In the latest Legatus magazine Andreas Widmer writes:
What makes business leadership Catholic?
…knowing and implementing the Church’s social teaching. Many business leaders are surprised to learn that the Church’s rich social teaching didn’t start with Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891); it goes back to Sts. Thomas and Augustine, the Church Fathers and the apostles. It goes back to the radical charity that Jesus himself described in John 13:35: “This is how all will know that you are my disciples; if you have love for one another.”
As scholars have studied, meditated upon and lived Christ’s social teachings through the centuries, they’ve synthesized them into nine basic classic principles:
- Human dignity: Men and women are made in God’s image and destined for eternal life.
- Justice: This cardinal moral virtue consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and to neighbor.
- Social justice: Groups and individuals must receive what is rightly owed them.
- Common good: All the conditions in society must allow individuals and groups to reach their fullest human potential, both in this life and the next.
- Solidarity: This is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good.
- Subsidiarity: Social functions should occur at the lowest possible level so that individuals and groups have a true sense of purpose.
- Universal destination of goods: God gave the good things of the earth to the entire human race, not just a select few.
- Charity: Charity disposes us to love God above all creatures for Himself, and to love ourselves and our neighbors for the sake of God.
- Preferential option for the poor: Charity requires us to place the needs of the poor before our own.
Worth referencing from time to time…