Catholic Social Teaching and Culture

A: Failing this we are warned that “cultures can no longer define themselves within a nature that transcends them, and man ends up being reduced to a cultural statistic. When this happens, humanity runs new risks of enslavement and manipulation.” (Pope Benedict XVI, 26)

“In many countries globalization has meant a hastened deterioration of their own cultural roots and the invasion of ways of thinking and acting proper to other cultures which are economically advanced but ethically debilitated.” (Pope Francis, 62)

Perhaps the greatest danger is “human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded. We have created a ‘throw away’ culture which is now spreading…The excluded are not the ‘exploited’ but the outcast, the ‘leftovers’.” (Pope Francis, 53) 

“It is a well-known fact that…millions of people are still suffering and dying of starvation” (Pope Francis, 2017 World Food Day Address to Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1) while our culture deadens us to the problem. 

“[A] globalization of indifference has developed. Almost without being aware of it, we end up being incapable of feeling compassion at the outcry of the poor, weeping for other people’s pain, and feeling a need to help them, as though all this were someone else’s responsibility and not our own.” (Pope Francis, 2017 World Food Day Address to Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1)

A: Religion is at the foundation of culture.  Pope St. John Paul II points out that at the heart of culture lay morality and at the heart morality lay religion. And by insisting on a vibrant, publicly assertive moral-cultural order, he throws down a gauntlet to the modern world and what he calls “skeptical relativism” and what Pope Benedict XVI has called the “Dictatorship of Relativism” which rejects religion in the public square. This situation “in the end, is nothing less than a threat to genuine human freedom, which only matures in generosity and fidelity to the truth.” (Pope Benedict XVI, Response to Questions Posed by US Bishops, 16 April 08, Washington, DC)

Without religion society creates an illusion that God does not exist or that God can be restricted to the realm of purely private affairs. Catholic social teaching insists that Christians cannot accept that attitude. Why? Because “Freedom…demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one’s deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate.” (Pope Benedict XVI, White House Welcoming Ceremony, April 16, 2008, Washington, DC) “Fidelity to the truth…alone is the guarantee of freedom”. (Pope Benedict XVI, 9)

Catholic social teaching makes it clear that the health of a culture demands that religious values be part of the democratic debate. Absent that, “public life is sapped of its motivation and politics takes on a domineering and aggressive character. Human rights risk being ignored”. (Pope Benedict XVI, 56)