The Christian ethics of socio­economic development promoted by the Catholic Social Teaching

Abstract

This paper highlights the relationship between economic science and Christian moral in order to analyze the idea of socio­economic development promoted by the Catholic Social Teaching (CST). In the first period leading up to the Second Vatican Council (1891­1962), from Pope Leo XIII to Pope John XXIII, the idea of development was connected both to technical and industrial progress, and to the universal values of justice, charity, and truth, which national communities were asked to follow. During the Conciliar period (1962­1979), the concept of development assumes a social and economic dimension, and so it becomes one of the main pillars of Catholic Social Teaching, which introduces the earliest definition of integral human development. Ultimately, in the post­Conciliar phase (1979­2009) including Benedict XVI’s pontificate, the idea of integral human development reaches its maturity by incorporating the complexity of real­world economic interactions. Finally, this paper shows how the ethics bolstered by the Catholic Social Teaching is characterized by two distinct but complementary lines of thought: moral rules for both political action, and for socio­economic issues.

integral human development, personalist economics, non-neutrality of economic theory