Fulfilling Our Mission: Incorporating Catholic Social Teaching into the Core Business Curriculum

The Ryan Institute for Catholic Social Thought at the University of St. Thomas co-sponsored a conference with the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, in February of 2011, entitled “The Logic of Gift and the Meaning of Business—An Experimental, Scholarly and Pedagogical Examination of Business in Light of Caritas in Veritate.” Participants at this conference identified a need to develop a cohesive body of Catholic principles not only for business professionals, but also for business educators. Michael Naughton, a member of the drafting committee, recently commented in the National Catholic Reporter that despite the existence of more than 1,000 Catholic institutions of higher education, the majority of which have business schools, many fail to draw upon Catholic social teaching in a systematic way (Allen, 2011). Indeed, it is in response to this conference that the Vatican has begun to develop guidelines for business professionals following the principles laid out in Pope Benedict XVI’s encyclical, Caritas in veritate. This recent action by the Vatican provides the motivation for the present paper, in which we provide a pedagogical resource for business educators, illustrating how to incorporate Catholic social teaching (CST) into the business core through a standard principles of economics course.