Today, we perceive Jesus Christ’s concern for the social questions of His time. If a sick man was brought to Him that He might lay His hands upon him, it is because Jesus’ feelings concerning social questions were well known. This is precisely the path the Church has been following since the Apostolic Age to date. This concern for the social questions became (as of Leo XIII with his Encyclical "Rerum novarum") what we know today as the Social Doctrine of the Church.

It is not just a simple "social philosophy"; Pope John Paul II pointed it out as a "Moral Theology". Benedict XVI has delved deeper into this perspective by highlighting charity as the master key of the Church’s Social Doctrine, to the point of defining it as "caritas in veritate in re sociali" (the proclamation of the truth of Christ’s love in society).

—Charity, in fact, is not only the principle of micro-relations: relationships of friendship, friends, family..., but also of macro-relations: social, economic and political relations.