Not what some say it is …

… Taking Back ‘Social Justice’ - Washington Free Beacon. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Non-Catholic readers may be inclined to skim the chapters discussing the papal encyclicals that first used the term and concept of social justice. That would be a mistake—first because Novak’s writing is consistently lucid and instructive, and second because it’s only by following the development of Catholic thought on social justice is the reader able to see why the term “social justice” was needed in the first place. Briefly: Two pontiffs—Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum (1891) and, forty years later, Pope Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (1931)—struggled to answer a question that in one form or another dominated Europe from the mid-19th century on: Would economic activity be governed by a centralized state, or not?

I had courses in Catholic social justice in high school and college. They were formative.