Pope Leo's address to CAPP on the eve of his Inauguration Mass, May 17, 2025
- Cecil Chabot
- Aug 15
- 2 min read
With his choice of name Pope Leo XIV has signalled the critical importance of Catholic Social Teaching in this time of rapid change and of new things ("Rerum Novarum"). On the eve of his Inauguration Mass, he met with members of CAPP in a private audience where he underlined the importance of our mission.
The Holy Father emphasized, in particular, the full compatibility between dialogue and doctrine, especially with to Catholic Social Teaching principles:
"... the Church’s social doctrine ... does not claim to possess a monopoly on truth, either in its analysis of problems or its proposal of concrete solutions. Where social questions are concerned, knowing how best to approach them is more important than providing immediate responses to why things happen or how to deal with them. The aim is to learn how to confront problems, for these are always different, since every generation is new, and faces new challenges, dreams and questions.
This is a fundamental aspect of our attempts to build a “culture of encounter” through dialogue and social friendship. For many of our contemporaries, the words “dialogue” and “doctrine” can seem incompatible. Perhaps when we hear the word “doctrine,” we tend to think of a set of ideas belonging to a religion. The word itself makes us feel less disposed to reflect, call things into question or seek new alternatives.
In the case of the Church’s social doctrine, we need to make clear that the word “doctrine” has another, more positive meaning, without which dialogue itself would be meaningless. “Doctrine” can be a synonym of “science,” “discipline” and “knowledge.” Understood in this way, doctrine appears as the product of research, and hence of hypotheses, discussions, progress and setbacks, all aimed at conveying a reliable, organized and systematic body of knowledge about a given issue. Consequently, a doctrine is not the same as an opinion, but is rather a common, collective and even multidisciplinary pursuit of truth."
