Spiritual Growth and Catholic Social Teaching Project

ABOUT

This research attempts to examine the relationship between spiritual growth and Catholic social teaching, with special reference to the Hong Kong context. It consists of three parts. The first part is concerned with the theoretical analysis of the traditional understanding of Catholic social teaching and its relation to Catholic spirituality. The second part serves as a further elaboration of the first part, through analyzing the spiritual growth of three Catholic saints. The third part is an in-depth exploration of the relationship between personal spiritual growth and social mission, with empirical reference to the Hong Kong context, through mainly the method of documentary analysis.

PART I  Theoretical Exploration: The Spiritual Foundation of Catholic Social Teaching

In the 1998 bishops’ statement, Sharing Catholic Social Teaching: Challenges and Directions, the United States Catholic Bishops expressed the target of the Church in educating laymen about Catholic social doctrine: “Our commitment to the Catholic social mission must be rooted in and strengthened by our spiritual lives. In our relationship with God we experience the conversion of heart that is necessary to truly love one another as God has loved us.”^[1] Living in a world full of injustice and suffering, to what extent can a Catholic act according to the foundations of the Catholic social teachings? What is the relationship between personal spiritual growth and Catholic social teaching?

In fact, it has been a generally accepted view that Catholic social teaching is to be grounded on individual moral life. But what this individual moral life consists of is quite ambiguous. Since Vatican II, one major mission of the Catholic Church is to promote social justice, safeguard human dignity, and take care of basic human material needs. However, the Catholic Church differs from the others in that her salvific work aims at the salvation of souls in eternality in the last resort. It is also mainly in this sense that the moral foundation of social mission, for Catholics, differs greatly from that of the other major world religions or moral traditions.

Undoubtedly, the principles of Catholic social tradition are based on love. But this “love” is not just to be understood in terms of the person’s good intention of promoting social justice and safeguarding human dignity. Rather it is also concerned with the person’s own moral living, and this moral living is embedded into a wider Catholic doctrine. The person who is engaged with social action is required to help redeem both the material and spiritual needs of the world, as well as the person’s own soul. This is the crux of the spiritual foundation in Catholic social teaching. Our exploration of the relationship between spiritual growth and Catholic social mission will be carried out in this direction.

PART II  Documentary and Autobiographies Analysis: The Spiritual Growth of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Thérèse of Lisieux and St. Teresa of Calcutta

In the vast resources of the saints’ personal writings, we have chosen the autobiographies and works of St. Teresa of Avila, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, and St. Teresa of Calcutta for investigation. Their autobiographies and writings are regarded as some of the rarely detailed works that convey first-hand materials about Catholic spiritual growth in the Catholic history. These writings provide us some empirical sources to examine issues about the progress of the souls and Catholic spiritual practice, and enhance our understanding of the important role of spiritual growth in the Christian life, particularly the work of Catholic social mission nowadays.

1. St. Teresa of Avila: The spiritual progress of St. Teresa of Avila, in particular from her birth to age forty, will be analyzed particularly to the “purgative stage” generally understood along with the Catholic spiritual tradition. Teresa’s long-termed struggle on the purgative stage displays the tremendous difficulties on the trial to perfection in face of worldly temptation. This section will also set out to clarify certain misunderstandings about the forms and intensity of suffering in the process of attaining spiritual growth.

2.  St. Thérèse of Lisieux: Compared with the dramatic life of Teresa of Avila, the twenty-four-year cloistered life of Thérèse of Lisieux looks rather mediocre and insignificant in the eyes of ordinary people. However, from the Catholic perspective, the greatness or, say, the sainthood of a person, does not consist in one’s achievement in the human world. In her short and seemingly insignificant ordinary life, Thérèse demonstrated many “little ways” of love and sacrifice, which are possible for anyone to imitate. We shall examine how a day-by-day self-conquest against one’s habitual defect may eventually lead to total self-abandonment and love towards God, with particular reference to Thérèse’s own description of her spiritual struggles.

3. St. Teresa of Calcutta: For Mother Teresa, Catholic social mission is to be based on the Mystery of Redemption; and to increase our knowledge of this mystery of redemptive suffering will lead us to love. Without suffering, claims Mother Teresa, “our work would just be social work, very good and helpful, but it would not be the work of Jesus Christ, not part of the redemption.”^[2] Thus, Catholic social mission not just aims at the material poverty of the poor, but also the redemption of their spiritual destitution. We shall in this study, through Mother Teresa’s spiritual anguish or suffering, depicts the spiritual foundation of Catholic social teachings, as well as the shortcomings of Catholic participation in social events nowadays.

PART III  An In-depth Exploration of the Relationship between Personal Spiritual Growth and Catholic Social Mission in Contemporary Society

Despite the diversified Catholic spiritual traditions in the long history of the Catholic Church, one theme has been unanimously accepted by all of them as to the individual Catholic moral life: the imitation of Christ. In the context of Catholic social teaching, this “imitation of Christ,” if being taken seriously, has often been confined to the Second Commandment only that is, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” This is somehow a mistaken view, and to a certain extent, it constitutes the source of some of the disputes between conservative and liberal Catholics over doctrinal issues and the Church’s missions in contemporary world. With regard to this question, we shall in part III further study the difficulty in understanding Catholic social teaching and the dilemma faced by Catholics in the Hong Kong real-life social action context.

[1] U.S. Catholic Bishops, Sharing Catholic Social Teachings: Challenges and Directions (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference of Bishops, 1998), 2. 

[2] Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Revealing Private Writings of the Nobel Peace Prize Winner, ed. Brain Kolodiejchuk, M.C. (London: Rider, 2008), 220.

Slide image: Nicolas Bertin. Christ Washing the Feet of His Disciples, 1720-1730. The Art Institute of Chicago.