Social Catholicism: Future of a Tradition in Crisis

As a closing perspective at a colloquium dedicated to Social Catholicism, this article recognizes, in the first section, the crisis in the social discourse of the Church. This crisis is not exclusively a present reality, but is also found in the origins and history of a tradition that is considered to be one of the precedents to conciliar renewal, which in its dialogue with the world invites modern times into theology and ethics. The future of this tradition in crisis demands recourse to philosophical reason and historical reality. So, in the second part, the contributions of the political philosophies of Paul Ricoeur and Charles Taylor in three mayor themes are considered: the good with respect to the just, holism as opposed to atomism, and collective rights in contrast to the exclusivity of individual rights. Finally, in the third part, compiling its legacy and these philosophical contributions, the author reflects on the contributions of Latin American Social Catholicism to a continent in which the processes of commercialization, depoliticization and individualism, which accompany this late globalized modernity, threaten our historic communities with dissolution into featureless societies, culturally without identity. The living traditions of the continent, both secular and religious, and among them, Catholicism, are their greatest resource for confronting this challenge, which adds the liberal question to the social question.