Business Ethics and Corporate Governance, Second Edition

TEACHINGS OF THE CHURCH

The longing for justice has always been a central theme of the Catholic Church from earliest Biblical times to the present. The work for justice finds its expression from the Gospels. The opening lines of Gaudium Et Spes of the Second Vatican Council placed the centrality of justice to the Christian calling most vividly in the following words: ‘The joys and hopes, the sorrows and anxieties of the women and men of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way oppressed, these are the joys and hopes, the sorrows and anxieties of the followers of Christ.’³⁴

The expression of the Church’s social teaching commenced in the late 19th century, 1891 to be exact, with the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII’s on the Condition of ...