VATICAN CITY CNS — With the world facing challenges like climate change, wars, debates over migration and increasing job insecurity, the Catholic Church must provide moral guidance and support true dialogue, which includes listening to the poor, Pope Leo XIV said.
“On such important issues, the church’s social doctrine is called to provide insights that facilitate dialogue between science and conscience, and thus make an essential contribution to better understanding, hope and peace,” the Pope said May 17 as he met members of the Vatican’s Centesimus Annus Foundation.
The foundation, which studies and promotes the church’s social doctrine, is named after St. John Paul II’s 1991 social encyclical, which marked the centenary of Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking encyclical, “Rerum Novarum,” and the beginning of modern Catholic social teaching.
The new Pope, who was elected May 8, said he chose the name Leo “mainly” to honor Pope Leo XIII and his approach to responding to the social challenges of the day.
Catholic social teaching, the new Pope told foundation members, “seeks to encourage genuine engagement with social issues. It does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth, either in its analysis of problems or its proposal of concrete solutions.”
“Where social questions are concerned, knowing how best to approach them is more important than providing immediate responses to why things happen or how to deal with them,” Pope Leo said. “The aim is to learn how to confront problems, for these are always different, since every generation is new, and faces new challenges, dreams and questions.”
A lack of critical thinking and engagement in real dialogue, “which also can be found in ecclesial circles,” he said, is not helping anyone.
“There is so little dialogue around us; shouting often replaces it, not infrequently in the form of fake news and irrational arguments proposed by a few loud voices,” he said.
What is needed are reflection, study and “a commitment to encounter and listen to the poor, who are a treasure for the church and for humanity,” the Pope said. “Their viewpoints, though often disregarded, are vital if we are to see the world through God’s eyes.”
People living in poverty, “born and raised far from the centers of power should not merely be taught the church’s social doctrine; they should also be recognized as carrying it forward and putting it into practice,” Pope Leo said.
“Indviduals committed to the betterment of society, popular movements and the various Catholic workers’ groups are an expression of those existential peripheries where hope endures and springs anew,” he said. “I urge you to let the voice of the poor be heard.”
When most people hear the word “doctrine,” he said, they think of something unchanging and not open to dialogue.
“We need to make clear that the word ‘doctrine’ has another, more positive meaning, without which dialogue itself would be meaningless,” he said. “‘Doctrine’ can be a synonym of ‘science,’ ‘discipline’ and ‘knowledge.'”
“Understood in this way, doctrine appears as the product of research, and hence of hypotheses, discussions, progress and setbacks, all aimed at conveying a reliable, organized and systematic body of knowledge about a given issue,” the Pope said.
“‘Indoctrination’ is immoral,” Pope Leo said. “It stifles critical judgment and undermines the sacred freedom of respect for conscience, even if erroneous.”
Indoctrination “resists new notions and rejects movement, change or the evolution of ideas in the face of new problems,” he said. “‘Doctrine,’ on the other hand, as a serious, serene and rigorous discourse, aims to teach us primarily how to approach problems and, even more importantly, how to approach people.”
“It also helps us to make prudential judgments when confronted with challenges,” Pope Leo said. “Seriousness, rigor and serenity are what we must learn from every doctrine, including the church’s social doctrine.”
Pope Leo asked the foundation members to scrutinize the social challenges around them, study possible solutions and contribute “to the development of the church’s social doctrine in this age of significant social changes, listening to everyone and engaging in dialogue with all.”
“In our day,” he said, “there is a widespread thirst for justice, a desire for authentic fatherhood and motherhood, a profound longing for spirituality, especially among young people and the marginalized, who do not always find effective means of making their needs known. There is a growing demand for the church’s social doctrine, to which we need to respond.”
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