This chapter explores two competing Catholic conceptions of social justice. The first strand of Catholic social justice, rooted in Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and subsequent papal interventions, promoted a social order based upon traditional familial structures. This ‘organicist’ ideal of social justice originally aimed at combatting Marxism, the ills of industrialization, and the erosion of the Church’s influence in European public life. Although the Vatican-endorsed model of social justice predominated within the Church, not all Catholics embraced the anti-Communism and emphasis on the patriarchal family that ‘organicist’ social justice ideas promoted. The second, more decentralised strand of Catholic social justice – the ‘radical’ model – sprang from disagreements within the Church on how to respond to socialism, workers’ rights, dechristianisation, and decolonisation. ‘Radical’ social justice enjoyed support from grassroots activists, theologians, reformers, and other Church leaders who endeavoured to empower the powerless in their societies and, from the 1950s and 1960s, around the world. Both strands of social justice upend conventional distinctions between the political left and right, while also bridging the national and the transnational. By problematizing the political and spatial categories commonly used to discuss social justice, this chapter offers a useful corrective to existing social-justice narratives.

This chapter traces the intellectual trajectory of the young John Rawls to show how several strands of Christian personalist theology intertwined at Princeton during the Second World War. It highlights a major new archival discovery: the undergraduate Rawls’s first published essay, a piece that demonstrates his early exposure to the ideas of Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. By considering in turn the influences on Rawls of American Episcopal Protestantism, Catholic human rights discourse, and continental dialectical theology, this chapter seeks to challenge historiographies that treat those different strands of Christian personalism in isolation. It also emphasizes the fundamentally liberal orientation of many Christian personalists, specifically their preoccupation with defending human free will as both essential to personhood and compatible with a robust theology of grace. This chapter draws attention to an oft-neglected liberal faction within the “Theological Discussion Group” of neoorthodox fame and showcases the enormous impact these liberal theologians had on reshaping elite American undergraduate religious education. This chapter ultimately argues that Rawls’s own liberalism, which would come to so define postwar political philosophy, was first forged in the cauldron of Christian personalism at Princeton and is best understood as a case for social revolution emerging from that framework.