The challenge of applying Catholic social teaching

Christ told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world—which, he had prophesied, was doomed to end in catastrophe.

He lived without worldly ties: without a job, wife, children, steady source of income, or fixed place of residence. He recommended the same to others, and commented on the narrowness of the way that leads to life. And he called Satan “the prince of this world.”

So it seems clear that Christianity isn’t primarily social or political, and it’s not surprising that clergy and religious are normally expected to refrain from marital, economic, and political involvements. Notwithstanding the universal call to holiness, there haven’t been many Catholics canonized for the way they carried on such things.

On the other hand, Christ gave us the Golden Rule, and expected us to follow ordinary moral precepts such as the Ten Commandments. More basically, God created the world and called it good, and man is social, so there should be some way of living a Christian life while participating in ordinary social functions.

So the Church praises the religious life based on poverty, chastity, and obedience, but also the lay life, in which the faithful live much like other people. And she tells lay Catholics that their manner of living should bring the Gospel into ordinary secular affairs and so help sanctify the world. So it’s evident that Christianity does have a social and political aspect.

But how does that work? If Satan is the prince of this world, making ordinary contributions to its life seems to require some sort of cooperation with him. Ordinary and necessary social functions include family and economic life, which are intertwined with sexual bonds and acquisitiveness, and politics, which involves willingness to use brute physical force including war. All these things routinely lead us astray.

The Holy Father has linked the last of them—war—to a “demonic cycle of evil,” and he has a point. As Thomas Hobbes said, the two cardinal virtues in war are force and fraud. And thoroughly just wars are hard to find: the Allied cause in the Second World War was more just than most, but the demand for unconditional surrender and mass bombing of cities was less so.

Even so, the Church has praised particular wars as just, and canonized Saint Louis and Saint Joan. How do we sort it out?

Catholic social teaching is intended to tell us, but it doesn’t tell us very clearly. Its main features seem to be an emphasis on prudence, as well as on legitimate authority, man as a social being, the need for mutual assistance, devolution of responsibility, respect for every person, and the principle that there are intrinsically evil acts that can’t be done no matter how necessary they seem.

All these raise difficulties. As someone who is neither a philosopher nor a theologian, it is not clear to me how that last principle is consistent with the practical possibility of a just war. Intentionally killing people, who are often morally innocent, to keep them from contributing to grave evils—perhaps only indirectly or prospectively—looks very much like doing evil that good may result. It may sometimes be necessary, but we are told that necessity is no excuse.

Perhaps that consideration was behind the attempt of the Fourth Lateran Council to ban military use of the bow and arrow against Christians. Arrows were literally the first ballistic missiles, and routinely kill soldiers who are too far away to attack anyone, simply because they support or are in league with the attackers and may become attackers themselves.

There are also difficulties in applying other aspects of Catholic social teaching. Whatever the ultimate reality or proper formulation, for us here and now mutual assistance can easily conflict practically with giving people serious responsibilities of their own. What should the ant in the fable do if he is initially helpful but the grasshopper always has an excuse for doing the same thing year after year?

And it can be hard or impossible to reconcile the supreme dignity of the individual with the practical need to rule effectively, when information and choices are limited, over people who are often stupid, irrational, dishonest, and even downright evil. The situation in El Salvador, where Bukele’s anti-crime measures have cut corners but greatly improved life for almost everyone, seems to provide an example.

We speak of war and peace, and apply different rules to them, but how should we classify the situation in El Salvador when Bukele took office? The declaration of a “state of exception” seems to put it halfway between the two—which, at least from a distance, seems reasonable. Or how should we classify the relation between Iran and Israel, along with its ally the United States, before February 28? “Peace” seems the wrong term, when the destruction of Israel, supported by proxy wars, cyberattacks, assassinations, and covert operations, has been fundamental Iranian policy for decades.

But the state of exception in El Salvador has gone on for more than four years. And the seemingly permanent state of war in the Middle East, with its indirect and unconventional tactics and blurring of the distinction between combatants and non-combatants, undermines the distinction between war and peace. Going farther afield, the rise of concepts like “institutional violence,” and the identification of law with policy that now pervades discussions of judicial decisions, blur the distinction between lawfulness and the reign of force.

It appears that social order on a scale larger than natural connections like the family is contingent and fragile, and the Hobbesian war of all against all, which abolishes distinctions like law and violence, war and peace, is closer than we like to think.

None of these difficulties can be wished away. The basic problem, it seems, is that politics, which necessarily involve decisions that are debatable and the threat or use of deadly force, is mostly a matter of prudence in situations that are often ungovernable. As such, it slides easily into the plea of necessity, which Milton rightly called “the tyrant’s plea” but sometimes seems unavoidable. And it essentially depends on predictions of the future and understandings of how the world works, which are notoriously uncertain and variable.

The Pope, for example, attributes extreme poverty to unequal distribution of wealth. He says the problem is getting worse, but it’s solvable, and the solution is a more equitable distribution—apparently (he suggests no alternative) to be achieved through state action and thus force or the threat of force. [https://www.ansa.it/english/news/vatican/2026/04/10/pope-blasts-injustice-of-wealth-in-hands-of-few-calls-for-fairer-distribution_674e26e7-d772-429f-88d7-5502ede146aa.html] He has also tied war to business and profit, and especially to the arms trade, speaking of the “money-making that is behind every war.” [https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-07/pope-condemns-arms-trade-as-he-returns-to-vatican.html]

His critics note the radical global decline in extreme poverty in recent decades [https://ourworldindata.org/poverty], and attribute that development to greater economic freedom rather than the redistributive measures used by socialist and communist countries. And they see no reason to attribute the Ukraine war, the chronic conflict in the Middle East, the proxy wars of the Cold War period, or the two world wars to the machinations of arms dealers or other business interests.

The Pope and his critics evidently agree that war and extreme poverty are bad. Where they differ is on how such things come about and how they can best be mitigated and made more rare. The critics make points that are at least reasonable. Under such circumstances, claiming the Pope is simply preaching the gospel seems out of place.

All in all, it seems that Catholic Social Teaching can’t be viewed as a system of clear doctrine that readily provides usable answers. It seems rather a matter of prudence and natural reason oriented toward human well-being, with nothing specifically Catholic or Christian about it. Otherwise, why present it as acceptable to non-Christians? As such, it can’t easily demand heroic virtue—like the absolute exclusion of the plea of necessity—that can easily jeopardize the continued existence of societies espousing it.

So it mostly seems useful as a way of organizing our thoughts and making productive debate possible. It is therefore helpful to those who want to navigate the uncertainties of political and social life as intelligently and cooperatively as possible. So they should appeal to it, but not claim it proves much without regard to circumstances and assumptions about how the world works that are rationally contestable.

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