Distinctive traits of the Roman. Catholic social doctrine What exactly does it mean to consider social doctrine as Roman Catholic? In answering this question we concretely start to analyse social teaching’s content, its domain (‘social’) and its nature (‘doctrine’). ‘Social doctrine’ is composed of two words. The ‘social’ part of it indicates that the Roman Catholic Church wants to deal here not just with specific matters of faith, such as the sacraments or the liturgy, but with issues concerning, for instance, inequalities in the distribution of wealth, labour rights and human dignity. This does not mean that the RCC treats such topics without what it considers the inspiration of the Holy Spirit or without the enlightenment of its faith. It just means that a great part in comprehending and studying such social objects is strictly related to those fields of human knowledge that specifically treat them, as economy, sociology, and humanities in general. Regarding these considerations, and to frame correctly social teaching’s domain, it is worthy reflecting from the beginning that […] the Church’s social doctrine ‘belongs to the field, not of ideology, but of theology and particularly of moral theology’ (XXXX XXXX XX, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. 41, AAS 80, 1988. 571). It cannot be defined according to socio- economic parameters. It is not an ideological or pragmatic system intended to define and generate economic, political and social relationships, but is a category unto itself. It is ‘the accurate formulation of the results of a careful reflection on the complex realities of human existence, in society and in the international order, in the light of faith and of the Church’s tradition. Its main aim is to interpret these realities, determining their conformity with or divergence from the lines of the Gospel teaching on man and his vocation, a vocation which is at once earthly and transcendent; its aim is thus to guide Christian behaviour’ (Sollicitudo, 41).43 As we have now seen above, Roman Catholic ‘social’ doctrine is defined as ‘a category unto itself’. This is posing a clear separation between scope and methodology, in the development of social doctrine, compared to the development of social sciences and social thought independent of Roman Catholic theology. Social thought comes from a theological ground, namely the interpretation of the Gospel. And clearly this is a different ground from, for example, from that of an economic or social theory. But social thought claims to share with ot...
