Catholic Social Teaching: a trickle-up response to poverty?

In this article, I offer a concise historical overview of the context in which Catholic Social Teaching developed. A necessarily brief account of nineteenth-century Social Catholics in France, Belgium, and the Rhineland demonstrates how three of the four principles of Catholic Social Teaching – solidarity, the common good, and human dignity – were already present in this endeavour. I then turn to the ideas of Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz