Review article
The Social Teachings of the Church as tradition
Johan Verstraeten
; Teološki fakultet Katoličkog Sveučilišta u Leuvenu, Leuven, Francuska
Abstract
The social teachings of the Catholic Church find their expression primarily as a doctrine or an instruction of the Magisterium. It is necessary to acknowledge, however, that this teaching has in fact been nourished by the social tradition of the Church as a whole. The Second Vatican Council cautiously describes the social teaching of the Church as "scrutinizing the signs of the times" and "interpreting them in the light of the Gospel" (GS 4). Paul VI avoided the use of the expression "doctrine" while John Paul II reintroduced it, adding to its meaning a subtle distinction. The author expounds on what he considers to be the social teaching of the Church, insofar as it is in the tradition of the Church, and then proceeds to define the social Christian-Catholic tradition as being a narrative tradition by reason of its use of root-metaphors and allegory. The great treatises on social teachings do not function on the level of principle and theory, but rather as texts which, through biblical and other metaphors, shape our prereflexive understanding of social reality. Thus, in the encyclical Sollicitudo rei socialis several metaphors stand out, such as: social mechanism, sinful structures, the well-being of the political community, the brotherhood of all nations in Christ, the community as the soul of the Church.
The theoretical and narrative dimensions in the social tradition of the Church, when interwoven, beget a Church which unfolds into a community of witnesses, sometimes even heroic: a community in which the Gospel is continuously being fulfilled anew within the framework of the concrete social history of mankind.
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
1188
URI
Publication date:
3.3.2003.
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