What role should the Catholic Church play in meeting three major challenges the world is facing: the abuse of human rights, not least in an increasingly dangerous China, the threat to democratic values, and the looming prospect of a climate catastrophe?

European thought and political action in the nineteenth and twentieth century have been dominated by great debates about democracy, human rights and self-determination. It has to be admitted that there is not much in the Catholic Church’s position on these issues which roiled the decades on either side of the beginning of the twentieth century of which one can be proud. It argued against, indeed raged against, the liberal and enlightened values usually associated with the struggle for accountable government and self-determination. The enlightenment was confronted by reaction. Pope Gregory XVI’s 1832 encyclical Mirari Vos denounced the “delirium” of the idea of freedom of conscience for all. As the nineteenth century progressed, Ultramontanism moved to centre stage in the fight against “modernists”, and theologians considered guilty of any trace of creativity were ruthlessly hunted down. Rome turned its back on reconciling itself to the modern world, an umbrella description that covered everything from liberal political views to railway lines. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, a thoughtful declaration of Catholic social teaching which opposed the extremes of liberal capitalism and of authoritarian socialism, was a hopeful and welcome standout from all this.