UNCC Essay: Exploring Catholic Social Thought Ideologies and Impact

This essay provides an overview of Catholic Social Thought (CST), emphasizing its core principles and their impact on individuals and society. It begins by defining CST as a set of Catholic principles focusing on human dignity and communal welfare, contrasting it with ideologies like capitalism and fascism. The essay then delves into nine key principles of CST, including the dignity of the human person, subsidiarity, the common good, preferential option for the poor, rights and responsibilities, financial impartiality, stewardship, promotion of peace, and global solidarity. Each principle is explained with its implications for individual actions and societal structures. The essay argues that the principles are interconnected and essential for creating a just society where human beings recognize their dignity and rights within the community. The essay concludes by emphasizing the interconnectedness of individual and societal well-being based on CST principles.

UNCC
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Catholic Social Thoughts
Catholic Social Thoughts are the Catholic principles that emphasis on the subjects of human
dignity and communal welfare. The thoughts discourse domination, the character of the public,
subsidiarity, communal society, anxiety for communal fairness, matters of prosperity scattering.
Its grounds are extensively measured to have been set by Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical
message Rerum novarum, which encouraged commercial dispenses, condemned mutually private
enterprise and public ownership. The social teaching of the Catholics is distinctive in its
consistent critiques of current communal and political ideologies in which the aspects of
capitalism, Nazism, feminism, fascism are condemned.
This essay will demonstrate the ideologies of CST in relative to the self and community.
It will explain the concepts which will describe that self and community are interconnected.
The CST includes all the aspects of life namely, economic, political, personal and spiritual. It
emphasis on putting the human dignity at the centre and it is the holistic approach for the
development grounded on the philosophies of CST, which is described as authentic development
by Pope Paul VI. Here are the nine ideologies of CST:
Dignity of the Human person
This principle involves the responsibilities and obligations that we owe to other
individuals. We must understand that every human being is a holy formation of god and this
specific cannot be acknowledged or lost. The society in which we live in must provide the same
dignity and respect to all the individuals despite their dissimilar conditions such as poverty,
inequality and repressions(Teixeira, 2017). According to Kath Boyle, if an individual lost his or
her human dignity, the dignity of society will also be lost.
Subsidiarity
This principle under the CST is the notion that any decision made about the specific community
or society, must enhance their contribution in the discussions. This principle states that every
individual has the permission to partake in the decisions that influence their lives(Wright, 2017).
Subsidiarity and participation needs the decision is prepared by the person’s closet and is mostly
concerned by the problems and apprehensions of the society.
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Common Good and the Community
The people are mutually blessed and communal. We understand our self-respect and privileges in
bond with other individuals, in public(Wright, 2017). Humans cultivate and attain
accomplishment in communal. The dignity of human beings could only be comprehended and
sheltered in situation of relations with the broader humanity.
In what way we establish our civilization — in terms of money matters and government,
in rule and strategy — in a straight line disturbs human self-respect and the capability of persons
to rise in public. The responsibility to “love our neighbour” has a separate measurement, but it
needs a wider societal promise(Wright, 2017). Everybody has an accountability to donate to the
worthy of the entire humanity, to the joint good.
Preferential Option for the Poor and the Vulnerable
The ethical check of a civilization is in what way it considers its maximum helpless associates.
The deprived have the utmost crucial ethical privilege on the integrity of the state. We are
baptized to gaze at communal strategy conclusions in expressions of in what way they disturb the
deprived(Wright, 2017). The “option for the poor,” is not a confrontational saying that mines
one set or division in contradiction of another. Relatively it shapes that the deficiency and
helplessness of the underprivileged injuries the entire public.
The selection for the deprived people is a vital portion of civilization’s strength to attain
the shared moral(O’Sullivan, 2017). A well public can be attained simply if its associates give
different consideration to persons with exceptional requirements, to persons who are deprived
and on the limits of civilization.
Rights and Responsibilities
The dignity or the self-respect of the individuals can be sheltered and a vigorous society can be
attained if social moralities are sheltered and accountabilities are encountered. Every human
being has a central entitlement to lifetime and permission to those possessions obligatory for
social politeness – beginning with foodstuff, accommodation and apparel, service, wellbeing,
and teaching(Nicholas, 2015). Resembling to these privileges are responsibilities and duties — to
other human beings, to our relatives and to the greater civilization.
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Financial Impartiality
The wealth must assist individuals, not the added system around. All workforces require a merit
to fruitful effort, to attired and fair pays and to harmless working circumstances(Wright, 2017).
They also possess essential privilege to form and join unions. Persons have a merit to financial
inventiveness and reserved possessions, but these privileges have restrictions(Sullivan, 2017).
No one is permissible to accumulate extreme prosperity when other human’s absence the simple
provisions of lifetime.
Catholic thoughts compete against communist and statist financial methods. But it too
discards the idea that a permitted marketplace automatically creates fairness. Distributive
fairness, for instance, can’t be attained by trusting completely on unrestricted marketplace
powers. Rivalry and permitted marketplaces are valuable rudiments of financial schemes(Melé,
2015). On the other hand, marketplaces need to be preserved in restrictions, as there are
numerous requirements and properties that can’t be pleased by the marketplace scheme. It is the
undertaking of the national and of all civilization to interfere and confirm that these requirements
are encountered.
Stewardship
The belongings of the world are favours from God, and they are envisioned by God for the
advantage of everybody. There is a “social mortgage” which monitors our own usage of the
sphere’s properties, and we incur accountability to upkeep for the stated properties as
representatives, not as measly customers and workers(Massaro, 2015). In what way we delight
the atmosphere is an amount of our stewardship, a symbol of our deference for the God.
Promotion of Peace and Disarmament
A catholic thought endorses harmony as a positive, action- familiarized notion. In the arguments
of Pope John Paul II, “Peace is not just the absence of war. It involves mutual respect and
confidence between peoples and nations. It involves collaboration and binding agreements.”
There is near connection in Catholic thoughts amongst harmony and fairness(Johnston, 2014).
Harmony is the fruitlet of fairness and is reliant on correct command amongst humans.
Global Solidarity and Development
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Our duties to one other are cross nationwide, ethnic, financial and philosophical variances. We
are baptized to labour internationally for fairness. Reliable expansion need to be complete human
growth. It must value and endorse individual, communal, financial, and party-political rights,
comprising the privileges of states and of inhabits(Cavanagh, David & Hendry, 2013). It needs to
evade the radicals of under-development on the one hand, and “super development” on the other.
Accruing material properties and practical possessions will be insufficient and humiliating if in
attendance is no esteem for the ethical, national and mystical magnitudes of the individual.
From the above mentioned principles of CST, it can be deprived that the human beings
are both sacred and social. People must realise their own dignity and privileges on the basis of
others in a society. As per the statement of Saint Paul, "We are one body: when one suffers, we
all suffer." It clearly describes that if an individual in a society suffers, the whole society
suffers(Cavanagh, David & Hendry, 2013). People must understand that all human beings are
one family and interrelated to each other with terms of principles and ethics. The approach of the
individuals towards the society in terms of monetary terms and the politics directly has its effects
on the self-respect and dignity of the individuals to enhance in a community.
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References
Cavanagh, G. F., David, J. M., & Hendry, S. J. (2013). Using Principles of Catholic Social
Thought to Evaluate Business Activities.
Johnston, L. (2014). Catholic Social Thought. Proceedings of the Catholic Theological Society of
America, 69.
Massaro, T. (2015). Living justice: Catholic social teaching in action. Rowman & Littlefield.
Melé, D. (2015). Virtues, values, and principles in Catholic social teaching. In Handbook of
Virtue Ethics in Business and Management (pp. 1-13). Springer Netherlands.
Nicholas, J. L. (2015). The Common Good, Rights, and Catholic Social Thought: Prolegomena
to Any Future Account of Common Goods. Solidarity: The Journal of Catholic Social
Thought and Secular Ethics, 5(1), 4.
O’Sullivan, J. P. (2017). Reinhold Niebuhr and Catholic Social Teaching on ‘Why Nations Fail’:
Constructing a Common Christian Ethical Analysis of a New Theory of Political
Economy. International Journal of Public Theology, 11(2), 141-162.
Sullivan, S. C. (2017). Catholic Social Teaching: Principles and Applications.
Teixeira, P. (2017). From Catholic Social Thought to Catholic Economics and Back: António
Almodovar’s interest into an unexpected subject. Iberian Journal of the History of
Economic Thought, 4(1), 21-23.
Wright, K. S. (2017). The principles of Catholic social teaching: A guide for decision making
from daily clinical encounters to national policy-making. The Linacre Quarterly, 84(1),
10-22.
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