Mining relates to violence in diverse ways, and frequently the relationship includes environmental violence. New technologies, including those central to a clean energy transition, mean that mining will remain a necessary industry. This means in turn that the human community will remain in need of ways to minimize and cope with the environmental violence of mining. The theory and practice of Catholic peacebuilding can offer distinct resources for dealing with these challenges. First, there is Catholic social teaching, which creates a foundation from which to respond to the environmental violence of mining in suitably complex and integral ways. Second, the Catholic community has a vibrant base of grassroots actors defending people and the environment from mining damage. And third, there is the church’s institutional capacity to network those grassroots actors and coordinate their work with national and international efforts to change resource governance and industry practice. The argument is not that these resources are necessarily unique to the Catholic community. The idea is that the Catholic community can array and marshal these resources in a distinctive way that gives it special potential for responding to mining and environmental violence.

The Catholic Church holds the concept of natural law in reference to a created order. While this concept has been put aside in philosophy and science the Church deems that creation implies an inherent relationship between all its components. The Social doctrine of the Church is built on the concept of natural law accessible to human intelligence. The teaching of Thomas Aquinas drawing from Aristotle remains the main source of Catholic understanding of natural law. Natural law and natural rights are not to be confused. Right refers to a natural order of things, which is the natural law apprehended by reason at a given moment. The source of human rights is entailed in a measure inscribed in the order created by God. So natural rights are determined on the basis of what constitutes a just relationship between persons in accordance with natural law. The attention given today to the ecosystem including the biosphere and human society altogether brings us back to the core of natural law. The ecosystem witnesses to an order which pre-exists to our attempts to use it arbitrarily. ’Integral ecology’ apprehends the human being in its interdependence with the created order of the universe.

The 1987 Philippine Constitution entrenched the right to human dignity – a concept that the Philippine Supreme Court has invoked since the 1940s. This chapter argues that Filipino justices have been using“dignity”or “human dignity”to avoid a strict originalist or textualist interpretation of constitutional provisions. They cite dignity as justification to expand existing constitutional rights or to uphold governmental actions that facilitate full enjoyment of such rights. They employ the dignity language mainly to further individual self-fulfilment, autonomy, or self-realization, subject only to select community interests that are expressly recognized in the Constitution. Such understanding and use of dignity in judicial interpretation has been largely shaped by culturally traumatic historical events, Catholic teachings, and nonmunicipal laws. Despite almost eighty years of invoking dignity in judicial interpretation and adjudication, however, the right to human dignity has yet to be consistently and faithfully used for what it was meant to be – a standard principle of interpretation to which Filipino justices must adhere in human rights adjudication.

In the early 2000s the Holy See submitted papers to the WIPO and the WTO, on the subject of Intellectual Property (IP) rights, genetic resources, traditional knowledge, and access to medicines. This chapter develops some concepts that are mainly implicit in those papers. Catholic Social Teaching does not address directly the subject of IP rights, but contains all the elements for a moral judgment on the present system of IP rights. The chapter develops the discussion in three parts: first, some ideas about private property and the universal destination of goods, and the right to knowledge; second, proposing a vision of IP rights in the light of the aforesaid principles about property in Catholic Social Teaching; third, examining the issue of IP rights in relation to the rights of native peoples. The essay concludes by arguing that, to ensure that patents serve the universal destination of goods and the common good, a new legal theory should be developed in this area. This would reconsider, especially, rules relating to the public availability of the invention, the right price of the licenses, possible exceptions to the patent, means of technological transfer, and the creation of alternative means of industrial knowledge protection.

Life patents are a form of intellectual property protection being enshrined and strengthened in bi-lateral and multi–lateral trade agreements. The Church’s teaching and societal engagement to protect human rights has grown in response to the expanded use of patents on living matter, including human genes, DNA and stem cells, as well as microorganisms, plants and animals. This analysis is based on three assets of the work of the Church in the United States: 1) the teaching of the Church; 2) relationships with the Church in other nations; and 3) on–the–ground experience in developing nations, especially through the Conference’s relief and development agency, Catholic Relief Services (CRS). The paper explores two questions: What lessons can be learned from the Church’s engagement with life patents as they touch the rights of persons who are poor, indigenous or marginalized? How can the Church appropriately defend the rights of persons at the margins of the global economy, insuring their just and fair treatment, and their access to the life–saving benefits of life patents?

Modern Catholic Social Teaching (CST) developed in an historical context that posed dramatic challenges to the institutional Church and lay faithful. The French Revolution (1789–1799), the Napoleonic era (1799–1815), and industrial revolution, and waves of succeeding uprisings in 1820, 1830, 1848, and 1870 represented radical challenges to existing political structures, such that Old Regime conceptions of the State and Church alliance of Throne and Altar were no longer tenable. The emergence of the modern secular state in traditionally Catholic lands often included the suppression of religious orders, charitable and educational institutions, and control over clergy and hierarchy. The Church struggled in this revolutionary age of ideology – torn between laissez-faire liberalism and revolutionary socialism. The Catholic movement, primarily of laity, grew in response to these challenges, under the rubrics of the “Religious Question” of freedom of religion, and Church–State relations generally, and of the “Social Question” or how to address the growing number of rootless and impoverished industrial workers in an increasingly secularized political and cultural environment. The revival of neoscholastic philosophy of society became the paradigm through which Pius IX and especially Leo XIII were able to engage modernity on evangelical and natural law foundations.

This chapter is an analytical summary of Rerum novarum. Its goal is to illuminate the purpose of the encyclical and the main lines of Pope Leo’s reasoning, his key premises and central ethical conclusions, and in this way, to articulate as clearly as possible the teaching that comprises Rerum novarum. Rerum’s influence on Catholic teaching and practice is most manifest in the Church’s “social teaching,” which in various ways identifies the encyclical as its founding statement. This identification is made in the names and citations of some of the most important papal contributions to Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and is pervasive throughout the corpus of CST. And it is revealed in the ways in which the accepted principles of CST are present or anticipated in Rerum novarum. Although the chapter does not undertake the large and formidable task of characterizing CST, it does indicate how these principles figure in Pope Leo’s analysis. It also underlines the extent to which these principles are not the main point of Rerum novarum, but stand in the service of the moral and religious reform urged by Pope Leo.

Aquinas did not speak of “social” teaching, but did synthesize the teaching of the prophets, the Lord, the Fathers, and sound philosophy concerning social matters and responsibilities. He would have regarded the principles of CST as part of the Church’s doctrine of faith and morality (de fide et moribus), insofar as morality – the living out of that faith which consists in true beliefs about the Creator – embodies the principles, precepts, and virtue(s) of justice. For among the cardinal virtues, justice is the one bearing on those of our choices that relate to or impact on other persons, especially persons with whom in one way or another we are associated. And Aquinas’s treatment of justice, mainly but not only in his Summa Theologiae, is very extensive and detailed. This chapter offers (1) an overview of his significance for CST, (2) a review of the appeals to his writings in Rerum novarum and some of its antecedents and successors, and (3) his contribution to some leading features of CST since then, including dignity and equality; private property and associations; “subsidiarity” and the service conception of authority and law; and “solidarity” (local and global).

This chapter explains the principle of the universal destination of earthly goods as it has been affirmed by the magisterium of the Catholic Church, based upon scriptural and patristic sources and on the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and developed especially since Rerum novarum. The principle is one of the most consistent doctrines of that evolving magisterium, with only minor adjustments of expression, extension to new matters, and differing emphases according to contingent circumstances and the relative force of opposing errors at different times. After a brief introduction (sec. I), the chapter presents in chronological order the evolution of the formulations of the principle before the Second Vatican Council (sec. II) and from there to Pope Francis (sec. III). The purpose of this sort of exposition – chronological and textual – is to furnish the reader with the main texts of the social doctrine of the Church about the principle, so that the stability of the teaching may appear as self-evident. For the main thesis is always the same: the priority of the universal destination of earthly goods as an end, and its compatibility with a strong right to private property as a means.

The common good (bonum commune) has, since antiquity, referred to the aim of social and political association, and was particularly prominent in medieval Christian political theology. Since St. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical letter, Mater et magistra, ecclesiastical statements about social teaching have employed a formulation of the common good, usually in the version that appeared in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, as “the sum of those conditions of social life that allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This chapter discusses the origins and development of this formulation as well as the ways that it has been used in subsequent Catholic Social Teaching. While it has sometimes been interpreted as an “instrumental” account of the common good, the sources and uses of the notion suggest that it is the particularly modern political component of a fuller notion of the common good continuous with the tradition. In particular, the recent formulation is concerned to limit the power of the modern state and protect the dignity of the human person in the challenging conditions of political modernity.

This chapter is an analytical summary of Rerum novarum. Its goal is to illuminate the purpose of the encyclical and the main lines of Pope Leo’s reasoning, his key premises and central ethical conclusions, and in this way, to articulate as clearly as possible the teaching that comprises Rerum novarum. Rerum’s influence on Catholic teaching and practice is most manifest in the Church’s “social teaching,” which in various ways identifies the encyclical as its founding statement. This identification is made in the names and citations of some of the most important papal contributions to Catholic Social Teaching (CST) and is pervasive throughout the corpus of CST. And it is revealed in the ways in which the accepted principles of CST are present or anticipated in Rerum novarum. Although the chapter does not undertake the large and formidable task of characterizing CST, it does indicate how these principles figure in Pope Leo’s analysis. It also underlines the extent to which these principles are not the main point of Rerum novarum, but stand in the service of the moral and religious reform urged by Pope Leo.