“A Vital Christian Presence in Social Work” SOCIAL JUSTICE AND SOCIAL SERVICES WITHIN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

This paper explores the human rights perspective in social work, social teachings and social services in the Catholic Church. It explains the human rights perspective as emerging from its origin of three Christian beliefs: the Trinity, the Incarnation and the Mystical Body of Christ. Seven major themes of the social justice teachings of the Catholic Church are com-pared with the Troman’s model of the attitudes and dimensions of social justice. These so-cial justice themes and attitudes are represented in all cultures through the ministry of the Catholic Church’s largest social service organization, Caritas Internationalis. Social Justice challenges the fundamental principles for individuals and society. From a worldview perspective, the concept of social justice has been interpreted through five pre-dominant perspectives in society: utilitarian, egalitarian, libertarian, racial contract, and hu-man rights (Tyler, Boeckmann, Smith, Yuen, 1997). Anyone or several of these perspectives create the framework in which social justice is implemented by different governments, reli-gious groups, and professions in their contributing services towards humanity and the forma-tion of a just society. Within the last decade, the social work profession has adopted the hu-man rights perspective as the basic principle undergirding the formulation of social wor