Culture Quotes from Catholic Social Teaching You Need to Know
by CAPP-USA
Culture quotes from Catholic social teaching.
Ten Quotes about Culture
“Culture” refers to the shared values, beliefs, customs, behaviors, and practices of a group of people, which are passed down from generation to generation. It shapes how individuals in a society think, communicate, and interact with each other.
Culture encompasses a wide range of aspects, including language, religion, traditions, art, food, music, social norms, what is right and wrong, and even ways of perceiving the world.
Catholic social teaching identifies three structures of society politics, economics, and culture, of which culture is the most important.
Pope St. John Paul II reconfigured the framework of Catholic social teaching to reflect this fact (Centesimus Annus), emphasizing the need to maintain a vibrant and critical interaction among all three – economics, politics, and culture.
- “All human activity takes place within a culture and interacts with culture.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 51)
- Religion is at the foundation of culture. 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)
- “We should recognize how in a culture where each person wants to be bearer of his or her own subjective truth, it becomes difficult for citizens to devise a common plan which transcends individual gain and personal ambitions.” (Pope Francis, 62)
- “Man remains above all a being who seeks the truth and strives to live in that truth…From this…the culture of a nation derives its character.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 51)
- “At the heart of every culture lies the attitude man takes to the greatest mystery: the mystery of God. Different cultures are basically different ways of facing the question of the meaning of personal existence.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 24)
- “Man is understood in a more complete way when he is situated within the sphere of culture through his language, history, and the position he takes towards the fundamental events of life, such as birth, love, work and death.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 24)
- “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)
- “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)
- “Development must not be understood solely in economic terms, but in a way that is fully human.” (Pope St. John Paul II, 29)
- If we fail to evangelize the truth, “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)
