GOD, SOCIETY AND THE HUMNAN PERSON
The Basics of Catholic Social Teaching

GOD, SOCIETY AND THE HUMNAN PERSON
The Basics of Catholic Social Teaching

Catholic social teaching concerns the right ordering of society, so that its members may fulfill their earthly vocations and attain their eternal destiny. It has a rich and venerable tradition reaching back to the very earliest days of the Church and has been expounded by the greatest thinkers in the Church from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to Popes Leo XIII and John Paul II. Despite this history, however, Catholic social teaching has often been misunderstood or inadequately explained. It has been used to further partisan political agendas or dismissed as being too theoretical for practical application to the “real” world. The purpose of this book is to draw together and to organize Catholic social teaching as found in the Catechism of the Catholic Church and other Church documents, and to arrange that teaching according to its major foundational principles and themes. The goal is to provide a reasonable and very readable overview of the social doctrine of the Church along with some examples of its practical application. In this way, the relationship between the social doctrine of the Church and other dogmas of the faith may more clearly be seen and its relevance to real problems in the “real” world made strikingly apparent.

About the Author: Edward T. Mechmann graduated from Columbia College magna cum laude in 1981 and from Harvard Law School cum laude in 1984. He later received a Master of Arts in Religious Studies from the St. Joseph’s Seminary Institute of Religious Studies in 1994. Following law school, he was employed as a prosecutor in New York City from 1984 to 1993 when he and his wife left to serve as lay missionaries in West Virginia. Since 1994, he has been employed by the Archdiocese of New York, first as the Coordinator of the Public Policy Education Network, and presently as the Assistant Director of the Family Life+Respect Life Office. In that capacity he assisted in the development of the marriage preparation booklet, Partners in Life and Love (Alba House, 1996). He has written several articles on religion and law for The New York Law Journal.