THE COHERENCE OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL THOUGHT - TOWARD A THEOLOGY OF INVOLVEMENT

Although recent attempts to state the coherence or integrating idea wi thin Catholic Social Thought have contributed much to our understandin g of the tradition, the attempts have been based on improper methodolo gical presuppositions. For this reason the authors offering these theo ries have been unable to justify their selection and emphasis on certa in documents; they have not fully considered the challenge to their th eories by development in the integrating idea taken as most essential; and they have not been methodologically clear about the role which th eir own vision plays in the historical retrieval. Recognition of such problems in historical analysis, and the path toward dealing with them today in an historically conscious way, is found in the work of Ernst Troeltsch.