Unlike his recent Regensburg speech with its controversial quotations about Islam, Pope Benedict's first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, published earlier this year, met with universal acclaim. Its far-reaching analysis examined not only the more spiritual aspects of our lives, but also our responsibilities in the public sphere, emphasising that social justice should be a central concern of politics.

Social justice has a long Catholic pedigree, with the term first coined by the Jesuit Luigi Taparelli in the 1840s, and later being expressed more fully in Leo XIII's encyclical Rerum Novarum, in which he emphasised that society should be based on cooperation rather than class conflict.

In political circles, however, it has remained a more controversial concept, often considered a theory of the Left. Yet this week at a Labour Party Conference fringe event hosted by the Christian Socialist Movement and sponsored by The Tablet, the former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith argued that social justice should also be a guiding principle for those leaning more to the Right. Mr Duncan Smith's ideas - he has been asked to indulge in some "blue sky" thinking by the current party leader, David Cameron - have been in part shaped by the places he has visited in the past year, where he has seen the damage inflicted by poverty to people's lives. Poverty, he said at the fringe event in Manchester, is relative, rather than an absolute - probably the first time that a Conservative has admitted as much. He understood that poverty is not just concerned with lack of food or shelter or clothing, however vital they may be, but is also an experience of being an outsider in one's own society.

Mr Duncan Smith is clearly as committed to slaying Beveridge's five giants of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness as his Labour counterparts, but social justice, as is clear from the experience of people in our most deprived ...

For those privileged to have experienced education in a Western-model university, Pope Benedict's speech at Regensburg last week was a template of an academic lecture: intellectually challenging, provocative, clarifying some issues while also raising new questions. But in the ever-shrinking twenty-first century global village, such discourse, particularly by a world leader, can never stand in isolation ...

In response to the Nolan Report in 2001, the Catholic Church in England and Wales tightened its procedures for dealing with allegations of sexual abuse of children against priests. The aim was not only to rescue its reputation, which had been badly damaged by a series of appalling cases, but also to make the Church an example of childprotection best practice. It has undoubtedly come a long way towards ...

Tony Blair must be reflecting ruefully on Enoch Powell's dictum that all political careers end in failure. He has been trying to engineer an end to his own that defied the rule: to go at a moment of his own choosing, basking in the applause of a grateful public, having fought his enemies to a standstill. But there is no warm autumnal glow in prospect: the political weather for the rest of his Prime Ministership ...

Even the United States realises it needs the United Nations. The idea popular among neo-conservatives in Washington that the UN was useful only in so far as it did America's will has given way to a wiser understanding, whispered in President Bush's ear by both his new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and his best friend Tony Blair, that not all problems in the world can be settled by American might and the ...