Massaro: The Traditions Of Catholic Social Teachings

When looking at the traditions of Catholic Social Teachings, people think that they must use the teachings of the ancient world and look at the bible word for word. Massaro talks about how all over the world, people have shared their traditions and ethics to tell others how they live and what worked for them to live a better planned life. All throughout history, people have been trying to find better ways to live, how to live together and to love one another. This is how we as a species have created traditions and ethics through many generations. The focus will be of how these traditions from the Catholic Social Teachings and the ethics of many people affect this constantly shifting world.
Massaro begins with how ethics have an very important

Massaro goes onto saying that “optimism about the operations of the human mind stands in contrast to fundamentalist Christians, whose stated policy is to follow the Bible alone, inerrant as they profess it to be (Massaro, 2012).” The main form of reason is “natural law” that God’s creation was with purpose “God also created humans with enough intelligence that they can use their reason to observe the natural world and to make reliable judgments about God’s purposes (Massaro, 2012).” With this intelligence humans were given, it was believed that we would use our advantage to “figuring out how their behavior may cooperate with God’s plans; they can also conspire to frustrate the clear purpose of their Creator (Massaro, 2012).” An example of this frustration would be the story of Eve in the garden when she eats the fruit of the tree God said not to eat. Our reasoning makes us humans, and at the top of the food chain because we can think and come up with logic, rather than follow and do what were told. This reasoning is also why we can pass on our ethics and out traditions of what works and why, and what does not work and why there too. Massaro talks that on the other hand, humans have little

Many traditions are lost throughout the ages because they were not transcribed and died with the person “unfortunately, many valuable contributions have been lost because they were not written down and preserved (Massaro, 2012).” This means that we have to fill those gaps, learn and create those traditions for ourselves, and pass them onto the next generation. Also with this loss of traditions and many writings, we lose the ideas of many great men, some of them being saints and great teachers. Massaro says that the loss of information between the “second and sixth centuries of the Christian era, these theologians addressed numerous matters of church doctrine and contributed greatly to the Church’s understanding of the Holy Trinity, the identity of Jesus Christ, the sacraments, scripture and the very mission of the Church (Massaro, 2012).” With all these documentations lost forever, it becomes the moral responsibility of the generation of today’s world to create our own traditions and ensure that they are passed on. Some of the documents that were lost Massaro says that many were from known saints and other high