RELG 243 - Roman Catholic Popes and Their Social Teaching

FC ARHU WINT

4 credits
Centering on the teachings of three popular popes, this course explores Roman Catholic social teaching on topics such as economic justice at the structural and transactional levels, oppression, and the importance of work, as well as broader concepts such as the nature of moral truth, views of the human person, social agency, and human limitation. The course begins with an examination of Pope Leo XIII’s influential encyclical Rerum Novarum that carved an intellectual path between Marxism and unbridled capitalism and includes the U.S. Catholic bishops’ pastoral on just economic practices as well as Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment.