Abstract
Three aspects of the implementation of social teachings are investigated in this chapter. Four major findings emerged. Firstly, the organizational-ecological profile of the Church, namely too many too small organizations, has seriously limited aspects of the implementation; secondly, church authority and religious piety are the major positive forces on its assertion of Life/Family values, regardless of the strength of state regulations. It is the model of the Church’s civil engagement from the early 1960s till today. Thirdly, an appreciable level of Human Rights-related participation is also found. The major factor is church authority and the laity’s support. A healthy interaction pattern among external and internal actors is identified to be the major social mechanism in this aspect. Fourthly, implementation related to Social Justice is quite limited and the Church’s future stance on this is still ambiguous.
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Notes
- 1.
For instance, Schuck (1991) added some 140 years earlier to what he called the Pre-Leonine period popes.
- 2.
For instance, the core concepts of social teachings, for example “structures of injustice and sin (Hornsby-Smith 2006)”, would sound totally “foreign” to the traditional Chinese religious spirit.
- 3.
Here Taipei refers not to Taipei city but to the Taipei Archdiocese which includes the whole of northern Taiwan. The Taipei Archdiocese can serve as representative of the whole of Taiwan Catholicism given that it is the largest diocese in Taiwan.
- 4.
The items included in the three factors are (1) Social Justice includes promoting of socio-economic and environmental justice plus the advocacy of democracy; (2) Human Rights factor includes promoting human dignity , human freedom and religious freedom; and (3) Life/Family values include anti-abortion and defending marriage and family values.
- 5.
The size of each organization is measured by the number of full-time employees (including religious and the laypersons) of each organization. These numbers are recoded into new codes according to 0–1 into 1, 2 into 2, 3–4 into 3, 5–17 into 4 and 18 and above into 5. The corresponding percentages of the new recorded categories are 19%, 20.9%, 19%, 24.8% and 16.3% consecutively. Notice that organizations with four or less employees amount to 2/3 of all organizations.
- 6.
Organizations are classified into three kinds in terms of the kinds of people they serve: (1) mainly workers, (2) mainly white collars and (3) serving no particular people. The third category was used as the reference group in the analyses.
- 7.
For relevant statistics, Hong Kong (http://www.catholic.org.hk/v2/en/cdhk/a08statistics.html), Macau (http://www.catholic-hierarchy.org/diocese/dmacu.html#stats and http://www.catholic.org.mo/), Taipei (http://www.catholic.org.tw/catholic/2014/New%20Book/Handbook/2014Taipei.pdf) and Shanghai (http://www.catholicsh.org/NewListIn.aspx?InfoCategoryID=7 and https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%A4%A9%E4%B8%BB%E6%95%99%E4%B8%8A%E6%B5%B7%E6%95%99%E5%8C%BA), accessed on March 23, 2016, 16:09. The number of Catholics in Macau is 29,611 in 9 parishes; those of Shanghai are about 140,000 in more than 100 churches.
- 8.
See in Chinese Catholic Cultural Association (1990) for records of the Church’s anti-abortion movements since the 1970s. Another case was the recent movement against homosexual marriage (CRBC 2014a, 42–55; 2014b, 2–13; 2014c, 19–20), but the Catholic role in that movement was not as central and active as it was in the anti-abortion movement.
- 9.
When asked about whether they approve or disapprove of the abolition of the death penalty, among 559 laypersons, 46.3% disapproved, 44% conditionally approved and only 5.8% approved without conditions (Kuo 2010: Appendix I, p. 33).
- 10.
For instance, in 1972, the theme of the Workshop on Social Affairs was “Evangelization and Social Development” ( Li Zhen 1978; CRBC 1978, 130). In 1975, a group for the design and evaluation of social development plans was set up under the Commission for Social Development (originally Commission for Social Work and Lay apostolate) in the Bishops’ Conference and the sociology department of Fu-Jen University was instrumental in providing “scientific research results” for designing and evaluations of social development plans, for example, Vox Cleri Monthly (1975). Its social research for the church has extended at least to 1987 and “A Study of the Catholic Church in Taiwan ROC” was published for the Symposium on Evangelization in 1988 (Commission for Evangelization 1987) .
- 11.
This line of thought can even be traced back to an earlier time. In the above cited article to introduce Pope John XXIII’s encyclical, the then Bishop of Tainan wrote: “As to life standards, the current wage level is too low and is not enough to support a family properly, but from the perspectives of manufacturers’ economic conditions and the nation’s public interests, labor wages should not be raised immediately. The nation’s finance cannot afford it, otherwise, the whole nation and society will be disturbed immediately” .
- 12.
However, there is one problem, a serious one: it lacked the general support of the laity . Perhaps, things can be even worse than lacking the laity’s support. I suspect that what Casanova (1996) pointed out, namely “the widespread rejection by lay Catholics of the church’s teachings on sexual morality … and they were consciously dissenting from church doctrines , in good conscience , without thinking that they were acting immorally, and without believing that they were unfaithful to the Catholic Church” (368) may also apply to Taiwan.
- 13.
It stated that: “Amidst the contemporary signs of liberalism and democracy, we discovered the vast cohort of blue collar class as well as fishermen and farmers who were the major labor force of Taiwan’s economic miracle, are now on the cross road of politics. In the assembly representatives requested the Church should play the iconic role by expressing the social teaching of the Church which had begun some hundred years ago. Even at this stage we cannot resolve any social problem, yet we cannot allow history to accuse us that we stand aloof with folded hands.”
- 14.
In Taiwan there are many meaningful social movements on a big scale. Thus there is no need for Religious Orders to establish their own or to maintain their own small scale social movements with similar natures. Members of Religious Orders should actively participate in social movements led by non-religious groups like environmental protection, human rights protection, banning the death penalty and social justice. This can be regarded as a proper orientation of integrating into the world according to the teaching of Vat II.
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Kuo, Wb. (2018). The Implementation of Catholic Social Teaching in Taiwan. In: So, F., Leung, B., Mylod, E. (eds) The Catholic Church in Taiwan. Christianity in Modern China. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-6668-9_8
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