Social encyclicals as motives of credibility for the Church
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jun 02, 2026
In my recent commentary on Pope Leo’s first encyclical (Are you of two minds about social encyclicals? I am.), I suggested that the difficulty posed by social encyclicals is that it is fairly unusual for people who do not know and believe in Christ to enjoy a firm grasp of the natural law—which is the primary source of the principles which form the basis of the Church’s social teaching. In her social encyclicals, after all, she is not primarily attempting to preach the Gospel, but rather to enunciate the natural principles which ought to govern the social thought and social arrangements of all men and women of good will.
While that reality is the basis for my suggestion (in the commentary noted above) that it is unfortunately rare for people to be able to both grasp and commit themselves to these principles without prior conversion to Christ, it nonetheless remains possible for men and women of good will to perceive and be drawn to both the good sense and the beauty of the Church’s articulation of social principles. Moreover, this perception is not only a good in itself but may also serve as a motive of credibility—that is, as a reason for someone to examine the Catholic Faith more closely so as to come to a serious conclusion about its veracity (see, for example, my article of July 18, 2025, Motives of credibility and predispositions to faith).
Indeed, when we have some sense of the moral demands of the “nature of things”, the consistency of the Church’s social teaching suggests a light streaming from a vital source. Nonetheless, to a considerable extent, the very awareness of the natural law today is merely a last vestige of that period of Western history between the rupture of the Church by Protestantism and the consequent rise of religiously “neutral” secular states, which sought (largely unsuccessfully) to make the natural law alone the basis of good governance, in most cases deliberately and vastly reducing the culturally formative role of religion, and especially of Catholicism. Thus, in the late nineteenth century, when Leo XIII began the pontifical trend of issuing encyclicals to address not the spiritual but the social needs of what was still very loosely a Christian society, it seemed that this natural good preserved and offered by the Church could (in addition to its intrinsic value) actually play a formative role.
But over a century later, in what is now a society which has repudiated not only Catholicism and not even only Christ but the actual human nature which God created, the social resonance of the social encyclicals finds little broad cultural adherence, and must rely for any positive reception on whatever weak awareness of the fundamental nature of things still persists in this society which has cast off not only its religious but its natural moorings.
The credibility of a social encyclical
The social principles of the Church are principles of natural law or natural justice which, since they can be grasped apart from Faith, may well appeal to a large number of persons who are either particularly clear-thinkers or who, being in social positions of weakness, can easily perceive at least some of the ways in which our society has gone significantly, and indeed unfairly, wrong. Both groups may well be open to principles of social order which are rooted in the good of the human person and, indeed, the good of the human family. In these cases, in addition to whatever benefits may be achieved through a wider adoption of these principles, the Church’s role in promulgating and explaining these principles may indeed become a motive of credibility to others—that is, a reason to take Christ and the Church seriously enough to investigate and ultimately accept the Church’s claims.
Thus, at the present time, a great deal depends on the willingness of our non-Catholic chattering classes to be sufficiently disinterested in their own anti-Christian bias to permit themselves to be attracted by, and to speak favorably about, Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas and the entire tradition of papal social encyclicals from which it stems. After all, outside the most dedicated of the Catholic faithful, it is only the “intellectual classes” which are likely to read the social encyclicals and, even among these, mostly the ones who have responsibilities for teaching and writing on social or religious concerns. So in terms of motives of credibility, most others will have to be drawn by hearsay—or perhaps by personal desperation—to go first to the text, and finally to the ultimate source of that text.
It is this sort of exercise that may settle into a person’s heart and lead that person into the heart of the Church to experience sacramental life in Christ. And it is in this sense that the typical ending of a social encyclical involves a return to its possibly unperceived source in Jesus Christ. This return to Christ remains central to its purpose, even if it can sometimes seem like a belated recognition of what should always be the full depth and purpose of the main thesis. In the latest of these encyclicals, Magnifica Humanitas (On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence), the conclusion remains true to form, by focusing on the Blessed Virgin Mary’s attentiveness to the ongoing work of God:
244. The Blessed Virgin Mary not only teaches us to recognize God’s invisible work, but also directs our gaze to “the points at which humanity is broken and the world becomes distorted” …teaching us “to view history through the eyes of the little ones, rather than through the perspective of the powerful; to interpret the events of history from the viewpoint of the widow, the orphan, the stranger, the wounded child, the exile and the fugitive.” [223] The Blessed Virgin thus becomes “poet and prophetess of Redemption” [224].*
This after all, is our most devout hope—the transformation of all things in Christ, the return of all things through Christ to the Father. My point is that so often this emphasis on making all things new comes from radicals who simply wish to tear all things down without changing human nature so that it can “do better next time”. But when it comes from the Church, it must comes with a firm pointer to what we all need to make things work. In other words, it must come not with mere reason and good intentions but with a concrete accessibility to the grace of Christ.
Insofar as the world gets the social principles without getting the grace of Christ, only the smallest part of the task has been completed. That part is hardly worthless. But it is really only by uniting their good sense with Our Lady’s “poetry and prophecy” of Redemption that social encyclicals can succeed in offering the remedy we really need. If social principles in this fallen world do not lead also to Christ, then they will never be sustained.
* The quotations are from Pope Leo’s own Meditation on the occasion of the Prayer Vigil and Rosary for Peace (11 October 2025) (referenced in footnote 223) and Pope Saint Paul VI’s Homily at the Marian Shrine of Our Lady of Bonaria (14 April 1970) (referenced in footnote 224).
Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.
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