Abstract

This article critically explains why the Catholic moral principles of the Catholic Church’s social doctrines, called the Catholic Social Teaching (CST) on the Christian faith and the social order, are difficult to teach and implement by Catholics and Christians in society, despite their being in existence for more than a hundred years. Applying sociological and theological perspectives and drawing on secondary literature, it argues that the difficulty of applying CST to local contexts goes beyond lack of dissemination of CST principles, instructional materials, and competent teachers, but is rooted in the very nature of CST principles as moral prescriptions, lacking in empirical illustrations from social science research and largely adopted from European social contexts. It also attributes the lack of CST’s implementation to the problematic normative enforcement of moral prescriptions in society with the growing normative pluralism and secularism of the contemporary world that tend to sideline moral and religious teachings.