Our Call to Caritas helps us come to a new understanding of charity, justice, and our call to live the radical challenge of Christ’s message in our world today.
This package provides educators with ideas and resources to guide their students in analyzing and responding to social justice issues through Catholic Social Teaching.
Package includes:
- Guides to prayers and reflections, experiential learning activities and group discussions
- Definitions of the principles of Catholic Social Teaching
- Examples of international solidarity in action from the work of Development and Peace
- Information and resources to assist educators in bringing Catholic Social Teaching
- Accompanying, ready-to-use PowerPoint
- Video for Activity 2 'Charity & Justice Part 2: Social Service & Social Action' (coming fall 2015)
For copies or for leader formation opportunities, please contact:
Kathleen Ladouceur, Catholic Schools Program Officer
1-800-494-1401 ext 229 or schools@devp.org
Theme: Our Call to Caritas
The Gospel message is a radical one. While Christ regularly fed people before he taught (today he would be a great supporter of school breakfast programs!), he also treated all peoples as equal and protected and included the marginalized.
We are called to live as Christ did, to lead lives of love. We are called to perform works of charity, certainly, but we are also called to challenge oppression. This means we have to go beyond simple works of charity to live in true Solidarity. This is how Pope Francis defined Solidarity:
Solidarity … is a word that means much more than some acts of sporadic generosity. It is to think and to act in terms of community, of the priority of the life of all over the appropriation of goods by a few. It is also to fight against the structural causes of poverty, inequality, lack of work, land and housing, the denial of social and labor rights. It is to confront the destructive effects of the empire of money: forced displacements, painful emigrations, the traffic of persons, drugs, war, violence and all those realities that many of you suffer and that we are all called to transform.
– Pope Francis, October 28, 2014, World Meeting of Popular Movements
Living the Christian virtue of charity – caritas: ‘love received and shared’ - requires both works of charity and works of justice, which together are the Social Mission of our Church. While this is a great feat, it is one our faith helps us to address.
Through Our Call to Caritas, we consider the concept of charity from a Catholic perspective – how we live it and how we teach it. We look at Catholic Social Teaching and how it helps us apply our faith to the globalized reality in which we live, at the individual, local, and global levels. We see how we are interconnected with others around the world through our daily lives. With this foundation, we will be better equipped to See, Judge, and Act upon the causes of poverty and injustice to bring about a more just world, both individually and with our students.