question” to the concerns of economics alone but takes up the whole gamut of issues that touch upon the temporal order, including the historical development of Church-state relations and slavery. The result is a study that could have been titled, “The Church and the World: From the Beginning Until The Present Day.” To an admirable degree he succeeds in doing what could reasonably be expected of a thousand-page work.

Of the two volumes, the second covers material that will be quite familiar to students of the tradition of Catholic social teaching and presumably to readers of this journal. Charles divides the corpus of teaching since Rerum Novarum into various periods, usually determined by pontificate, although more recent decades are subdivided even further. He provides the context for each period by way of marvelously written historical sketches, which taken together provide a serviceable introduction to twentieth-century political and economic history. He can be disarmingly but devastatingly direct: “The majority of Germans, Catholics included, accepted Hitler with enthusiasm, though in a totalitarian state it is difficult to judge how genuine such enthusiasm was” (II, 122); or, “In France the intellectual scene had been set by left-wing intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre whose social influence was almost entirely negative …” (II, 190).

Summaries of the texts themselves follow, usually on a section by section basis, including plentiful quotations from the originals. Charles cautions that the temptation in presenting Catholic social doctrine is “that it is too easy for those presenting it, consciously or unconsciously, to superimpose their own social, political, and economic agenda on it” (I, xiv). Charles avoids that temptation altogether in his summaries, each of which is faithful to the original documents (usually papal encyclicals). While it is necessary to read the originals themselves in some important instances, non-specialists have no need to read, say, Benedict XV’s encyclical on peace, Ad Beatissimi–the Charles summary will more than suffice.