Save the Church: The Black Death

An encyclical is the result of an immense amount of prayer, study, thought, reflection and consultation over a long period of time. Catholics – and many others – find them of great value in shedding light on and summarising issues of great complexity. Many return to encyclicals time and again to reflect on the insights which they contain.

These index pages include a listing of each Pope’s Encyclicals, Apostolic Letters, and other documents. An English translation of the Latin titles is also provided.

Catholic Social Teaching touches upon many different aspects of life, from the family to international development, how we think of those who are homeless to how we care for the environment, and from how we shop and consume to the rights of workers and the dignity of work. All the different areas that Catholic Social Teaching touches upon have developed from practical reflection on the realities of modern life in the light of the principles and themes of Catholic Social Teaching.

In this section, you can find a more detailed study of the six central themes of Catholic social teaching that are focused on in the website.

Catholic Social Teaching covers all spheres of life – the economic, political, personal and spiritual. With human dignity at its centre, a holistic approach to development founded on the principles of CST, is what Pope Paul VI called ‘authentic development’. Explore the Catholic Social Teaching principles and how they guide the work of Caritas Australia.

The sustained onslaught of plague on English population and society over a period of more than 300 years inevitably affected society and the economy. Evidence of the effects can be measured and responses traced not only in social and economic, political and religious terms, but also in changes in art and architecture. The effects of the Black Death in all these matters were disputed by contemporaries and are still hotly disputed today, which makes the topic so endlessly fascinating.

With so many dead and dying, patterns that had kept medieval society stable were replaced by hostility, confusion, greed, remorse, abuse—and, at times, genuine caring.

The Black Death – as it is commonly called – especially ravaged Europe, which was halfway through a century already marked by war, famine and scandal in the church, which had moved its headquarters from Rome to Avignon, France, to escape infighting among the cardinals.In the end, some 75 million people succumbed, it is estimated. It took several centuries for the world's population to recover from the devastation of the plague, but some social changes, borne by watching corpses pile up in the streets, were permanent.