This chapter explains the principle of the universal destination of earthly goods as it has been affirmed by the magisterium of the Catholic Church, based upon scriptural and patristic sources and on the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, and developed especially since Rerum novarum. The principle is one of the most consistent doctrines of that evolving magisterium, with only minor adjustments of expression, extension to new matters, and differing emphases according to contingent circumstances and the relative force of opposing errors at different times. After a brief introduction (sec. I), the chapter presents in chronological order the evolution of the formulations of the principle before the Second Vatican Council (sec. II) and from there to Pope Francis (sec. III). The purpose of this sort of exposition – chronological and textual – is to furnish the reader with the main texts of the social doctrine of the Church about the principle, so that the stability of the teaching may appear as self-evident. For the main thesis is always the same: the priority of the universal destination of earthly goods as an end, and its compatibility with a strong right to private property as a means.

The common good (bonum commune) has, since antiquity, referred to the aim of social and political association, and was particularly prominent in medieval Christian political theology. Since St. John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical letter, Mater et magistra, ecclesiastical statements about social teaching have employed a formulation of the common good, usually in the version that appeared in the Second Vatican Council’s 1965 Pastoral Constitution for the Church in the Modern World, Gaudium et spes, as “the sum of those conditions of social life that allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfillment.” This chapter discusses the origins and development of this formulation as well as the ways that it has been used in subsequent Catholic Social Teaching. While it has sometimes been interpreted as an “instrumental” account of the common good, the sources and uses of the notion suggest that it is the particularly modern political component of a fuller notion of the common good continuous with the tradition. In particular, the recent formulation is concerned to limit the power of the modern state and protect the dignity of the human person in the challenging conditions of political modernity.