Pastoral letter seeks to reveal Church’s ‘best kept secret’

A new booklet mapping out the basics of Catholic social teaching is intended to introduce older teenagers to the Church’s tradition of thought around major questions questions facing the world in our time, Down and Connor’s Bishop Noel Treanor has said.

‘Wellspring of Your Future: The Social Teaching of the Church’ has been distributed as a pdf to schools and chaplaincies in the Diocese of Down and Connor and will be published as a booklet shortly.

Explaining that coming generations will be increasingly faced with “massive questions about human identity, about the meaning of life, about the organisation of life and of society”, Bishop Treanor told The Irish Catholic that “It’s often been said that the social teaching of the Church is its best kept secret” and that he wrote the document as a light introduction to the subject.

Today’s young people will face a radically changing world, with the world of work changing dramatically due to such developments as nanotechnology and robotisation, and with international interdependence increasingly the norm, Dr Treanor said.

Given this, he explained, he had written the document to help young adults realise that “within our Christian tradition there are not simple answers but there are the tools to reflect critically and creatively about matters of the common good, human dignity – the absolute dignity of human life, and the rights of everybody in a world where wealth is produced and distributed in a just fashion.”

Building around this year’s World Peace Day message from Pope Francis, he said the document sought “to make known the fact that there is a body of reflection, of thought, and of teaching which grapples with the great issues of justice, the organisation of society, governance, work, the production of wealth and the distribution of wealth, and the major human and social issues at stake in society”.

“It’s a question of giving kids the reflective tools and the appreciation of the fact that their Christian faith is, as St Paul would call it, a power for life and for living in an incarnate world,” he said.