Speaking to the College of Cardinals earlier this year, our current Holy Father cited this specific document as one of the chief reasons for his choice of name because Leo XIII’s historic encyclical offered the Catholic faith’s treasures to a world experiencing the throes of the Industrial Revolution. “In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching,” Pope Leo XIV told the cardinals, “in response to another industrial revolution and to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

The first U.S.-born pope is clearly situating himself in a spirit of continuity with his predecessors on the Chair of Peter, showing that the Catholic faith is an unchanging gift from God to help navigate the ebbs and flows of history. As Leo XIII used his ministry as the Bishop of Rome to address a rapidly changing world, so, too, Leo XIV is indicating to us that he wishes to help everyone — Catholic and non-Catholic alike — to deal with the major social upheavals afoot through what we might call the tech revolution seen in generative AI, social media, deep fakes, self-driving cars and a whole host of other technologies operating today. Perhaps inspired by the Holy Father’s statements, Bishop Felton has asked The Northern Cross magazine to include a column that will focus on the Church’s social doctrine, and I am honored to have been tapped to write this column for all of you.

Perhaps some will think Catholic social doctrine is a matter of politics, but this truly is not the case. From the Church’s perspective, social doctrine is a part of moral theology and applies the unchanging truths of faith to the concrete circumstances of life. Sometimes, the Church’s social doctrine gives us principles to apply to a specific situation, while at other times it offers us clear prohibitions or admonitions for how we are to live a holy life of virtue. In the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, Cardinal Renato Martino explains that “the value of Catholic social doctrine [is] as an instrument of evangelization” that places the human person and society in relationship with the Good News of Jesus Christ. As this column will focus on specific topics in upcoming issues of this publication, it is my hope that everyone will find the columns to be helpful in fulfilling our call to be missionaries for Christ by showing how the faith gives us an ethical dimension in the 21st century.