Catholic Social Teaching: Highlights from the Popes – Prof. James Felak

The Thomistic Institute

Religion & Spirituality, Society & Culture, Philosophy, Christianity, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 873 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2026

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Prof. James Felak traces Catholic social teaching from Leo XIII to Francis, showing how the popes defend human dignity, a just wage, solidarity with the poor, subsidiarity, and the balance between rights and duties against both unchecked capitalism and collectivist ideologies.

This lecture was given on March 5th, 2026, at University of Washington.

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About the Speakers:

James Felak is a Professor of History and current holder of the Newman Center Term Professorship in Catholic Christianity at the University of Washington. He specializes in Catholicism in East Central Europe and has authored two books on Catholic politics in Slovakia, and a book on Pope John Paul II and his visits to his native Poland during and after Communist rule there. This latter work is based on hundreds of pages of papal speeches and sermons, and the records of the Communist government and secret police as they monitored the Pope during his visits. Besides courses on modern Europe, Felak teaches “The History of Christianity” and “Catholic Classics in Historical Context.” The latter course covers the major Catholic writers and thinkers from St. Augustine and St. Benedict through G. K. Chesterton and Flannery O’Connor. Felak is from southwestern Pennsylvania, received his doctorate from Indiana University, and has resided in Seattle since 1989.

Keywords: Catholic Social Teaching, Common Good, Human Dignity, John Paul II, Just Wage, Leo XIII, Rights And Duties, Solidarity, Subsidiarity, Workers

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast. Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square. The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world. To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.5	Thomistic Institute.org. So I'm going to talk about Catholic social teaching tonight.
0:27.4	Start right from the foundations with Pope Leo the 13th, after whom the current Pope is named,
0:33.2	and then go on and look at some of the highlights of other popes and kind of, and sort of culminate with Pope John Paul II,
0:41.7	who has the most kind of recent and important things to say,
0:45.3	and then also a couple other comments
0:48.0	about the most, two most recent popes.
0:50.8	In Rarum Novarum in 1891,
0:53.7	that was the first time a pope in a big way addressed the problems of modern society,
0:58.0	especially economic problems.
1:00.0	And he did it in a cyclical, that's a letter, a long letter, called Rerum Novarum.
1:06.0	And the context of this was he's living in a time now Europe has been transformed, so has North America with the Industrial Revolution. People used to be predominantly rural, now they were predominantly urban. Now industry is producing more than agriculture. A lot of production is no longer done by little shopkeepers in little, you know, like
1:30.3	shoemakers, houses and shops and things, but now math produced in factories. This is creating
1:36.3	all sorts of problems. There's going to be uprootedness. People are going to leave their villages,
1:41.3	move to these big anonymous cities to try to find work. There's going to be people living in overcrowded housing, these so-called slums.
1:47.6	There's going to be a lot of diseases of malnutrition, of airborne and waterborne diseases.
1:53.8	A lot of insecurity.
1:55.0	There's no real unemployment insurance, no retirement benefits, no health insurance.
1:59.6	People are really kind of uprooted from a
2:01.5	more secure life and thrown into a troubled one. And the way in Pope Leo the 13th is going
2:08.6	to attack this situation really vehemently. He'll say a few rich owners, society is becoming
2:16.4	a few rich owners and then large numbers of impoverished workers.
	...

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