The social teaching of the Church as a living tradition 100 years after Rerum Novarum

Abstract

Catholic social doctrine is often said to be just a logically coherent system, which started to develop with the first social encyclical Rerum Novarum of Pope Leo XIII in 1891 and which has been based, since then, on the several papal documents dealing with social problems in politics and economics. But in such a statement there is little consideration of the fact that Rerum Novarum already was a synthesis of different currents of Christian social questioning and reflecting on different cultural backgrounds, different historical and political experiences and also on different philosophical traditions. Catholic social doctrine is - according to the German scholar H.J. Wallraff - a "network of open sentences" (ein Gefuge offener Satze) rather than a closed system.