What can be made of Catholic Social Teaching (CST) nowadays? Its principles and themes (whether defined as seven or ten) are regularly taught (including by one of authors of this introduction) in undergraduate classrooms as a means to showcase that the Catholic Church has something to say about the social realm beyond abortion and euthanasia. Scholars publish articles and books that put CST’s principles in relation to economics, war, conflict, just peace, bioethics, the environment, abortion, universities, and this is just a sampling of topics. Yet, when these principles are attempted to be put into practice at the grassroots, we see how they can be mobilized by those in power to disarm grassroots efforts.
Let us take the Fall 2025 letter from Loyola Marymount University’s Board of Trustees chair Paul Viviano as a primary example of the conundrum of conflicting mobilizing of CST’s principles. In the school’s decision to not recognize the non-tenure track union under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), Viviano cites a constitutionally protected religious exemption and a need to address faculty concerns directly. While the religious exemption is “protected” by the US Constitution, an exception that many Catholic colleges are now exploiting, the need to engage directly with the employer falls under the purview of CST. According to the Board of LMU,
Catholic Social Teaching affirms the dignity of work and workers’ rights while also calling leaders to safeguard the common good. For LMU, that means addressing concerns through direct dialogue and shared governance, rather than through third-party intermediaries who may not share the university’s mission or student-centered focus. This approach best advances progress and mutual responsibility for student success.
Responses from the union, stakeholders, and faculty all criticized both uses of religious exemption language, as well as the reliance on Catholic Social Teaching to make such a claim. In a letter from the LMU’s theological studies department, concerned faculty write, “To interpret the common good as a justification for such strategy of ‘small sacrifices’ is a gross ‘category mistake,’ clear to anyone endowed with minimal ethical sensibility. That LMU would pass over obvious requirements of fairness and, even worse, do so in the name of a religious exemption that appeals to the common good, throws into relief the hypocrisy of hiding what is truly at stake behind the veil of religiously based categories.” These faculty worries reveal this key fault: the principles meant to empower society’s marginalized and workers on CST’s authority can be used to shield power, enforce inequities, and continue stratification.
The ability to mobilize the terms of CST against those seeking justice may not be surprising. The roots of the principles of CST are found within magisterial documents that presuppose the necessity and efficiency of the labor-capital relationship. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (1891), accepted as CST’s founding document, is in its opening paragraphs a rabid attack on the socialist project, considered to be “against nature.” Later paragraphs articulate, according to a deontological reading of natural law, the proper obligations between owners and employees that might achieve a common destination of goods.
In other words, CST attempts to identify what makes a moral owner and what makes a moral employee. It might include the right to a union and to organize. It might include the right to a livelihood to raise a (Catholic) family. It might include the right to own a piece of the earth that CST defines as God’s creation, or at least not hoard property for one’s own benefit. Nevertheless, the system that attempts to organize these moral principles still flows through capital while seeking ecclesial validity.
The goals of this symposium are not to resolve the conundrums of using the principle-based moral methodologies of CST. Instead, the essays gathered here seek to critically assess the content and form of Catholic Social Teaching and envision what a catholic political theological engagement might look like beyond an emboldening by magisterial teachings, instead seeking movements, mystics, and people on the margins to exemplify what “catholic” could contribute to larger conversations on political theology.
The initial ideas and words for this symposium emerged from the Political Theology Network Conference 2025 that took place in Nashville, TN. Our conversations were plentiful and included people from various Christian denominations and from several countries The academic backgrounds of our participants were not only tried and true theologians, but also anthropologists, cultural theorists, historians, and community organizers. It was a space where the ideas of CST could be examined democratically and thought through together. It is our hope that the contributions to this roundtable can allow both for a critical examination of how concepts relating to CST can be mobilized against injustice, and for the incarnational elaboration of a truly liberatory catholic political engagement rooted in the lived experiences of people at the margins of the hierarchical Church.
The first set of essays engages with concepts, such as natural law, private property, liberation, and subsidiarity, that have been foundational in the elaboration of the Church’s doctrine and point to both their limitations and affordances. In doing so, authors insist on the importance of grounding CST concepts in the lived reality of the People of God.
In his essay, Solomon Parditey examines the concept of “natural law” and critiques the universalist tendencies of its deployment within Catholic Social Teaching. Rejecting claims of universality and impartiality that obscure the situated historical and cultural contingency of those who make such claims, Parditey argues for natural law to be “reconstituted as a fragile, penitential grammar” functioning “as a discursive tradition that must undergo repentance as a precondition to its pronouncements, learning from those it has marginalized before asserting its capacity to structure the commonweal.”
Next, Alex Mikulich turns to a central concept of CST: private property. By building on Ignacio Ellacuria’s work, he argues that private property has functioned historically to produce injustices and inequalities that have been neglected in CST’s general defense of the concept. Through an analysis of the racialized distribution of waste produced by capitalism, he proposes “a new historical-ecological Catholic social praxis that creates conditions of the possibility of a social metabolism that is oriented to the earth’s metabolisms.”
Interrogating the accumulation of private wealth from another angle, Hans de Salas-del Valle invites us to return to the original meaning of the “jubilee:” a liberation characterized by “the cancellation of debts, the freeing of bondservants, and the return of land to cultivator-occupants.” Describing the suffocating situation of indebtedness in which millions of Americans find themselves today, de Salas-del Valle asks what a CST engaging critically with the current privatization of debts in capitalist societies would look like. Unsatisfied with the rhetoric and actions that characterized the Jubilee 2025, the author asks Church authorities to take seriously and engage courageously with “God’s promise of liberation from debt.”
In the last essay of this section, Perdian Tumanan sees ecumenical dialogue as necessary for the Christian resistance against forms of authoritarianism that growingly rely on Christian language. He himself engages in such a dialogue by bringing together Abraham Kuyper’s concept of “sphere sovereignty” and the concept of subsidiarity, that has been part of CST since its inception. Tumanan argues that, while both concepts are useful for resisting authoritarian encroachments on all spheres of life, they can only do so if Christians keep engaging critically with them through dynamic ecumenical discussions.
Together, these four authors argue for a dynamic CST, rooted in the reality of living people and open to being moved, informed, and transformed by such realities. The question of what a CST emerging from spaces of marginalization and vulnerability, that is, a CST that takes shape directly at the intersection of the divine and flesh – the question of what such a catholic political theology would look like is taken up in the remaining contributions to this symposium.
Kyong-Jin Lee’s paper takes us to the Yungas, in Bolivia. She proposes to look at the lived realities of Afro-Bolivian coffee farmers through a decolonial and phenomenological lens that pays attention to their ways of relating to each other, the land, and the Spirit as they adapt to climate change. This approach allows her to argue that “vulnerability becomes a generative site of political agency.” Analyzing the practices and relations that animate these communities, Lee contends that they offer an incarnation of CST that is rooted in local realities and does not depend on the magisterium for asserting its validity.
William Kuncken continues on the theme of vulnerability, where he proposes to push further the moral theology of Josef Fuchs. By engaging with Fuchs’ ethic of co-creativity, which “arouses curiosity, challenges our presuppositions, and delivers us from a world of exclusivity and isolation,” Kuncken invites us to consider Jesus’ and our vulnerability and embeddedness in Creation as a source for ethical commitments that are themselves creative, dynamic, and untethered from the calcifying attitudes of the magisterium.
In the last paper of this symposium, Jules Leslie Webb offers a powerful reflection on enfreakment, transness, and incarnation. Proposing an insightful analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s A Temple of the Holy Ghost, she argues against non-affirming theologies that deny the experiences and claims of trans people and invites readers to see the other’s “agonistic opacity” as an enfleshed “divine gift.” Webb’s contribution therefore concludes this series on catholic political theology with a provocative and unsettling call for a Catholic Social Teaching that deeply and affectively engages with and receives “the ongoingness of our givenness as it unfolds on God’s terms.”
